Cramping ALL advantages in One Slide
My guilt of putting too much words in a slide.
One thing that I absolutely agree with TechCrunch’s pitch deck teardown is too much words in a presentation slide. This is definitely something that I have been guilty of doing in my early days as a presenter and adviser. It can be hard finding the right balance because all the information that is your pitch deck is important. In today’s substack, I am going to share my experience and how I would decide what to include in the pitch deck.
Too Much Information
Early on in my days learning presentations (which we had 3~4 subjects that required presentation per semester) I started putting what I wanted to say on my slides. Instead of paragraph forms, I separated them with bullets. The slides went on to 30~40 slides for a 10 minute presentation and guess what I did when I was presenting? I was READING from the slides. A HUGE No-No in presenting. I was constantly referring to the slides meaning they were looking at my back most of the time. Yes, I am guilty of having made that mistake too. The response? Receiving average scores for the presentation part of the assignments, only scored highly due to the fluency of language.
The Most Heartbreaking Experience
I noticed audiences yawning away during my presentation and my lecturer practically trying his level best to keep with the information on the slides because he has to grade them. Here’s why it was heartbreaking. Being new to presenting and wanting to score high in university, it felt like the effort put in was not translating to desired results. After which, I made the same mistake in investment advisory. My clients either cut me off midway or yawn throughout the section I was explaining.
The Other End
Because of this experience I went all the way to the other end of the extreme (overcorrecting here) and used images. This happened during studies and in my work life. Guess I needed to make the same mistake a few times to learn my lesson. I started using images to convey the message but I forgot to use captions. My audience/prospects ended up being lost because they had to give 100% attention to what I was saying in order to comprehend the pitch. Hence the handout became a useless “reference”.
How Do I Decide?
Following the experience of going to both extremes, I have slowly incorporated the best of both worlds. The Key? Summarising. I feel slides’ content should be a summary of the section in which you are presenting. On top of summarising, people are very visual, combine the summary into captions on images is my go to in preparation nowadays. Key points combined with a short “subtitle” is a good way to go. Nowadays, some presentation specialist even bring it up a notch by creating the illusion of writing content in long paragraph form but in actual fact, the points are highlighted with different font size and colour. (see below for reference).
Decide to summarise your information on that particular section, accent it using a combination of visual and text and hopefully your deck will not have too much words peppered all over it that will take audience’s focus away from you too long when you are pitching. If you know someone who is pitching and find my experience and how I would do things helpful, please subscribe and share! Thank you!