Most people suck at presenting to big groups.  It’s a shame because the ability to nail these presentations at key conferences can be once-in-a-lifetime opportunities to influence journalists, business partners, potential employees, customers and VCs.

This was evident at the Twiistup pre-event company pitch last week at UCLA.  Francisco Dao came up with the idea of letting 10 companies that weren’t selected for Twiistup to do a presentation the night before to a group of people and let the audience pick one company to win the final slot at Twiistup.  I was the judge.  It was mostly painful.  I’m not saying the companies were bad – many were not.  But their presentations were not well prepared, not well delivered and lacking in a compelling story that captured the imagination of the audience (or me).

So I thought I’d write a piece on how to not suck when you give a presentation.  I spoke about this yesterday on Fox Business News.  I’ll put up the video when they post it on their website.

1. Show some energy! – No great presentation can be delivered like a conversation.  You’re not lecturing to a college class, you’re not at a cocktail party and you’re not chatting with a small group in a board meeting.  You’re on stage!  People are sitting in their chairs for too long – most of them squirming.  Many of them have their iPhones and laptops ready to command their attention the moment that you start sucking.  You’re on stage – act like it!  Get out of your comfort zone.  You need to be an order of magnitude more perky than you would feel comfortable with in a normal conversation.

Project your voice.  Use your hands.  Don’t mumble.  Speak quickly sometimes.  Speak slowly to emphasize a point.  This is called “vocal variety” and it’s critical.  Speaking in a monotone voice is, well, monotonous.  A friend of mine once said about public speaking, “it’s far more interesting to the audience if you’re loud and evocative than if you’re actually making great points.”  This is so true.  Even better when you’re: loud, evocative and have compelling content.

If this isn’t naturally you then you need to learn it.  Go join your local Toastmasters.  It’s the best way to learn.  It’s how I did.  Or take an acting class.  No joke.  If you care about being a compelling presenter you need to work on it if it doesn’t already come naturally.

2. Tell a story – Every great presentation tells a story.  Stories have starts, middles and ends.  They are human and touch emotions.  The bring your product to life.  They are not buzzwords or bullet points.  Why do people think that buzzwords are going to interest audiences?

I always tell people that if you’re not creative in how you tell stories the simplest way to do so is by telling “a day in the life” of your potential user.  Establish the persona of the person who would be using your products.  Help us to get to know him or her.  Tell us what their life is like without your product – how they struggle.  Tell us about the breakthrough they’ll have when they’re using your product.

NEVER lead with features.  No one gives a shite about your features other than your product manager and your developers.  If you demo your product (which is always great) then tell us part of the story while you’re demo’ing.  Talk us through how the person using your product is benefiting through your technology.  Don’t: show us every single feature – we don’t care.  Don’t: tell us, “and now I enter my name, and then I put in my email address, and then I can pull in my social graph through Facebook Connect, and then then I can select the button here to Tweet out my actions on Twitter.”  Zzzzzzzzz.

3. Learn how to structure – Telling a story is one thing.  But make sure that you’re structured in the way you communicate.  You need to break down your message into key components.  It is generally best if you have a “theme” or “thesis” which if the main point you want to get across.  You then need sub-themes or “supporting evidence” to reinforce your key theme.  These are weaved through your story.

If you’re not naturally talented at good, logical structures you may consider purchasing The Pyramid Principle by Barbara Minto.  She wrote the book that inspired the way that people at McKinsey and Accenture do presentations.  OK, hold back on your consulting humor.  But seriously her book is spot on.

3. Know your audience - I always try to find out something about the audience before I present.  I recently spoke at the business school at UCSD.  Before the event I wanted to find out what I could about the students.  I found out that they were older than most typical MBA programs.  They had more advanced degrees.  50% of them were interested in life sciences, 50% in tech (e.g. much more focused on life sciences than most audiences where I present).

I was the keynote for a dinner.  I walked around to a few tables and I asked students what would interest them.  I spotted my fellow VC Leo Spiegel (from Mission Ventures) who had spoken previously to the same group and asked about his experiences.

My choices – talk about the VC industry and where it is heading (which is what the dean asked me to cover), talk about how to start companies (which is partly what Lada Rasochova, the director of the entrepreneurship program asked me to cover), talk about how to get into VC (which a few students asked me to cover) or give advice on what the Rady School’s venture fund should think about when investing (the event was a kick off for this new fund).

My constituencies were broad and I felt like going deep into one single area would have bored large groups of the people on any topic I picked.  So I decided at the last minute to do a very quick & punchy version of all of them.  I had prepared notes in advance for any of the topics because I felt so confused before coming on my remit.  I think (?) it went down pretty well.  Usually you can tell when it does and when it doesn’t.

I also sometimes start a speech by asked for people to raise their hands if they fit a certain demographic.  ”Raise your hand if you’re an entrepreneur, raise your hand if you plan to raise venture capital in the next year, raise your hand if you’re a service provider to the startup industry,” etc.  I can then change my focus based on the results.  But ONLY do this if you plan to adjust your approach.  If you don’t think you’re skilled enough to do it then asking my make you more nervous at the last minute than you need to be.  Also, asking is not appropriate at a marquee conferences like TechCrunch50, DEMO, Twiistup and the like.

4. Be unique / memorable – The stand out presentation at the actual Twiistup event was Geodelic evidenced by their winning the “audience award” for best presentation.  The CEO, Rahul Sonnad, played the ukulele and sang a song about what their product did.  He did a great parody of a heavy Indian accent.  They had slides with moving images and music.  They planted fake questions in the audience with Geodelic team members posing as normal audience members shouting out something like, “can’t you just tell us what this means in normal words?”

OK, it was WAY over the top and I don’t recommend it for most people.  Rahul and Co. obviously have a great sense of humor and pulled it off.  But for you it is worth thinking about what you can do in more humble ways to be unique – memorable.  Remember that at many of these shows you’ll be up against 9 or 10 other companies that have also been selected (or in the case of TC50 – 49 other companies!).  They all start to blend together.  Do SOMETHING that makes you stand out.  For almost everybody – DO NOT attempt humor.  If you’re not already the funniest person you know in social situations you’re not likely to be funny on stage.  Nothing is worse than bombing at jokes on stage.

5. KISS – (keep it simple, stupid) The goal of the presentation is just to give the audience a basic sense of what you do and why it matters.  Don’t confuse this with a tour-de-force education on the finer details of how your company operations.  They simply need to know: who has a problem? how are you solving this problem? why does this matter? how big of a problem is it – really?

So I recommend that you GREATLY simplify your message.  The conventional wisdom is that the audience can only remember 3 simple things about any presentation 10 minutes after they’ve seen it.  I think 3 might be an exaggeration.  You’re there to leave an impression – not to educate.  It’s OK to throw in some facts & figures that people won’t remember because giving people numbers helps them understand the magnitude of the problem you’re solving.

6. Summarize – The old line about presenting was, “tell us what you’re going to tell us, tell us and then tell us what you told us.”  If you literally do this it will be very boring.  But the core idea is right.  If you want the audience to remember what you covered you need to be slightly repetitive with your key take-away message.  I like to have an “anchor line” which is my big take-away point and have it repeated three times throughout the presentation.

Example: you’re a fitness tracking company like FitOrbit.  You might say early on, “75% of Americans are overweight.  They’ve tried diet plans but nothing works.  In fact, they spent $2.4 billion on such plans last year.  You manage what you measure so the key to solving the problem is getting people used to tracking their performance.  You need to make it easy.  We’re offering an online community that connects personal trainers and people who want to get fit.”  Then you go deeper into the problem and the solution.  You remind people that it’s a big industry and people need to get online and track their eating and fitness to be successful.  Connecting to a trainer helps keep you in line.

Closing line: “FitOrbit is an online community for the $2.4 billion diet & fitness industry that connects people who want to be in better shape with trainers who can help them online.  Remember, you only manage what you measure.”

All numbers above made up.  Actual lines used are not from FitOrbit, they’re from me just for an example.  The point is – you need to revisit your key theme repeatedly for it to stick and you NEED to close with it.  Don’t make the audience think too hard – spoon feed them.

7. Make it visual – Bullet point were the worst thing ever created for group presentations.  Nobody wants to read your text on a big screen.  If you’re going to do that why not just print out your presentation and leave it on my seat.  Far more expedient.  You presentation should have almost no bullet points.  The way to capture an audience’s attention is visually.  Pictures set the image, your voice tells what would have been in the bullet points.

You need to memorize what you’re going to say when each image comes up.  If you wants some words to support the image – fine.  But make them sparse and make the B-I-G!  If you really get nervous and are afraid you’ll forget your lines have one 3X5 cue card in your hands for each slide.  Don’t write sentences on the – only key words to help you remember what you’re going to say.

One strategy I often employ.  I often do two versions of my presentations – one that has mostly images and one with a lot of supporting text.  I use the latter if I send out the deck after the presentation.  Sending out a follow up deck with a lot of images is silly – no one remembers the “meat.”  But writing lots of words on a slide you put up on a big screen so that later people will be able to understand what you said is also suboptimal.  My dual approach solves both needs.

8. For fawk sake, practice! – It was clear many of the people who presented at Twiistup’s Pre-Demo Night hadn’t practiced enough.  It is not sufficient to write yourself notes and read them before hand.  You actually need to do a dry run in front of friends, colleagues and others.  People don’t like to do this because it feels funny “pretending” to deliver a presentation.  That’s not you.  You’re going to read out your points like it is for real.  You’re not going to stop and go out of character and say, “oh, that didn’t sound right.  I’m gonna do this page over from the start.”  You wouldn’t say that on stage.

There is only one way to know how your presentation will go – to do it in advance.  Get real feedback from your listeners.  Ask them to be harsh.  Better that you know now than in front of 300 people.

9. Stick to your fracking time – If you’ve been given 6 minutes then plan a presentation that can be done in 5.  Trust me – whatever amount of time you’ve gone over in practice it will be longer when you’re on stage.  And if you’re done a minute early – bravo!  The audience will love you.  The best way to manage to a time is: a) practice with a stop watch and b) have less slides than you think you’ll need.  There is nothing worse than a presentation that runs over the end of the allotted time.  Oh wait, there is.  A presentation that is CUT OFF because it ran long.  And you don’t get to finish your points or summarize at the end.  Don’t be this person.

10. Have a “Plan B” – the show must go on –  As was evidenced at the UCLA event and at many, many events I’ve been to – there are times when you have technical difficulties.  The show must go on.  Have a plan b that you can fall back on.  Where you planning to demo?  Fine, but if it isn’t working you need to call an audible.  If it’s a really important show there’s an easy solution.  Have a PowerPoint deck with screen shots that you can walk through.  Simply say, “Obviously I preferred to do a live demo but I have a deck with screen shots just in case this happened.  Whew.”

11. Have someone else drive the demo – Don’t try to be super human.  Have somebody else drive the demo.  There’s nothing worse than the presenter constantly stopping their speaking to concentrate on typing text, clicking on tabs or futzing with the computer.  Have another person that drives the demo.  There actions need to be scripted so that you know exactly what’s going to happen.  They obviously need to practice just as much as you do.  If they do something out of sequence don’t hesitate to politely instruct them.  Tell them in advance to listen for your cues in case this happens.

Some final “no no’s”

- “how’s everybody doing today?” – lots of people start with stupid chatter like that at the start of their presentations.  It adds nothing.  You’re not a comedian warming up the audience.  Get right down to business.  I hate time wasters at the start of a presentation.  You’re already trying to stick to a rigid time plan.

- how many of you “X”? – OK, I already said above that you can ask if people are entrepreneurs, investors, etc.  But please don’t say things like “how many of you have ever had problems with Outlook?” or “How many of you are frustrated with Facebook?” or some similar line to prove your point.  You never know how the audience will react.  If you don’t get the response you expect it ruins your tempo and the audience will start to question your premise.  The risks outweigh the benefits.

- don’t turn around and read the screen – ooooh.  Big pet peeve.  If you don’t put up bullet points this will never happen to you!  But it looks really stupid PLUS your voice projects in the wrong direction.  Many, many people make this mistake.  Yuck.

- never say, “I know this slide is really busy and hard to read” – if it’s so busy and hard to read then WTF did you put it in your deck?  Are you a moron?  If you practiced you sure would realize that nobody could read it.  People say this all the time.  I cringe when I see it happen.  It definitely is an IQ test thing for me.

Author: Mark Suster

I’m writing this post as part of my series with Advice on Raising Venture Capital but will file it under Sales Tips as well since it applies equally to both scenarios.

Congratulations.  You’ve found a VC partner or principal who has invited you to the Monday partners’ meeting.  Or on a sales campaign you’ve finally gotten your project sponsor to take you to the “executive committee” where decisions are made and budgets are agreed.

So you arrive at the meeting in the comfort that somebody has championed you to this point.  Every 1:1 meeting you’ve had to date has been collegiate and productive.  What could go wrong?  A lot, actually.  Here are some tips to keep in mind for the big day.

1. Information Asymmetry - The biggest problem that presenters face in large (5+ people) is information asymmetry.  You come into a meeting where your sponsor (the person who invited you to present to the partners) knows a lot about you and the rest of the room may have varying degrees of knowledge.

This is true whether your at a sales meeting or at a VC firm.  Sometimes a company presents at a partners’ meeting that has been well vetted and thoroughly discussed prior to the meeting so all partners know a great deal about the presenting company.  Other times the partner wants to test whether there is support before sinking in tons of due diligence time.

Either way, don’t assume that the entire room is up to speed on your company.  Also, you might be presenting your telecom company to a 6-person team where 3 people are telecom experts and the other 3 have only superficial knowledge.  These kinds of meetings present challenges as some people want to go deep and others are at 50,000 feet.

Make sure you discuss this expectation with your sponsor before the meeting.  Understand how knowledgeable the room will be around your industry and your product and importantly – agree a plan with your sponsor on how to play the meeting.  Getting his / her buy-in to your approach is important as they can help you steward the meeting in the right direction.

I would normally recommend you address the issue early in the meeting with the group to set expectations.  I would try a line like, “I know that some of you might be social media experts and others may be less deep on this particular area.  My plan would be to start the presentation at the 50,000 foot view and then dive down to a more granular level once we’re all base-lined.  Does that sound ok?”

This last question is important.  You need to let the energy of the room guide you.  If people want to go straight to details then staying too high level will also irritate people.  But … watch out.  If one vocal person blurts out, “just give us the details, we all know social networking” don’t assume that person speaks for the entire room.  It’s a delicate situation but I recommend saying something like, “OK, that sounds great.  Happy to do that.  Just to check – does everybody feel comfortable going straight to details or does anybody want 2 minutes on the basics before our deep dive?”

I’m surprised in sales situations (and believe me, raising money is a sales process) how often the presenter takes direction from the most vocal person who usually speaks first.  They don’t always speak for the group.

Regarding information asymmetry – take me as an example. I’m no dummy on businesses that are in the financial services sector, but my 3 partners have been investing in the space for 20 years so I’m clearly on a different level.  30% of our last fund went into deals in this sector.  My partner, Brian McLoughlin, attends almost all Financial Services conference, makes a number of investments in the space and has relationships across the sector.  His immediate focus when these companies present is an order of magnitude more detailed and knowledgeable than mine.  In our current portfolio 3 or his 4 investments are in the Fin Svcs space.  But when you present to both of us you still need to keep me in the dialog.  Vice versa is it’s a SaaS platform company where I spent nearly 10 years running companies.

2. Scoring an “own goal” – The most common mistake is one I’d call scoring an “own goal.”  It is when you’re in a meeting and somebody throws out a question that is a slight “red herring.”   They were thinking of the question as you were speaking and they blurted it out.  This happens often is sales meetings or VC meetings.  Some presenters take that as a challenge to inform the person who asks the question about everything the presenter knows on that topic.  What started out as an innocuous question asked purely out of interest can become a total time waster if it’s not pertinent to your storyline that you’re trying to convey.

I saw this happen recently with a VERY polished presenter (and somebody we’ve decided to take to the next stage so it obviously didn’t kill him) but he felt compelled to answer every question asked at great length even when not that important to the overall picture and it was quite distracting to the flow of the meeting.

Use the lesson I was taught many years ago: A, B, C (answer, bridge, communicate).  Answer the question, bridge back to what you wanted to originally talk about and then get back to communicating your messages.  Warning: you need to determine whether questions are really “red herrings” or truly something that the group wants to explore.  If it’s the latter – you can’t move on.  2 quick tactics:

- it is acceptable to say, “did I answer the question thoroughly enough for you?”
- if you’re pretty sure it’s a Red Herring then simply say, “that’s a great question. Do you mind if I answer that a little later in the presentation?  I have a few slides later that address that.” (obviously if you say that you need to come back to the question either later or after the meeting. tip: write it down when asked / parked)

3. The “Detail Merchant” – The third thing you need to worry about in a group presentation is the “detail merchant.”  This is the person who wants to ask you the most detailed questions about every aspect of your business – sometimes details that aren’t relevant to the group getting a good picture of your market opportunity, your team, your competitive positioning, etc.  Sometimes they do this out of interest, sometimes it is to show the group how smart they are and sometimes it’s just because they’re a nudnik.  I’ve experienced this in many sales meetings I’ve made and unfortunately in many VC pitches I made.

These are the bane of many sales meetings but there always seems to be one – even when well intentioned.  The problem with letting the detail merchant take over a big meeting is that they’re driving the meeting toward their agenda and not yours.  More importantly, they’re often driving the meeting to an objective that doesn’t meet the needs of the other participants in the room.

It happens to all of us at VCs – usually in a mild, benign form.  Sometimes I find myself really interested in the technical details of a companies product and after a few questions on the topic I look around and find my partners disinterested in this line of questions.  Other times I find them wanting to know the details of one component of a business before I have understood the market landscape and I’m screaming inside my head that I want to understand the overall concept before the deep dive.  It’s different than a “Red Herring” in that it’s not an irrelevant question it’s just that you’re getting too detailed before the group as a whole understands the complete high-level picture.

Whatever the reasons you need to be conscious of this.  Here’s how to deal with it:

- first, you must always answer and acknowledge the question. Do this be repeating it and writing it down.  “You want to know about the terms of the deal we signed with CBS and the reaction of their new VP.  Let me write that down.”
- If you can answer at the highest level you should.  “The new VP is very supportive of us – we’ve met him three times.”
- As with the Red Herring question you must “bridge” back on the main storyline of your presentation.  You say, “It’s an important topic.  If it’s OK with you I’d love to answer it in just a couple of minutes after the next few slides.  I think the context may be easier.  Is that OK with you?”
- That last question is key.  If they say, “no, I’d prefer you cover it now” then you must.  You can allow a detail merchant to drive you down 1 or 2 rat holes because you need to meet their needs.  But you need to be sure that you’re not meeting their needs at the expense of everyone else.  You need to have a relationship with your sponsor that after 2 rat holes you’ve agreed with him / her that he’ll help you bring the meeting back to a level that’s appropriate for everybody.
- If the detail merchant is really persistent you might try the line, “If you have a few minutes after our presentation or later today I’d love to come back and give you all the details you’d like. I have tons of information I’d be happy to share 1-on-1 with you.” Sometimes that works.

Allowing one partner or one executive in a sales pitch take you down a rat hole might ruin the overall flow of the presentation for the group it it’s entirety.  As both an entrepreneur (in VC and sales meetings) and as a VC I’ve seen this happen many times.

4. The “Naysayer” – Another difficult situation you can run into is the naysayer.  It’s the person who is always flinging out the skeptical question at you like, “Google could easily do this,” “how can you ever get mass adoption on a tool like this” or “not another social network – just what the world needs.”

Naysayers are difficult to handle because they set a negative tone for the room.  I talked about a situation where this happened to me when I was raising money in Silicon Valley for my second startup.

I find with naysayers is to acknowledge the issue they’re negative but to not discuss it in depth.  “I understand your concern about Google.  It’s obviously something we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about as well.  The short answer is, ‘we believe that our niche focus on backing up documents in the financial services sector will mean that their more generic approach of being a platform won’t be a competitive threat for the segment of the market we hope to serve’ but I’m very happy to have a much more detailed dialog with you at the end of the meeting or one-on-one afterward if you’d like.”

Please don’t get me wrong – some questions you will be asked that are challenging your business are totally legitimate and need to be discussed.  I’m mostly talking about when you get what is clearly in your perception questions asked in a hostile tone or that sound negative / dismissive – especially if they persist from one single person.  Judgment from you on the day as to which scenario it is will be very important.

If they persist the room will be aware of it and will start to discount the person as long as you handle it professionally.  Unfortunately if you “take the bait” and seem defensive it normally just makes both of you look bad.  The other great thing about the “cover it later” approach is that it gives you an excuse to all on this person later one-on-one afterward and build a relationship.  Why not follow up after the meeting and ask whether you can come see him directly to show him some data you have.  Any excuse to build a relationship with the naysayer and turn a negative into a neutral.

But the overall advice is similar to the detail merchant – you can’t let the naysayer take your agenda off course or everybody else – including you – loses.

5. The “Silent Partner” – The final mistake that I see many people make is not engaging the “silent partner.”  Just because somebody doesn’t speak up and challenge you in your meetings doesn’t mean that they won’t be against your company / idea when the internal discussion happens.

As a sales person it’s your job to flush everybody out and find out what their thoughts / feelings are.  In a positive way, of course.  The best tool for engagement is the question.  If you notice a partner that hasn’t spoken or seems to not be paying attention (hopefully not on a Blackberry!)?  Get them involved!

Find a way to ask them a pertinent question and ask for their point-of-view.  “Bob, if I’m not mistaken you have some experience in social games through your involvement with EA.  I know that mobile is slightly different but how do you see this space playing out?”

Work the room, folks.  Whether in sales or in raising VC these are often group decisions.  You need everybody engaged, everybody knowledgeable about what you’re doing and you need to get all issues / risks in people’s minds out on the table and in the open.  This will only happen through your asking questions, listening to what each person is saying, writing down key notes and testing with the group whether you have understood all of their concerns.

I was recently in a meeting with a company that had met 2 of my partners twice before our meeting so my partners’ knowledge was already much deeper than mine.  I didn’t ask any questions in the meeting because they were already going too deep relative to my knowledge.  After the meeting the CEO came into my office and asked if I had 5 minutes.  We spent 30 minutes together.  He got all my issues on the table.  I thought, “brilliant.”  He gets it.

Information asymmetry, detail merchants, naysayers and silent partners are all potential landmines.  You’ve got to learn how to deal with group dynamics to avoid presentation rat holes.  All that said the next step is the most important.

6. Pre-Meeting Prep – So much of your performance in the big meeting is tied to the preparation you put in before hand.  It’s so important that it’s going to be the topic of an entirely separate post.  But for the sake of completeness in this post – before you arrive at a big meeting you need to know in advance: who will be there, what their views are, how they normally act in meetings, what the relationship is between individuals and whether they’re knowledgeable about your space.  Just winging it on the day is a much lower probability outcome.

You can only do this if you have a “champion” on the inside.  Make sure you’ve spent enough time with your sponsor in advance of the partners’ meeting that you feel confident they’ll advocate for you on the day.  One sign of whether they’re truly supportive is how well they help you prepare for the big meeting.