Presenting with Type - Presentation Zen Design - page 51

Known as The Pitch Coach and “The father of angel investing
in New York,” David S. Rose gives some pricless advice for
those making presentations to VCs and Angels for
investments.
The primary hallmark of an entrepreneurial fundraising pitch as opposed to other
types of presentations is that the most important factor by far is you. Investors are
going to spend the entire session attempting to determine if you are the person
behind whom they should invest their money, and how you come across personally
is often more important than everything else combined, including your business plan
and industry and financial projections. This means that fundraising pitches must be
given by the CEO and no one else. The top ten characteristics that investors will be
looking to find in you during your presentation are integrity, passion, experience (in
starting a business), knowledge, skill (in functional operating areas), leadership,
commitment, vision, realism, and coachability.
Presentation flow
The single most important thing in sequencing a presentation is that everything must
flow logically from beginning to end, and require no prior knowledge on the part of
the audience. You do not want the audience to have to “think” at all, which means
you need to answer every potential question at exactly the right place, just before the
audience would think to ask it. It sounds easy, but 99% of presentations don't do it.
The opening
The world's greatest presentation trainers, such as Granville Toogood ( The
Articulate Executive ) and Jerry Weissman ( Presenting to Win ), all agree that the
presenter has between 30 and 60 seconds to grab the attention of the audience. To
do this, start with nothing on the screen but your company logo, your name, and your
title. Then, begin with something dramatic and memorable that will have the
audience want to follow along with you for the rest of the presentation. This opening
can be a personal anecdote, an unusual number, a historic progression, a
counterintuitive fact, whatever is appropriate. Virtually anything that will start the
presentation with a bang and set the mood for the remainder of the pitch is
desirable.
Context setting
It is crucial that after the opening, the presenter immediately set out the context for
the rest of the presentation. This should not be the agenda for the presentation, but
rather should be (at least for a venture fundraising pitch) an extraordinarily concise
explanation of what the heck the company does: “We manufacture and sell buggy
whips”; “We operate a search engine that finds anything on the Internet”; whatever.
Consider this to be the picture on the outside of a jigsaw puzzle box, that gives the