The number-one mistake people make in preparing a presentation for potential investors is that they overload their audience with too much information.
“That’s usually the thing people get wrong. They put way too much on a slide,” Cyril Gantzer, the head of the analytics team of shared-inbox app Front, reports Business Insider. Gantzer was instrumental in putting together the pitch deck that helped Mathilde Collin, the 28-year-old cofounder and CEO of Front, get $66 million and 10 investment offers in five days earlier this year.
Most founder have the document format in mind – the more you can cram on the screen the better, he told Business Insider. But there’s a fundamental difference between a document and a presentation. A document is a self-contained material that can “travel on its own.” Chockfull of words and numbers, it contains everything the recipient needs to make sense of it.
A presentation, on the other hand, should have no more than one message per slide, according to Gantzer. It should take only three seconds to read and injest what’s on screen.
Having short slides puts the responsibility on the presentation-giver to guide their audience through the story they want to tell. In the case of Front, Collin’s pitch deck told the story of Front. It addressed the pain points that Front aims to solve, the achievements of the company so far, and the long-term vision of how Front hopes to reinvent email, reported the Business Insider.
It was also minimalist, which encouraged her audience to read the slide and shift their attention back to the speaker.
Gantzer added that the number of slides shouldn’t be a constraint. It’s better to spread information across many short slides than to squeeze a novel into 10 slides, he said.
“If you optimize for the number of slides it’s because you have a rule in mind that you should spend three minutes per slide,” he said, according to the Business Insider.
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