Baldwin and Matt interviewed Memet Yazıcı, Managing Partner of TRPE Capital. Memet speaks here about preparing for pitch meetings, a portfolio company’s management team’s role in telling the company’s story, and the importance of relationships with LPs.

01:35 Sometimes more experienced LPs will give you very good feedback on your pitch, helping you clarify your message.

03:59 Talking about your track record isn’t always the most useful way to pitch. Try these things instead.

05:37 Memet talks about how he doesn’t change the fundamental investment thesis, but “moves the emphasis,” according to the particular interests and background of the LP.

07:12 Memet tells us a bit about his pre-meeting prep.

09:27 Memet points out that the management team at the portfolio companies is part of the storytelling effort too.

10:58 Memet goes into whether he finds storytelling skills well-developed at portfolio companies.

11:48 Memet describes things that make him cringe about some portfolio companies’ storytelling.

13:01 Memet mentions that sometimes a portfolio company’s management team needs outside help with their storytelling.

14:06 Memet talks about the CFO in particular, and his/her role in telling the company’s story.

14:59 “The CFO is the navigation officer on the ship” (one of Baldwin and Matt’s favorite quotes from the interview)

15:38 “They [CFOs] obviously need to own the numbers, they need to be very good with the numbers, but what do those numbers mean? What’s that context? We need the CFO to have that context.”

17:13 In Memet’s opinion, the best CFOs are often female CFOs, and Memet goes into what he means by that and why he thinks that way.

19:37 Memet talks about relationships with LPs, and how they should be seen in a bigger picture. “Relationships are really the true capital of our business.”

20:30 Memet goes into other things that an LP relationship might mean to you, beyond supplying financial capital to your business.

23:42 “Building that human relationship [with the LP] gives you an opportunity to help back, to contribute back.”

Memet was quite articulate and thoughtful, this was one of our favorite interviews. Thanks Memet, it was a pleasure!

About Baldwin Berges

Baldwin has been active in the investment industry for more than 20 years. His specialty is all about positioning investment opportunities so they are easy to understand and developing strategies and systems to convert more opportunities into business during long sales cycles.

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About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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This post originally appeared on Fund Marketing Secrets.

Baldwin and Matt interviewed Roland Meerdter, co-founder of Door Ventures. Roland speaks here about streamlining the DDQ process, the origins of Door, how standardized DDQs evolve over time, and how digitalization is affecting the due diligence process.

Highlights of the conversation:

02:16 Analysts are having to cover more, and the due diligence process is an increasing burden on them, too.

04:29 Analysts need to be able to see the evolution of an asset manager, how the manager’s process might change over time.

05:01 The role of the APFI in standardizing the questionnaire.

06:49 Digitalization is playing an important role in the DDQ process.

09:47 Manager selection teams are more likely than they were a few years ago to acknowledge that part of the DDQ is standard amongst competitors.

13:36 One reason the analyst needs visibility into the evolution of a manager’s thesis is so the analyst knows whether decisions that have been made in the past still hold. “The challenge is delta.”

17:42 “There is a balance between the usefulness of the information on the manager research side, and an element of ‘check the box.'”

20:44 “The quality of the questions has gone up. The quality of the responses has gone up.”

23:32 How the standard questionnaire will probably evolve to reflect changing emphases in the industry.

24:31 The central question to ask active managers. It’s where the rubber hits the road.

26:12 Good questions are about digging through the nuances.

27:12 Roland tells a story of interviewing a manager who had studied French literature, and how paying attention to that small detail opened up a new world into the manager’s mindset.

33:24 Asset managers saw Door as not only a way to increase efficiency, but as a way to create a higher level of engagement.

35:02 Roland mentions that customers often use your service in a way you would never have expected.

35:53 “We’re trying to make humans more effective, not necessarily machines more effective.”

38:32 If I’m a manager research analyst, “I don’t want my managers filling out questionnaires. I want them focused on running the portfolio.”

40:50 Small firms deserve the same access to information that the big shots do.

Thank you for your time Roland, it was a great pleasure!

About Baldwin Berges

Baldwin has been active in the investment industry for more than 20 years. His specialty is all about positioning investment opportunities so they are easy to understand and developing strategies and systems to convert more opportunities into business during long sales cycles.

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About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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This post originally appeared on Fund Marketing Secrets.

Baldwin and Matt interviewed Kyle Dunn, CEO of Meyler Capital. Kyle speaks here about marketing in the fund world, and what opportunities fund managers are missing, and that performance is vital, but it’s table stakes, it’s like BMW saying, “Our cars run good.”

Highlights of the conversation:

03:08 People want to discover things on their own, and if you don’t have technology to track that discovery process, it’s hard to know who to talk to.

05:30 How marketing automation fits in with the concept that “fund management is a relationship business.”
07:52 “Would you ever put a paragraph on a freeway sign?” (about layering stories; don’t try to say too much too quickly).

09:48 Why video is particularly important these days.

12:34 Alternative approaches if you don’t feel like you’re good on camera.

19:56 Lead scores prioritize your interest list.

21:18 How to know you shouldn’t get on an airplane and go meet with someone.

23:38 “We have an industry that is fixated on a tool [the pitch book] that actually isn’t really used… It’s like the conch in Lord Of The Flies.” (one of Matt’s favorite lines)

24:26 “The biggest misbelief is that all that matters is performance. If you’re a manager and that’s all that you think, you’re in trouble.”

28:59 “You’re the most sophisticated investors on the planet, why would you not want the most sophisticated marketing to align with your investment strategy?”

32:50 “When you think about it, the last thing you should talk about is performance, because then you look like a greaseball when you don’t perform.”

Thank you for your time Kyle, it was a great pleasure!

About Baldwin Berges

Baldwin has been active in the investment industry for more than 20 years. His specialty is all about positioning investment opportunities so they are easy to understand and developing strategies and systems to convert more opportunities into business during long sales cycles.

• 
• 

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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There was so much to talk about in the first interview that Baldwin and Matt asked JB Beckett to grace the podcast a second time.

For those who missed the first interview, JB is the author of #New Fund Order and a very articulate veteran of the fund scene.

In this interview, JB talks about what prompted him to write #New Fund Order, and about fintech and AI.

A summary of some of JB’s comments:

–He wrote most of the first draft of #NFO in a single week of feverish activity.

–Running a fund is neither art nor science, it is “fuzzy logic” and plenty of subjective judgement. We are human beings trying to make money for other human beings and for ourselves in the process.

–Fund companies might actually be inhibiting fintech progress, or maybe not. They don’t seem to be so sure themselves.

–Smartphones, and the companies that produce them, bring more disruption potential to the financial services industry than people in the industry seem to realize.

Thank you for your time JB, it was a great pleasure to have you back.

About Baldwin Berges

Baldwin has been active in the investment industry for more than 20 years. His specialty is all about positioning investment opportunities so they are easy to understand and developing strategies and systems to convert more opportunities into business during long sales cycles.

• 
• 

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life managing inventory levels for wholesale import companies and forecasting labor costs for national retail chains. Since 2006, he has been teaching professionals how to present themselves and their companies better. His clients work for companies like Citibank, Allianz, 3M, P&G, and Deloitte.

• 
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About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Baldwin Berges and Matt interviewed JB Beckett, author of #New Fund Order. JB has listened to thousands of fund pitches in his career. In fact, he’s such a wealth of information that we will bring him back for an encore presentation.

A major theme running through JB’s comments in this particular interview is the internal organizational tension between the marketing team and the individual portfolio managers, and what this tension causes and why it exists.

A summary of some of JB’s comments:

—The pitchbook is important, it has to match the flow and the personality of the fund manager. The buyer will know something is fishy if it doesn’t. However, in a meeting between the fund buyer and the fund manager, the fund buyer is primarily there to talk to the fund manager and see how he/she thinks, not to review the pitchbook. The fund company needs to remember that the pitchbook is there for the fund buyer’s meeting prep, not to rehash during the meeting.

—Product marketing teams are too often equipping the fund manager with what they think the fund buyer wants, not what the fund buyer actually wants.

—One of the main reasons for this disconnect (the one between what the marketing team thinks the buyer wants and what the buyer actually wants) is that the marketing team at many houses has become obsessed with the volume of the information it is providing. The marketing department has essentially become a publishing department.

—A fund manager’s rough edges are important. They are what cements the bond between the fund manager and the fund buyer. Those rough edges might make the marketing department cringe, but if they are all rubbed off, no bond will form.

Thank you for your time JB, it was a great pleasure. We look forward to having you back!

About Baldwin Berges

Baldwin has been active in the investment industry for more than 20 years. His specialty is all about positioning investment opportunities so they are easy to understand and developing strategies and systems to convert more opportunities into business during long sales cycles.

• 
• 

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of our listeners, a country fund investing in publicly-traded equities on that country’s exchange, had a followup question about something discussed on the Ole Rollag interview. They asked:

“We send out a monthly newsletter about our fund performance and other developments in the [country name removed] markets. This newsletter goes out to our existing investors and people who have opted into it on our website.

“But Ole mentions the high volume of emails (ranging from a couple hundred per day to a couple thousand per day) these people might be getting.

“How do we reconcile these two seemingly competing realities? On the one hand, we’re sending out a newsletter because we’d like to communicate with interested people. But on the other hand, allocators are getting tons of emails. What does Ole have to say about this? Should we consider our newsletter a small voice lost in the wind? Are we wasting our time?”

Ole’s answer:

“Short answer is to ask the allocators what they prefer. I think that weeklies might be helpful, but good allocators won’t react on price, but change. I see weeklies, and ignore them. Unless someone says, ‘Wait, something has changed.’

“If it is the status quo, then it is junk. Let me know when you think there is a problem. If you tell me when to reduce, that is amazing and I would definitely come back.

“Long term greedy!”

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Baldwin Berges and Matt interviewed Ole Rollag of Murano.

Ole mentioned a couple things in particular that caught our attention:

One is the importance of good old phone followup. Ole mentioned that Murano’s people spend a lot of time on the phone with allocators; he used a great phrase, saying that allocators are essentially “drinking from a firehose.” Simply sending them a couple emails and hoping they’ll notice you is a recipe for failure. It doesn’t matter how great your slide deck is — if they don’t know you, you’re just a drop in the ocean. Call them up and become real, even if you are thinking a call is a little too much, or are afraid you might do it wrong. Stay top of mind.

Another is that many managers don’t know who they’re competing against. A great Ole-ism: “If I had a dime for every time a manager said they are unique and they don’t compete with anyone, I’d be a very rich man.”

Ole knows quite well what goes on in the heads of allocators — he talks to a lot of them, just in the normal course of his business. An interesting point that he makes, and we here at Doppler have seen the same thing, is that fund managers tend to stress performance, but performance is only third or fourth on the list of what a good allocator is looking for. That point alone (it’s around minutes 15-17 of the podcast) makes the podcast a great listen.

There’s lots of other great stuff here too. Thanks Ole, it was a pleasure!

About Baldwin Berges

Baldwin has been active in the investment industry for more than 20 years. His specialty is all about positioning investment opportunities so they are easy to understand and developing strategies and systems to convert more opportunities into business during long sales cycles.

• 
• 

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life managing inventory levels for wholesale import companies and forecasting labor costs for national retail chains. Since 2006, he has been teaching professionals how to present themselves and their companies better. His clients work for companies like Citibank, Allianz, 3M, P&G, and Deloitte.

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Full transcript:

Matt:
Thank you for joining us for this episode of the Lessons Learned podcast. Our hosts are Matt Krause, that’s me, and Baldwin Berges.

Baldwin:
Hello there.

Matt:
And, our guest today is Ole Rollag of Murano. Ole, can you introduce yourself a little bit, and tell us what you do, and who you do it for?

Ole:
Sure. Well, thank you very much for inviting me to be on the podcast. Like Matt said, my name’s Ole Rollag. I am the founder and managing principal of a company called Murano which is basically placed to go right up against that third party marketing model.

What Murano is, is essentially a matchmaking service. We don’t sell funds, you don’t say the name of the funds, we don’t get paid off the back when they sell. All we’re doing is listening to the allocators and finding out what they’re looking for and if we have a fund manager that fits within that profile, and there’s no deal breakers, we’ll have that manager get in touch with the allocator so they can start a relationship.

Baldwin:
I remember when I first met you, this has got to be about 10 years ago now, I think it was in 2007 or 2008, right? At the time, I was also setting up an investment boutique focused on exotic markets in Africa and the Middle East. And someone told us, or told me at least, you’ve got to talk to Ole Rollag. I was really having a hard time trying to get attention to that business in the beginning and all that, and so we met.

I remember we met in the city of London, and I remember we had this fascinating conversation about where you had this other way from the traditional third party marketing solution. Because as a fund manager myself, I was kind of nervous about paying away retainers to the wrong people because I’ve made that mistake before, basically getting on to their roster where they’re then struggling to divide time to the managers and don’t actually have the confidence of the final investor and most of the time it went nowhere. It was really exciting to hear you say, like, no, no, look, there’s another way.

A good place to start is maybe, what’s wrong with this third party marketing model, and because since 10 years, you have worked with thousands of managers, you’ve listened to them, and you’ve also seen all the mistakes that the managers have made. We can have a pretty long conversation, but what stands out most for you?

Ole:

It’s funny, because you know, when you think about it, I was one of those managers as well. And I think when we met, I was just kind of wrapping up this idea of a long volatility fund.

You remember in 2008 it was a really tough time. As a matter of fact, I don’t know anybody who actually kept their jobs within that period. I think everybody had to switch or move on, and I made a very good decision and a very poor decision, because an event driven long volatility fund in 2007 would have been the fund to invest in, but the timing of the business was wrong. So, Ole Rollag as a fund manager wasn’t going to happen in the near term.

Then, I don’t know if you remember, but it looked Armageddon. It looked like things were really just going to go to zero. One of the things that I really struggled with as an asset manager is of course, you know, I’m a genius right? (Laughter) People should invest in me because I’m really good at it. Most managers have this sort of [inaudible] where, if somebody has money, they should definitely allocate to you.

You’re very cognizant that when you’re starting a new business, the formula for success is AUM times management fee plus performance fee equals success. There’s no point being in the asset management business if you’re running a sub-scale fund. It’s just not worth the risk. So, we were doing management consulting and I sort of kept myself employed throughout the crisis, and then kind of came up with this idea of Murano because, you know of the many, many things that are very complicated in this industry, we find that getting that first meeting is probably the most costly and the most difficult. So, trying to find out ways for people to kind of work through that is sort of a major factor. And that’s why people go to conferences, and all that sort of stuff.

Baldwin:
And that’s an interesting point you just raised there, because from what I’ve seen in the industry is, there doesn’t seem to be this awareness of the cost per meeting, so asset managers from my experience don’t really think too much about, is it really worth me doing that trip to let’s say, Hong Kong, because actually I haven’t analyzed what the cost of client acquisition is. They’re kind of in the dark about that, aren’t they?

Ole:
Totally, and it’s extremely frustrating.

Baldwin:
Exactly. There’s no rationale behind it, right?

Ole:
Yeah, and then what I think the biggest or one of the big problems is that sales is relegated into a corner where it’s very much underappreciated in this industry. You think about any other business, any other listed company, what do we care about? We care about earnings growth. We care about sales. And business is sales. And that’s what is going to make you a success or a failure. And yet, we’re so isolated in this industry and then we have these sort of notions of, call them what you will, but this sort of inability to understand what the business is of asset management.

Baldwin:
So you put these parties together, you make a match, and then, have you over time now gotten also involved in coaching these guys on how to make the right impression to actually get the business, or has that become part of your proposition? Because you must have seen all sorts of things going wrong once that match was made.

Ole:
Yeah, yeah. Maybe it would be helpful just to give some scope of what the scale of the business is, and all this other sort of stuff. So right now, we’re just under 30 employees with offices in London and New York. The majority of these employees are calling allocators all day long. They make about 50 calls each. They get hold of about 10 allocators and if they can find one allocator that fits within the requirements of what one of managers are doing, then we write it up and asked the manager to contact this allocator.

We have just under, or just about 90 clients that range anywhere from tiny little funds all the way up to very, very large asset managers. Our largest client is just over a trillion dollars in AUM, and the way the service works, is it’s a pure informational service. Like I said before, we don’t represent anyone or shout any names out, or anything like that. So, there’s a big challenge, is that you can find the right investors, but if the clients are not using the service correctly, then they’re going to cancel the service. The service can be canceled within a quarter, so with three months’ time, and so we have to make sure that not only are we finding the right investors, but that we’re also, that our managers know how to contact these investors.

The biggest problem that we find, is that a lot of people hide behind e-mail. And if you want to start a relationship, you have to call. It’s funny, because these days we’re looking at algorithms, and the majority of our work is done on a computer and all this other sort of stuff. People have this natural tendency, or this need, to actually hear somebody else’s voice on the phone, and that’s my big intention.

Baldwin:
So you actually probably have then, evidence that allocators want to be called by the right people.

Ole:
Oh, yeah. When you think about it, how many e-mails do you receive a day? How many e-mails do you think an allocator receives a day.

Baldwin:
Oh, it’s ridiculous the amount. It must be amazing, yeah.

Ole:
It’s easily 200. I know one guy who has just three years in the business and he receives actually 2500 e-mails a day.

Matt:
Say that again, 2000 what?

Ole:
2500 e-mails a day.

Matt:
Wow.

Ole:
The read rate on e-mails we know is 5%. One thing that I always ask allocators is hey, how do you decide which e-mail to read, or which call to pick up? The basic response is, if I don’t who you are, I don’t read your mail.

Baldwin:
Of course, yeah. So the fund manager then has a limiting belief in his head, saying that the allocator actually does not want to be called, and that’s where this whole thing gets stuck, right?

Ole:
It’s rubbish. They have to be called. Also, you notice in your own personal lives, you get this e-mail from a conference organizer or somebody, and then it will say, come to this conference, and then they’ll respond to their own e-mail, saying hey, Ole, did you receive this? And it’s like, yeah (laughter), you know, this isn’t sincere. Because e-mails are free, they’re abused. It always goes back to the relationship. If I know who you are, you at least introduce me to your product, then we can chat.

The other problem that we’re seeing past the call is that oftentimes e-mails are too long, so you get the TL;DR, too long, didn’t read sort of thing. Managers need to know what their value proposition is. What’s incredible, is that people don’t know how they compete or why people allocate to them. Which to me, is crazy, right?

Baldwin:
Yeah, yeah. I know it’s striking actually to hear it, because it’s all metrics about performance. It’s all about basically, that they’re so good at segmenting information when it comes to the financial part, but when it comes to the commercial part, they actually haven’t even thought about it a second, about what makes them so unique.

Ole:
Yeah, and yet you’re dedicating millions of dollars to this business, and you don’t know how to segment or target yourself. Which is really funny, because it’s across different sort of things, so if you look at CTA managers, commodity trading advisors, [company name] and so on and so forth, they know the pecking order. They follow the rankings and they follow what’s going on, and they know, well you buy me because so and so doesn’t do this, or that, or the other thing. When you’re looking at most long-only managers or a lot of other managers, they do not know who they compete against.

If I had a dime for every time a manager said they’re unique and they don’t compete with anyone, I’d be a very rich man. (Laughter)

Baldwin:
So Ole, what can managers do to better understand … is it about better understanding … so with your services that you speak to allocators all the time, and so you make a map of what they’re looking for, what they want, what their preferences are? But, do you also help managers help find out what makes them so unique, or is that something that they just have to do by themselves, is that an exercise …

Ole:
Unfortunately, it’s a combination of the two. If you’re looking at big mistakes which there are many, I’ve learned … let me tell you a story. At one time, what we did was, we would help managers with their presentations. You know, get it to look pretty, make sure the messaging was efficient and clear, and all that sort of stuff. The one thing I learned, and I don’t know, Matt, if you’ve had that same experience or Baldwin but you know, you can only go so far with what the message is. Ultimately, the manager is going to have to do a lot of work because that is their job. But they don’t know how to a lot of times, and it’s not uncommon to be so close to your business that you don’t really, you can’t really see anything else except what’s five inches from you.

It’s a little bit funny, we’ve all had relationships and everything, and then whenever you go over a problem or something like that, you talk to a friend or significant other, and it’s like oh, well you should do this. Like, gee, I don’t know, and all this other stuff, and you kind of hesitate. But then you think about that a couple of weeks later or a month later, and you’re like, yeah they’re actually right. Why didn’t I just accept it.

It’s like that with a lot of managers. You can give them the tools, but also from what I said, they’re going to have to make the changes and you come and do all that tough work. It’s a little bit like, with consulting is never do something that cannot be sustainable and replicated in house. Because if you do something for people, they will never know how to recreate it.

Baldwin:
Yeah, that’s the fish, or learning to fish kind of analogy, right?

Ole:
Yeah.

Baldwin:
You have to be able to internalize it. You’ve spoken to so many allocators. I know you actually produce content about your interviews with them, I think you’re still doing that. What comes to mind as this recurring desire by fund allocators that they wish fund managers would behave better at or become better at? Is there something recurring?

Ole:
Yeah, but I think the biggest recurring … I would say there are two kinds of allocators. There’s the simplistic one who buys performance and then there’s the professional allocator, and I have to be very careful how I say this, but … the problem with allocating to third party funds is that there is no book that I’ve seen that tells you how to allocate to a third party fund manager. You can’t go to school, or there’s not an association, and so really it’s a craft.

When you’re coming into the profession of third party fund allocation, most of the people say, well, what’s performing, what’s not performing, and that’s the allocator who is down a very, very difficult road because what happens is that you’ll buy a high performing manager, all of the sudden they go into draw down, you’re unhappy that you lost money, you redeem from the fund and they go off to find the next best thing to replicate your mistake.

What really happens, you start to understand that performance is the product of a good process and a good edge. So a good allocator doesn’t look at performance right away. As a matter of fact it’s usually, what’s funny is this is actually sort of like across the board, performance is probably a third or fourth factor in the whole look and feel of the fund. It’s up to the allocator to understand under what conditions this manager will perform. Are the conditions right, or are they not right?

Also, understand what that edge is, what makes that manager different from everyone else. Just because of a manager’s underperforming an index, or peer group, or he’s outperforming the peer group, or his asset classes are not at the right time, there’s a whole bunch of different factors that you can’t discount as an investor.

I kind of go back to my grandfather. My grandfather was a veterinarian and when I was a kid, I didn’t really care about it. I thought, oh yeah, a veterinarian, cats and dogs, big deal. He doesn’t work on humans, he isn’t a brain surgeon. But actually, you think about it, a veterinarian is a tough job because animals don’t tell you where they hurt. And fund managers don’t tell you why they’re special. They don’t know, most of them don’t. It’s really a skill that an allocator has to get and it’s a thankless skill that they have to have.

Baldwin:
And is that across hierarchy, so even the principals struggle with this? You maybe attribute, maybe it’s lack of experience by the salespeople, or is it just across the company in general, when you see this?

Ole:
It’s usually, newer managers typically will suffer from this a lot. Smaller managers will. If you’re talking to like, a Blackrock, or a large asset manager, they know it exactly. They’ve got it down. There’s a reason why some of those guys are big. But it does seem to be across the board, and with allocators just as with fund managers, some are wiser than others, but that’s what makes this industry a little bit complex, is because you have different experience, different skill sets, and a lot of people haven’t made all those mistakes just yet.

Matt:
Could we back up to something you mentioned earlier? You mentioned the volume of e-mails they get, and a lot of the allocators won’t even talk to somebody who they don’t know personally. We run into a lot of clients who, they think that oh, we’ll take our prettied up slide deck and we’ll e-mail it off to a bunch of people that we don’t know, and our lives are going to change. Can you talk a little bit more as to why you see that as the wrong way to go about things, and what’s happening on the other end of this erroneous belief?

Ole:
Yeah, and essentially these, a lot of allocators are drinking from a fire hose when it comes to information. They just have too much of it, and also, it kind of falls flat. The bulk e-mailing thing doesn’t work, I know for a fact that doesn’t work. People just don’t rush out, and I think what people miss out on is this very intuitive nature of that actually, we are service providers. If I’m going to give somebody my money, I’ve got to trust them. It’s about a relationship. Can I trust you? And you’d be amazed how many fact sheets disappear when the performance is bad. And above all, if I have a manager that will not take my call if things are not going well, then they’re not going to do business with them.

It’s amazing just to go through this whole thing. Most businesses will map out their sales process. If you think about this, the only reason why you send an e-mail, or the only reason why you call is for them to read your e-mail, and the only reason why you want to read your e-mail is prompt them to open up the presentation of the fact sheet. The only reason why you have them read the fact sheet is so that you can get a meeting. The only reason why you want a meeting, is so you can follow up and get another one.

It’s not get an allocation, it is, what do I need to get out of these next steps, what do I need to get out of this call and all this other sort of stuff. Then the sales sort of tend to break down in so many areas, because, I can’t tell you how many times where we’re working with a fund manager, and they get a meeting, and they don’t follow up. And they say, well, if they’re interested they’ll give me a call.

Baldwin:
That one there, yeah, I think you’re right. That is the cardinal mistake that is always made, and it’s the easiest one to remedy.

Ole:
Why bother having me if you don’t follow up?

Baldwin:
I’m thinking there’s a lot of limiting beliefs in the heads of fund managers. I’ve had them too, as a fund manager. Obviously that’s why I think that’s why this one resonates so much with me, right? The limiting belief is that if I follow up too much I’m going to look desperate, which is, that one happens often. Also, the fact that you know, if you’re going to follow up you may actually blow it, because you’re going to follow up in a poor way and you actually may blow it.

But what they don’t understand, is like you said, 2500 e-mails every day, they probably have to make at least two or three meetings with people every day, you’re going to move into the background. It’s about staying top of mind. You’re doing them a service by doing that via e-mail is not going to help because there’s too many e-mails. You know, you’re doing them a service by staying top of mind because they’re only human, right?

Ole:
Yeah, no, absolutely and then it’s funny because a lot of people think sales is somebody showing up in a plaid suit and a suitcase selling vacuum cleaners or whatever, but at this level of the game, you’re not selling anything. You’re guiding people with what to do and helping manage their time.

One of the cardinal sins a lot of people suffer from is they will work so hard to get this meeting, and then they’ll go and rehash the presentation again. The allocator is there, he’s already gone through the presentation, he doesn’t want to go through it again if he’s doing his job. And also, if I have the manager in the meeting, I want to talk to the manager. I want to find out what makes him tick. I can read that presentation whenever I want to.

Baldwin:
But I think you’re bound to have read it, because you want to have that first impression. You want to see if you’re see if you’re dealing with somebody that you intuitively can already select as someone who’s material you’d be willing to read, right?

Ole:
Yeah, and you know, there’s a lot sort of … one of the biggest tricks because you kind fall into this fact sheet purgatory to where you know, oh well, we’ll put you on the distribution list and then people get the newsletters and that’s kind of it, is to structure the meetings in a way to where after this meeting we can do one of two things if you’d like to follow up. We can do x, y, or z, or we can do all three of them, and then sort of manage it that way. That way you follow up, you provide people with more information doing all that sort of stuff.

When you think about it, most of us need to be managed in some way. So the salesperson is basically managing you, handling you to make sure that you get enough information you need to have to know whether you’re going to do business or not.

Baldwin:
I’d like to ask you a question that’s always on my mind. I’m really curious of what you about it. Usually when you speak to an allocator or the designated person to listen to you as a fund manager, they’re a gate keeper. They are eventually going to have to convince other people around them. If it’s a private banker, it’s their clients. If it’s an institution, it’s the people at the investment committee. Generally there are always more stakeholders.

What in your opinion can fund managers do to really help the gate keeper do his job by making it easy for them to convince stakeholders if they’re convinced? Do you have any insights on that?

Ole:
The first thing that I would say from the very top is, there’s a reason why these gate keepers are there. I’m just going to back up for just a minute. If you think about it, if I hire an equities analyst and Baldwin, you come in with an equity fund and say hey, Ole, look at this, I’m going have to pass this straight down to my equities analyst and have him take a look at it. If it rises back up to the top, then that’s my job.

These gate keepers, you need to obviously have a tremendous amount of respect for these people, and also we need to help them do their job. If there is a report that needs to be written or whatever, oftentimes it doesn’t hurt to write those reports for them, to help them do their work.

The one thing that’s really funny, if you go outside of fund management and let’s say that you were a big consulting firm or whatever, and you’re describing the process. The work that you’ll take in order to get a proposal sent and all this other stuff, will be about a week sometimes, sometimes maybe even more. In asset management, we don’t do that. It’s like, here’s our presentation. You’ll get all the answers there. Here’s the DDQ.

You know you’re going to win the business if you’re the one who actually does a lot of the hard work for somebody, because they know that when they need you, you’ll be there, and you have your stuff and your house in order. It’s just amazing how sort of willy nilly we are in asset management about these sort of things. To put that into perspective, if you’re a 100 million dollar fund and you’re looking for, or let’s just say 500 million dollar fund, and you’re looking for a 50 million allocation, and you get 1% management fee, that contract’s worth half a million dollars of revenue for you. It’s worth your time. It’s worth your time to work hard.

Baldwin:
It’s almost worth establishing a team to devote its time entirely to that opportunity. It’s seen as a new division sometimes. (Laughs)

Ole:
One of our clients was based in Dallas, Texas. There’s a number of funds there, but typically if you ever want to allocate you have to travel down to Texas. They’re not right around the corner. They went through every single thing to figure out okay, well what is the best way, what is to happen here. So the investor would arrive into Dallas at whatever hotel. On the bed would be a number of files with a handwritten note saying, “Dear Baldwin, welcome to Dallas. We’re looking forward to seeing you at 9:00 a.m. tomorrow morning, but just in case you’re eager, we thought you could use these due diligence files for your review and preparation.” Or, getting an idea of what your favorite food is. If you like pizza, or steak, or whatever, making sure that we have those things on hand. Mapping out that whole bit is what services should be like.

Baldwin:
Did I get this right? This is a fund manager who refuses to travel but wants the investor to come to Dallas, is that it?

Ole:
No, no. If an allocator is going to allocate them, they’ll have to come Dallas to do the due diligence on the manager.

Baldwin:
Oh, okay.

Ole:
So they would really map it out …

Baldwin:
That’s going to happen anyway, and what they do is they make that a special experience for the allocator, something that … what they’re doing is they’re absolutely convincing him that there’s a service level provision and …

Ole:
No, just think about it. Whenever you walk into an office there’s always a bit of standard where, you know, take your coats, would you like some water or coffee and all this other stuff. There’s a reason why we have these sort of things in place, is because we want our guests who are coming to our offices to feel comfortable. You need to think about that experience. These guys would go to the extreme of actually mapping out the whole day, or the whole two days or whatever time it took.

Baldwin:
That’s fascinating, because if by chance you have an allocator who is willing to abide by your plan then you’re playing in your home field twice, right? That’s the great thing.

Ole:
Yeah, well you just want to make sure that have people that are comfortable and happy and can trust you.

Baldwin:
That’s actually very easy to implement. Yeah, that’s a great takeaway.

Ole:
But it’s funny, because it’s even good with smells. What does the office smell like when somebody comes in. Does it smell good? Does it smell stale?

Baldwin:
And they will want to walk through the office, that’s for sure, if they’re doing their job. You have to make … that was a pet peeve of mine, when we got allocator visits.

Ole:
You don’t want to have a meeting just after somebody had a big curry. No matter how much we love curry.

Baldwin:
It smells like McDonald’s takeout. You don’t want that.

Ole:
There is so much detail to this and I’ve kind of learned throughout my experience that this is a real skill. Fund distribution is not an easy game. There’s so many parts.

Baldwin:
Something I fondly remember when I was also in London and we hung out a lot, when I’d come to your office, sometimes we did the box of presentations trick, right? You’d dump all these presentations on the floor and they’re all gray and blue, they all look the same, right? That was hilarious when we spoke to people. What should a good pitch book look like? Should you have a short first version and then a long DDQ type version? What have you learned over all these years about what a good pitch book looks like?

Ole:
I really think it is personal to everyone, but I think for me it’s under 20 pages. It tells me who these people are, which is extremely important, you know, who am I dealing with? And also don’t tell me about Apple or Google or whatever, that’s not what makes you different. Tell me what makes you different.

For example, one of these things that I always insist on whenever I see something is that you’d be amazed, I went through one time a pitch book that was 60 pages long and by the end of it, I didn’t know if it was an equity or a fixed income fund. I swear to God. I looked hard. You have the cover page. Second page, what am I looking at? What are the terms, i.e., can I invest in this? Is it the right legal structure? Is it the right liquidity? Is it the right size?

All these sort of things, and don’t lie to me. If you’re a small fund, tell me you’re a small fund. Give me the AUM. Don’t hide it from me. Then also things like phone numbers, giving contact. It’s not only in presentations, but also in e-mails. Do you know how many times you have to look for a phone number everywhere because somebody just doesn’t put it in their signature?

Baldwin:
Yeah, all the time. In this industry, all the time.

Matt:
Tell us about some more of the disqualifying factors, not having a phone number, and then Baldwin mentioned that a stack of anonymous slide decks was in blue and gray. What else do you see that, pet peeves that you have?

Ole:
Pet peeves. Um, ooh, there’s so many. The, ooh, I don’t want to tell you that information sort of thing.

Baldwin:
Oh, right, yeah, yeah. That’s a big one.

Ole:
It’s like, well then I can’t invest. So that one’s quite big. Also, people who aren’t being truthful about procedures. We know for example, that everything goes … any fund that’s out there, they’re going to have a drawn down, and it’s going to be a nightmare position. Tell me about what happens with a nightmare position. Tell me what you learned when you did that trade. Is there anybody there to take you out of it if you are emotionally attached to it? That sort of stuff, where people are very ambiguous about it. That’s very frustrating. If you look at the volume of funds, there’s about 14,000 hedge funds in this world. According to the ICI handbook, there are over 100,000 retail or mutual funds out there, 100,000 of them. There’s more equity funds than there are equities.

Baldwin:
I’ve never thought about this, you’re so right.

Ole:
You might be different, but you’re not that special. Be transparent. If it really is something that’s different and unique, then you should be paid for it. That really gets me irritated. Having information that’s not very clear is frustrating. Sometimes allocators mention, or managers will have opinions about macro when they’re actually more of a sector focus fund to where they’re really bottom up, but they’ll give you a top down overview. All these sort of things kind of waste time, and I think what’s really funny when you’re looking at pitch books, I don’t know about you guys, don’t tell me if I’m just sort of short term memory, but the first three or four slides are really the most important and the value of the slides starts to decrease the more I go through the presentation. I’ll tend to look at the first couple of slides in great detail, and then I’ll be yep, yep, yep, oh wait, okay, yep. Are you guys like that at all?

Matt:
I think that by the time you hit slide number five, the viewer’s attention is dropping precipitously, no matter how good the deck is.

Ole:
Yeah, I definitely agree with that. So what that means, I guess, is that you have to get everything that’s relevant within those four or five slides.

Baldwin:
What I like to look at when I put together presentations, I think of them as a storyboard for a play or for a story, because there’s got to be a reason why you want to flip the page. There’s always got to be a little bit of a storybook thing, but that’s just me, but yeah I think you’re right.

One of the things that I always find interesting, I’d like to also know what your opinion on it is. Maybe I’m a bit of an extremist in that sense, but I believe that anything that’s on a slide you should be able to internalize in a matter of three seconds, so that means there’s a lot more visuals and less text, and so that means that you can have somebody page through 50 slides without any effort at all, right? Is that something that would work in the investment world, you think? Or is that too weird.

Ole:
Yeah, but I would actually add to that, is don’t make people work for it. A lot of people will have these slides like this graph, and it’s supposed to be self explanatory. But just because you think you’re smart, doesn’t mean that you can guess everything and want to actually take the time and the brain power to get it. So, don’t make me guess. Just tell me what I’m looking at, or what your interpretation of this is. On the title, equity markets are going to go down, okay, and this is why.

Baldwin:
And this is the evidence, yeah right.

Ole:
Don’t make anyone work too hard.

Baldwin:
You know what, this has been amazing, Ole. Thanks for that. Matt, do you have anything else for Ole? Burning questions that you’re trying to extract from the genius?

Matt:
How do you feel, shall we wrap it up?

Baldwin:
Yeah, well, Ole, thanks a lot. Every time I speak to you, there’s more there. That’s been 10 years going and more. So, thanks again for making time. Keep up the good stuff, and I hope to see you very soon, my friend.

Matt:
Thank you very much for being with us.

Ole:
You’re welcome. It’s always a pleasure.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Tsufit (LinkedIn profile) started out as a lawyer, singer, and actress, but for over 15 years now she has been coaching others to step into the spotlight. In fact, she wrote a book titled exactly that: “Step Into The Spotlight!”

As you’ll hear, one of the things she sees in public speaking is that it helps you crystallize your message. I love one of her quotes: “If you can’t say [something] in 30 seconds, you won’t be able to say it in 30 minutes.”

Also Tsufit points out the importance of knowing why you’re there speaking. As she says, it sounds obvious, but in reality it’s not nearly as obvious as one might think, and understanding why you’re really there is way more important than many people realize.

One of the main themes flowing through the interview is the (often unrealized) opportunity to own the room. Not just in the way we might think at first (feeling in control of your physical surroundings), but starting much earlier than your actual speech, when you might negotiate with the organizer to get a better role for yourself.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Baldwin Berges (LinkedIn profile) spent years in the investment world, helped companies raise money, and is now helping them clarify their messages, making complex ideas simple to understand. In this interview he talks a bit about speaking at conferences, and gives some tips to other speakers.

As you’ll hear, he’s a big supporter of professional conduct, remembering that your job is to make sure you make the conference organizer, and, more importantly, the sponsors, look good. They want to ensure the audience really enjoys its time there, and you need to make sure you support them in that.

Also, he shows the true mark of a professional, paying attention to details like making sure his clicker (the remote that advances the slides) is working. I imagine that Baldwin has very, very few technical problems (“sorry people, please bear with us while we try to figure out how to get this video to work”).

One of the main messages flowing through the interview is the need to realize your speech is not about you. Whether he is talking about thinking of needs of the conference organizer, or the needs of the audience, he is always driving home the point that your first thoughts should be of the needs of the other people in the room.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Erik Vos (LinkedIn profile) has worked and presented in 91 countries and counting. In this interview he talks a bit about speaking at conferences, and gives some tips to other speakers.

As you’ll hear, he’s a big supporter of preparing a lot (a man after our own hearts!), and of the value of a conference speech being in the increased confidence that it gives to the speaker, and how business development follows that, not the other way around.

He also discusses the importance of a good introduction, an important detail many speakers (and their introducers) don’t give the focus it deserves.

One of the main threads flowing through the second half of Erik’s interview was the importance of understanding your audience. In the interview, Erik gives some great tips about how to do that when you are speaking to people you don’t know personally.

By the way, in our pre-interview chat, we discussed, in depth, tailoring your words to your audience. It’s an art in and of itself, and it can take years of experience to know how to do it like a professional. So enjoy the tips Erik gives in this interview, but know that behind the words you hear from Erik here, is an impressively deep understanding of the nuances behind the tips.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Zeynep Stefan (LinkedIn profile) has been in the insurance and risk management business for over 10 years. In this interview she talks a bit about moderating a panel, and gives some tips to other moderators.

As you’ll hear, she’s a big advocate of moderators preparing before the panel, and of meeting with your panelists before the event.

She also discusses the importance of effective listening, and having the ability to interact harmoniously with others.

At the end, Zeynep refers to a couple consulting sessions she had with us a few years ago, and is still benefitting from. Thanks for the kind words Zeynep!

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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During some situations, maintaining eye contact with the audience may be one of the biggest factors defining the whole presentations’ success or failure. Your audience will be more drawn into your topic, as long as you successfully keep an eye contact with them and establish a bond. Turning your back to them to check out your slides, even for a short moment, may disrupt that bond. If you’re aiming to convince and move your audience to adopt your ideas, it is suggested you face them and maintain the established bond with your eye contact.

But if you’re using a presentation software during your speech, how can you both keep facing the audience AND know what’s going on behind you in your slides? What if you want to keep some reminder notes around, but don’t want to hold pieces of paper in your hands? The presenter view comes very handy in such situations, and may still be one of the most powerful yet underused tools available to us.

This tool, which is available in both PowerPoint and Keynote, allows to display different views on your computer screen and your projection screen. While only your current slide is shown on the projection screen, your computer will display a wide range of tools like;

• your current slide on display,
• the very next slide and following slides,
• speaking notes to yourself,
• speaking time,
• and current local time.

In your upcoming presentations, follow these simple steps to harness the power of the presenter view:

1. Prepare speaker notes as reminders and write them into the notes section of individual slides.
   
2. To simplify existing slides that contain a lot of text, you can move some of that text to the notes section. To do this, simply cut and paste the text. This will give you more space on the slide to enlarge the important points such as keywords, charts, pictures, etc.
3. When presenting, position your own screen so that only you will be able to see it. After you start the slideshow, your audience will see only your current slide.

Tip: In PowerPoint, an easy way of adding speaker notes to an existing presentation is to use the Notes Page feature under View menu. When selected, the software will display your slides and a larger text box to insert your notes.

About Alper Rozanes

Alper graduated from Baruch College in New York with a degree in management information systems. He loves to cook (his specialty is oven-baked honey mustard salmon). Among his other hobbies are tennis, bowling, and jumping from known flying objects at 10.000 feet.

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Alper and Matt interviewed Aydın Bırık, who in his job sees many, many startups pitch their companies to potential investors. Here he talks about what he does (and does not) like to see in the presentations, and what suggestions he would give to the entrepreneurs who give them…

The original interview contained some information Aydın asked us to keep private, so here is the sanitized version for public consumption:

Matt:
Okay. We’re recording now. Okay. You’re Aydın Bırık, and you listen to a lot of investor pitches. Think of a recent investor pitch that you listened to and tell us what were some of things that you liked about it and some of the things that you didn’t like about it.

Aydın:
Okay. Very good. Well, thank you folks. Public speaking is very important and there are a lot of cases where it really has an impact. Investor pitching is on my top priority list because the result could be an investment or not, so it is extremely important. We are not talking about a corporate presentation. It is sometimes, for a lot of entrepreneurs, it is a life changing experience; and unfortunately, all my career I could say I have seen almost a thousand start up pitches, especially in my expertise, for Turkish entrepreneurs, we still have a lot of space to improve.

Firstly, mostly engineers, are trying to do the pitches because they’re the ones who do the product and they think having the product is enough for an investor to be invested. Unfortunately, they don’t know once you cannot present the product, you will not get your message. People are not looking for, especially in the investors, people initially doesn’t look for the product or its company, people look for the entrepreneur itself. The entrepreneur itself makes the difference for an investor to invest in the company or not.

Matt:
You mean like the personality, the character…

Aydın:
Exactly. The personality, the character. To present that, having good presentation skills is very important. The preparation is extremely important. Most of them doesn’t come investor pitches without preparation. Yes, they have prepared a presentation, but they didn’t do rehearsals. I can easily see this.

Matt:
How do you see that when they’re not rehearsed? How do you know that they’re not rehearsed?

Aydın:
Well, the story is still very important. For startups, the idea is finding a solution to a problem, so without the story, people doesn’t conceive the problem or the solution. If they don’t come to presentations without thinking about the story or developing a story, they start from some point and they go to another point and then they come to other point, as well. On that thing, we understood he didn’t prepare enough.
I’m not going even mentioning about their typos or things they passed very fastly or things they spent too much time, so that are the things they didn’t get enough preparation. I’m not going to mentioning about their voice variety, how to use the stage, how to use two people because mostly teams made of a couple of people, they’re not only by themselves, even they have thousands ways to do a good presentation using their coworkers. They don’t do that. Sometimes only one person speaks. Sometimes one person speaks and the other person continues. For a listener, we lost track what’s going on over there.

For a good investor pitching, the first thing we look at is the people, the people itself, how passionate they are. How they have been working on this and what they have created. Were they aware of what they have created? Do they have a story behind it? Before looking at the product or the business model, we evaluate the people.

Matt:
What do you like to see in the people? When you say passion, what do you mean? Passion for the product? Passion for business as a process? What do you mean by passion? Passion for what?

Aydın:
Well, for the passion, how I conceive they have a passion or not is their control over their presentation, their preparation, including their voice tone, things they have touched, and things they haven’t touched because there is a standard for an investor pitching. It’s S-C-Q-A. You start with the situation, the problem, Then, you continue with the complexity, why that situation is complex. Then, you ask for a question, and then, you give the answer. S-C-Q-A is a standard kind of thing, but not so many people use this, or not so many people continue this flow. They didn’t do enough research. That gives me an idea of they haven’t read what’s going on on papers, and that gives me an idea they are not passionate enough, their product or their business. They just come there to present their idea and thinking they did the best thing, but they have to do their research.

Matt:
You mention S-C-Q-A. Remind me again. What does that stands for? S … Situation?

Aydın:
Situation.

Matt:
C.

Aydın:
Complexity. Q. Question and answer.

Matt:
That’s the standard sequence of an investor presentation.

Aydın:
There are also other slides they have to add, like the team, the competition, which milestones they have done so far. There are also some slides that must be on the page, but the flow should be on this, should be like this.

Matt:
But you don’t see a lot of people following this.

Aydın:
I don’t see it. Yeah. Yeah. Again, most important thing is the story. We are not talking about a yearly, annual financial revenue presentation over there. We are talking about a life changing product. They have to present us a life changing product at the investor pitching. You have to…

Matt:
Should the story have to do with how the product would change somebody’s life?

Aydın:
Could be that. Could be that. Or how he ended up coming up with an idea. A presentation like, “My mother and I, we were in Istanbul and for long of my life we weren’t able to get organic food because of this happened, this happened.” Even putting something from your own could be very valuable; but because of mostly engineers do this, they don’t spend time developing their story before the presentation.

Matt:
Okay. Alper, I saw you writing. Do you have some questions?

Alper:
Yeah, yeah, I have some questions. You said you sat through almost one thousand or maybe more investor pitches. Remember the successful ones. What happened at the end of it, when the presentation ended and you thought to yourself, “Okay. This was a good, successful presentation.” What happened afterwards?

Aydın:
The timing is extremely important, especially in investor pitchings. It has to be very short because, for example, for a day, for demo day, maximum fifteen sometimes thirty people are on the stage, and they have limited time, so they have to present whatever they have in that very, very limited, sometimes it’s even two and half minutes. We call it elevator pitches. In two and half minutes they have to present what they’re been working for their whole life, so that gives an idea they have to be very well prepared, including their stories.
What is a good present, and at the end what happens? For investors, we need to learn some things that we have to learn. One is about the team. Who is the team? What is the problem? What is the solution? How are you going to solve it? What others tell about this? and how much money you want?

If you’re able to tell them in a very flawless way, you tell who you are. You tell what was your story. How did you come up this? And then you tell, how you’re going to solve this, and what you want with who. Then at the end, very basically I described to you, but we got what we want and we say, “All right, we got what we want.” At the end, a lot of people say they understood if we understand if it is a good startup pitch or not. How I evaluate if it is a good presentation or not is, that if questions comes about the past and the recent, such as “How are going to this”, “have you talked with those”, then it is a bad presentation. If questions comes about the future, such as “what would you do more funding” “would you be able to do more of this” then it is a good presentation. Also, if too few questions are comes then it’s a bad presentation, because that means listeners didn’t get it. If there are a lot of questions coming after your presentation, that means you got some kind of attention. You can not tell everything in two and a half minutes. It is just impossible. The idea behind investor pitching is just to take attention and ask for a longer amount of time for details. On your presentation you have to impress people. You have to touch some specific points, but in a very connected way, with a story. You have to touch some specific points. You need to tell how much money you want at the end, because it’s investor pitching; I can tell almost fifty or seventy percent, they usually forget, or they didn’t do their research enough. They just present their product and we have to ask them, “All right, how much money you want?”

Matt:
How often does it happen, an entrepreneur gives a really shitty presentation and you say, “Yeah, the presentation was shitty, but the product was great, we should make an investment anyway.” How often does that happen?

Aydın:
Good question. Well, that happens. That happens too much, especially here in Turkey. That happens a lot. Turkish people doesn’t have good presentation skills because of many many different reasons, especially the presentations I listen are technical presentations. It is tech jobs and they involve people who have technical skills, mostly founders are technical people. Because of them, mostly, I would say, I cannot give a percent, but mostly it is bad presentations, and very rare good presentations.

Alper:
I just want to clarify, when you ask the question, did you say, how much of the bad presentations end up getting investments?

Matt:
Basically, does a presentation need to be good? Can a presentation suck and you still get an investment?

Alper:
And how much of it happens?

Aydın:
Presentations could be bad, and the products could be good. There are different types of investors. Some people might not be looking at the presentation, just the product, but that is very, very small percentage. They are just investors and they want to invest in something, so their barrier could be low; but with a bad presentation entrepreneurs are missing a huge potential, huge opportunity. That doesn’t happen too much. I know very good products because of bad presentations just couldn’t get understood.

Alper:
What would you suggest they do before the presentation?

Aydın:
For a good “presentation”, a perfect “preparation” is a must. Do rehearsals all the time. Some year ago for an international pitching contest, mentors forced entrepreneurs to memorize every word while they were helping them to get ready to pitch in front of American investors, can you believe they made entrepreneurs memorize every word they present on the stage, including some random sounded jokes.

I believe this how a good presentation happens, though. Jokes, questions to ask, some stoppings, good entrance, hook sentence, a good local voice, eye contact, good usage of stage without looking at your presentation. All those tips that we all know are definitely in my experience effective to have an ear on the presentation. Because think about this, we are not listening only one presentation on that day. We are listening almost thirty presentations for a day, and at the end we have to make a decision. Since there is also a little time to evaluate them, we evaluate them afterwards, which is almost two hours or three hours later. What do we remember? We remember who had “his show” on the stage.

Matt:
Who had the what?

Aydın:
The show. Show. Show on the stage.

Alper:
Who made the best impression.

Aydın:
Yeah, yeah. The best impression.

Matt:
Think of a recent day where you had to sit through these thirty presentations. What was one of the memorable shows? What did the guy or girl do that was memorable? What was memorable?

Aydın:
Well, all right. There are some things I can remember. There are some things I cannot remember, but I know there were some very good presentations, good command of English. In some cases they come to the stage, and they have their people on the audience, and once that team was coming we saw some shoutings and cheerings. A lot people were maybe too tired and looking at their phones, but once we saw all this noise, we just thought, “What’s going on?” And we thought, that there is going to be something over there. Then the guy was very self confident, and he was going to pitch hardware device.

Their presentation was good. The entrepreneur came and he started, since he was going to pitch something with a device and storing files, he started taking a selfie of all the audience and I and us. So, he initially do the demonstration, and he started with a very good problem. We all had these pictures, how I’m going to do this, stuff like that. So he did demo without using too much of his time, he did a good start. He was able to present whatever we like to hear. For investor pitches, we don’t have to hear everything. We don’t have to hear everything. This is the key. Just creating curiosity is important.

Matt:
So, he walks up there on stage and his employees are in the audience and they’re whooping it up so there’s some excitement, and then he gets up there and he takes a selfie of himself, and this is a photo storage device, so he’s working his product into the presentation. So, he’s not just standing up there saying, “Hi, my name is Ercan. We make a product that does photo storage.” He’s actually working the product into the presentation, and you like that.

Aydın:
Exactly. Exactly.

Alper:
What percentage, would you say, slides were used in these one thousand presentations? Like, how much of them use a presentation, like a PowerPoint behind them?

Aydın:
Well, they use them every time. They have to use every time because they have to show something and it’s not only like a free-form speech. If this for the investor presentations, they have to present something, so every time they have to use some sort of…

Alper:
And how would grade their usage of slides, figures and design

Aydın:
Oh man. Well, sometimes they’re very bad.

Alper:
Like confusing? [Crosstalk]

Aydın:
Definitely sometimes confusing. Sometimes small fonts. Mostly presenting about the financials, for example, it is small fonts. We don’t have to see your one-year thing. You can just put it on your backup slide, just present us some …

Alper:
The key elements.

Aydın:
Yeah. Small fonts, and, of course, well, for good presentations, for example, if it is a product announcement, you can use just pictures; but for startup presentation just using pictures without writings sometimes isn’t good because we sometimes we have to see something written. You’re not announcing a product, so there has to be some writings, some information as well. Who you are, what you have done, however you are creative creating your presentation, then of course it takes our attention. For example, on team slides some people put pictures and write under, “I have worked there.” Their titles with the companies, but some people just put their picture but they just add the logos of the companies they have worked or the universities. That is a creative way to say the same thing, but they have to have a presentation, and they have to have some information.

Alper:
Okay, but in most cases, unfortunately, the presentation becomes an obstacle between the presenter and you if done badly.

Aydın:
Exactly, including if they are not prepared enough and looking at the presentation all the time, that becomes definitely an obstacle. They have to go back and forward, that kind of thing. The flow of course because the presentation has to follow the story that you’re telling. The story is the key thing. “How did you end up being there?” That is the most important thing. You are presenting yourself. You are not presenting a product. You are presenting yourself, so if you prepare your slides aligned with your story, then it makes easier for us to catch up. It’s like watching a movie. You don’t have to ask anything. Some slides are going and he’s telling something regarded with that. This was thing. You know how, “I was like this, did this, and then, all of sudden, I figured out this. We had been working on this. This is my team. Blah, blah, blah blah.” Then, it gives a good impression.

Alper:
You would say the presentation, the pitch, the investor pitch is maybe the most important five minutes that person can have on their lifetime.

Aydın:
In their entrepreneurial experience. Exactly.

Alper:
Can we quote you on this?

Aydın:
Yes. Exactly. Exactly Please.

Alper:
The most five crucial minutes…

Aydın:
For an entrepreneur. I will try repeat the same thing. The most important time of their life would be their investor pitching presentation preparedness, whatever that experience is. The most important because they will need this, Alper, everywhere. They will need this everywhere, not only at the fifteen minutes of investor pitching, but a five minute pitching at bar because you are developing something that nobody has ever done before, so trying to express something that no one has ever done before is much more harder than trying to present something easy as saying “here it is.” And they require different skills. You can have very good presentation skills, but if you’re not able to tell what the investor is looking for, if you’re not able to, if you don’t have a hook sentence, for example, then it is not going to make sense. You can be a very good showman. You have to give what the investors are looking for, or potential partners, plus with a good story behind it. And they will need that all the time, everywhere.

Alper:
Do you think they can use the same pitch over and over and over again or should they…

Aydın:
No, It evolves all the time. They have to be good listeners. Another thing, they should not lose any chance to present their presentation. They should not be shy to present. They should apply everywhere and do their presentation all the time. This is one of my tips because every time they will get some questions and they will understand what is missing or not, and based on that feedback they have to change their presentation or pitch. Or should.

Alper:
I have one last question.

Alper:
If you were to sum up your thousand presentation experience and so many years as being in the audience, what would be the three key messages you would want to give to prospective pitchers

Aydın:
Preparation is the key. Preparation, including rehearsals.

Creating a story. Creating a startup story. Why you are there. Your story.

Then, of course, attractive visuals. Because you will have something to show us, having an attractive visual informational documentation, helps you while giving your massages

Matt:
All right. Well, thank you very much.

Alper:
Thank you very much.

Aydın:
You’re welcome, guys.

[hide]

Transcript:

Matt:
Okay. We’re recording now. Okay. You’re Aydın Bırık, and you listen to a lot of investor pitches. Think of a recent investor pitch that you listened to and tell us what were some of things that you liked about it and some of the things that you didn’t like about it.

Aydın:
Okay. Very good. Well, thank you folks. Public speaking is very important and there are a lot of use cases where it really has an impact. Investor pitching is one of the top on my top list because the result could be an investment or not, so it is extremely important. It is not a corporate presentation. It is sometimes, for a lot of entrepreneurs, it is a life changing experience; and unfortunately, all my career I could say I have seen almost a thousand start up pitches, especially in our area, in Turkish entrepreneurs, we still have a lot of lacks.

Firstly, mostly engineers, are trying to do the pitches because they’re the ones who do the product and they think having the product is enough for an investor to be invested. Unfortunately, they don’t know once you cannot present the product, you will not get your message. People are not looking for, especially in the investors, people initially doesn’t look for the product or its company, people look for the entrepreneur itself. The entrepreneur itself makes the difference for an investor to invest in the company or not.

Matt:
You mean like the personality, the character…

Aydın:
Exactly. The personality, the character. To present that, having good presentation skills is very important. The preparation is extremely important. Most of them doesn’t come investor pitches without preparation. Yes, they have prepared a presentation, but they didn’t do rehearsals. I can easily see this.

Matt:
How do you see that when they’re not rehearsed? How do you know that they’re not rehearsed?

Aydın:
Well, the story is still very important. For startups, the idea is finding a solution to a problem, so without the story, people doesn’t conceive the problem or the solution. If they don’t come to presentations without thinking about the story or developing a story, they start from some point and they go to another point and then they come to other point, as well. On that thing, we understood he didn’t prepare enough.

I’m not going even mentioning about their typos or things they passed very fastly or things they spent too much time, so that are the things they didn’t get enough preparation. I’m not going to mentioning about their voice variety, how to use the stage, how to use two people because mostly teams made of a couple of people, they’re not only by themselves, even they have thousands ways to do a good presentation using their coworkers. They don’t do that. Sometimes only one person speaks. Sometimes one person speaks and the other person continues. For a listener, we lost track what’s going on over there.

For a good investor pitching, the first thing we look at is the people, the people itself, how passionate they are. How they have been working on this and what they have created. Were they aware of what they have created? Do they have a story behind it? Before looking at the product or the business model, we evaluate the people.

Matt:
What do you like to see in the people? When you say passion, what do you mean? Passion for the product? Passion for business as a process? What do you mean by passion? Passion for what?

Aydın:
Well, for the passion, how I conceive they have a passion or not is their control over their presentation, their preparation, including their voice tone, things they have touched, and things they haven’t touched because there is a standard for an investor pitching. You start with the problem. It’s S-C-Q-A. You start with the problem, situation. Then, you continue with the complexity, why that situation is complex. Then, you ask for a question, and then, you give the answer. S-C-Q-A is a standard kind of thing, but not so many people use this, or not so many people continue this flow. They didn’t do enough research. That gives me an idea of they haven’t read what’s going on on papers, and that gives me an idea they are not passionate enough, their product or their business. They just come there to present their idea and thinking they did the best thing, but they have to do their research.

Matt:
You mention S-C-Q-A. Remind me again. What does that stands for? S … Situation?

Aydın:
Situation.

Matt:
C.

Aydın:
Complexity. Q. Question and answer.

Matt:
That’s the standard sequence of an investor presentation.

Aydın:
There are also other slides they have to add, like the team, the rekabet (a Turkish word)…

Alper:
Competition?

Aydın:
Yeah, competition. There are also some slides that must be on the page, but the flow should be on this, should be like this.

Matt:
But you don’t see a lot of people following this.

Aydın:
I don’t see it. Yeah. Yeah. Another thing. The most important thing is the story. We are not talking about a yearly, annual presentation over there. We are talking about a life changing product. They have to present us a life changing product at the investor pitching. You have to…

Matt:
Should the story have to do with how the product would change somebody’s life?

Aydın:
Could be that. Could be that. Or how he ended up coming up with an idea. A presentation like, “My mother and I, we were in Istanbul and for long of my life we weren’t able to get organic food because of this happened, this happened.” Even putting something from your own could be very valuable; but because of mostly engineers do this, they don’t spend time developing their story before the presentation.

Matt:
Okay. Alper, I saw you writing. Do you have some questions?

Alper:
Yeah, yeah, I have some questions. You said you sat through almost one thousand or maybe more investor pitches. Remember the successful ones. What happened at the end of it, when the presentation ended and you thought to yourself, “Okay. This was a good, successful presentation.” What happened afterwards?

Aydın:
For an investor … By the way, another thing is, I would answer that question, but the timing is extremely important, as well, especially in investor pitchings. It has to be very short because, for example, for a day, for demo day, we call it demo days, maximum fifteen sometimes thirty people are on the stage, and they have limited time, so they have to present whatever they have in that very, very limited, sometimes it’s five minutes. We call it elevator pitches. Five minutes they have to present what they’re been working for their whole life, so that gives an idea they have to be very well prepared, including their stories.

What is a good present, and at the end what happens? For investors, we need to learn some things that we have to learn. One is about the team. Who is the team? What is the problem? What is the solution? What is the problem? How are you going to solve it, and how much money you want?

If you’re able to tell them in a very flawless way, you tell who you are. You tell what was your story. How did you come up this? And then you tell, how you’re going to solve this, and what you want with who. Then at the end, very basically I described to you, but we got what we want and we say, “All right, we got what we want.” At the end, a lot of people say they understood if we understand if it is a good startup pitch or not. If lot of questions are coming, then it’s a bad presentation because investors didn’t get, didn’t understand it, how you’re going to do this, where you’re going to find this money, why you think this money. If there are not too much questions, at the end if it is an angel network group, for example, they leave the room and then we vote. Not having too many questions, and a lot of people interested in the presentation then it means he did a good job. It’s successful.

You have to touch some specific points, but in a very connected way. With a story. You have to touch some specific points. They are everywhere in investor pitching they say at the end, tell how much money you want because it’s investor pitching; and I cannot tell almost fifty or seventy percent, they maybe forget, or they didn’t do their research enough. They just present their product and we have to ask them, “All right, how much money you want?”

Matt:
How often does it happen, an entrepreneur gives a really shitty presentation and you say, “Yeah, the presentation was shitty, but the product was great, we should make an investment anyway.” How often does that happen?

Aydın:
Good question. Good question. Well, that happens. That happens too much, especially here in Turkey. I’m not talking about global entrepreneurship, we’re talking about the Turkish entrepreneurial market. That happens a lot. Turkish people doesn’t have good presentation skills because of many many different reasons, especially the presentations I listen are technical presentations. It is tech jobs and they involve people who have technical skills, mostly founders are technical people. Because of them, mostly, I would say, I cannot give a percent, but mostly it is bad presentations with, okay, could be interesting products; but mostly. More than half.

Alper:
I just want to clarify, when you ask the question, did you say, how much of the bad presentations end up getting investments?

Matt:
Basically, does a presentation need to be good? Can a presentation suck and you still get an investment?

Alper:
And how much of it happens?

Aydın:
Lot of presentations suck, and the products could be good. For an investor, there are different types of people. Some people might not be looking at the presentation, just the product, but that is very, very small percentage. They are just investors and they want to invest in something, so their barrier could be low; but with a bad presentation they are missing a huge potential, huge opportunity. That doesn’t happen too much. I know very good products because of bad presentations just couldn’t get understood.

Alper:
What would you suggest they do before the presentation?

Aydın:
A good presentation … A good preparation. I’m sorry. A good preparation. Do rehearsals all the time. In, for example, two years ago there was a program, they collect Turkish startups and sent them to the States. It was Trip Technet, something like that. Some American mentors were mentoring them, and they make them pitch in front of American investors. I know from them, they memorized every word. They made our Turkish entrepreneurs memorize every word they present on the stage.

This is how a good presentation is happening, including some jokes. Jokes. You have to put some jokes on the presentation. You have to ask questions. Those kind of tips were given them. Memorize a good presentation. Without some stoppings. A good entrance. A good voice. A good local voice. Eye contact. Good usage of stage. Without looking at your presentation. All those tips that we all know are definitely in my experience effective to have an ear on the presentation. Because think about this, we are not listening only one presentation on that day. We are listening almost thirty presentations for a day, and at the end we have to make a decision. Since there is also a little time to evaluate them, we evaluate them afterwards, which is almost two hours or three hours later. What do we remember? We remember who had the show on the stage.

Matt:
Who had the what?

Aydın:
The show. Show. Show on the stage.

Alper:
Who made the best impression.

Aydın:
Yeah, yeah. The best impression.

Matt:
Think of a recent day where you had to sit through these thirty presentations. What was one of the memorable shows? What did the guy or girl do that was memorable? What was memorable?

Aydın:
Well, all right. There are some things I can remember. There are some things I cannot remember, but I know, for example, at the StartersHub, there were some good presentations, good command of English. They come to the stage, and they have their people on the audience, and once that team was coming we saw some shoutings and cheerings. A lot people were maybe too tired and looking at their phones, but once we saw all this noise, we just thought, “What’s going on?” And we thought, that there is going to be something over there. Then the guy was very self confident, and he was going to pitch a device, a hardware device where you can store all your photos on your cloud, but cloud at home, so…

Matt:
By the way, was this Monument?

Aydın:
Monument. Yeah. Monument.

Matt:
That’s Semih Hazar from Toastmasters.

Aydın:
Yeah? He came? He came over there? Ercan? How do you know him?

Matt:
From Toastmasters. Semih was in Toastmasters ten years ago, that’s how I know him, and I met his business partner…

Aydın:
Ercan.

Matt:
Yeah.

Aydın:
Yeah. Ercan and Semih are my friends, and I’m the guy who picked them for Turkcell and now we’re going to do business. Out of my six success stories one of them is Monument. I still have good connections with them.

So, Ercan’s and Semih’s presentation was good, and I know they got support from a professional presenter, by the way Mehmet, but I know their presentation. He came and he started, since he was going to pitch something with a device and storing files, he started taking a selfie of all the audience and I and us. So, he initially do the demonstration, and he started with a very good problem. We all had these pictures, how I’m going to do this, stuff like that. So he did demo without using too much of his time, he did a good start. He was able to present whatever we like to hear. For investor pitches, we don’t have to hear everything. We don’t have to hear everything. This is the key. We don’t have to hear everything. We only have to hear the problem, the situation, the team, and how much money you want. The story behind it, and as far as I remember, that’s was something I still can remember.

Matt:
So, he walks up there on stage and his employees are in the audience and they’re wooping it up so there’s some excitement, and then he gets up there and he takes a selfie of himself, and this is a photo storage device, so he’s working his product into the presentation. So, he’s not just standing up there saying, “Hi, my name is Ercan. We make a product that does photo storage.” He’s actually working the product into the presentation, and you like that.

Aydın:
Exactly. Exactly.

Alper:
What percentage, would you say, slides were used in these one thousand presentations? Like, how much of them use a presentation, like a PowerPoint behind them?

Aydın:
Well, they use them every time. They have to use every time because they have to show something and it’s not only like a free-form speech. If this for the investor presentations, they have to present something, so every time they have to use some sort of…

Alper:
And how would grade their usage…

Aydın:
Oh man. Well, they’re very bad. Very, very bad.

Alper:
Like confusing? [Crosstalk]

Aydın:
Definitely sometimes confusing. Sometimes small fonts. Mostly presenting about the financials, for example, it is small fonts. We don’t have to see your one-year thing. You can just put it on your backup slide, just present us some …

Alper:
The key elements.

Aydın:
Yeah. Small fonts, and, of course, well, for good presentations, for example, if it is a product announcement, you can use just pictures; but for startup presentation just using pictures without writings sometimes isn’t good because we sometimes we have to see something written. You’re not announcing a product, so there has to be some writings, some information as well. Who you are, what you have done, however you are creative creating your presentation, then of course it takes our attention. For example, on team slides some people put pictures and write under, “I have worked there.” Their titles with the companies, but some people just put their picture but they just add the logos of the companies they have worked or the universities. That is a creative way to say the same thing, but they have to have a presentation, and they have to have some information.

Alper:
Okay, but in most cases, unfortunately, the presentation becomes an obstacle between the presenter and you if done badly.

Aydın:
Exactly, including if they are not prepared enough and looking at the presentation all the time, that becomes definitely an obstacle. They have to go back and forward, that kind of thing. The flow of course because the presentation has to follow the story that you’re telling. The story is the key thing. How did you end up being there? That is the most important thing. You are presenting yourself. You are not presenting a product. You are presenting yourself, so if you prepare your slides aligned with your story, then it makes easier for us to catch up. It’s like watching a movie. You don’t have to ask anything. Some slides are going and he’s telling something regarded with that. This was thing. You know how, “I was like this, did this, and then, all of sudden, I figured out this. We had been working on this. This is my team. Blah, blah, blah blah.” Then, it gives a good impression.

Alper:
You would say the presentation, the pitch, the investor pitch is maybe the most important five minutes that person can have…

Aydın:
In their entrepreneurial experience. Exactly.

Alper:
Can we quote you on this?

Aydın:
Yes. Exactly. Exactly Please.

Alper:
The most five crucial minutes…

Aydın:
For an entrepreneur. I will try repeat the same thing. The most important time of their life would be their investor pitching presentation preparedness, whatever that experience is. The most important because they will need this, Alper, everywhere. They will need this everywhere, not only at the fifteen minutes of investor pitching, but a five minute elevator pitching at bar because you are developing something that nobody has done before, so trying to express something that no one has ever done before is much more harder than trying to present whatever, “Here it is.” And they require different skills. You can have very good presentation skills, but if you’re not able to tell what the investor is looking for, if you’re not able to, if you don’t have a hook sentence, for example, then it is not going to make sense. You can be a very good showman. You have to give what the investors are looking for, or potential partners, plus with a good story behind it. And they will need that all the time, everywhere.

Alper:
Do you think they can use the same pitch over and over and over again or should they…

Aydın:
No, no, no no. It evolves all the time. They have to be good listeners. Another thing, they should not lose any chance to present their presentation. They should not be shy to present. They should apply everywhere and do their presentation all the time. This is one of my tips because every time they will get some questions and they will understand what is missing or not, and based on that feedback they have to change their presentation or pitch. Or should.

Alper:
I have one last question.

Matt:
Okay. Yeah, You ask your one question. I have nothing, and we could go on all day, but you ask your one question.

Alper:
If you were to sum up your thousand presentation experience and so many years as being in the audience, what would be the three key messages you would want to give to prospective pitchers?

Aydın:
Preparation is the key. Preparation, including rehearsals.

Creating a story. Creating a story. Creating a startup story. Why you are there. Your story.

Then, of course, attractive because you will have something to show us, having an attractive visual informational documentation.

Matt:
All right. Well, thank you very much.

Alper:
Thank you very much.

Aydın:
You’re welcome, guys.

[/hide]

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

• 
• 

One of the most commented-on items in our Tips & Tricks email series is this Kevin Spacey speech:

https://www.getdrip.com/9763063/campaigns/7516685/emails/102822/archive

The comments are often to the effect that the readers loved the speech, for various reasons, and they watched the whole thing (it’s about 47 minutes!).

The thing is that, visually, the speech is one of the most boring speeches I’ve ever seen — boring suit, boring background color, speaker standing behind a podium. Even Kevin Spacey’s face is, in my opinion, boring. I love Kevin Spacey, the guy is one of my favorite actors, but he has made an entire career out of playing characters that are boring on the surface (but quite interesting inside).

So why do our T&T readers so often say, “I loved that speech, I watched the whole thing?”

I think it’s because Kevin Spacey has something to say.

That’s the key to a good presentation. The key is not knowing how to do everything “right.” It’s having something to say.

In my opinion, that’s the single most important presentation skill: the ability to dig deep and find something in yourself that needs saying. If you don’t do that, no amount of training is going to make your speech interesting. And if you do do that, almost nothing else matters.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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What’s behind that 25 times

There’s more behind that “practice 25 times” advice than just an unthinking “more practice is good, so get a lot of it.”

Here’s what’s behind it…

(click here if you don’t see the embedded image above)

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Why we do Tips and Tricks as a weekly email, not a once-and-done ebook:

Transcript:

This series, the Tips and Tricks series, it’s going to take about a year. There are 40 or 50 tips, or something like that, and then spaced out, one a week, that ends up being about a year.

Sometimes people come to us and they say, “Hey Matt, can’t you just take all of those tips and package them in an e-book or a best of blog posts list, or something, so that we can read them all at once and just get them out of the way?”

The short answer is yes, absolutely, we could do that, technically.

But the reason that we don’t is that good presentation skills, or good communication skills, are kind of a mindset change.

They’re not just a set of skills that you learn in one day and then you’re fine for the rest of your life. They’re a mindset change. A mindset change takes a longer time to achieve. That’s why we break them down into much smaller, weekly emails over the space of a year, because the point is to effect some sort of a mindset change, not to just dump a bunch of standalone, a la carte skills on to you.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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xxx

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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This guy Eric Takaha at Franklin-Templeton is a master of using what I call “softening words,” which can come in very handy when you are describing overall trends in a public forum. I’ve bolded the “softening words” in the transcript below…

[themedy_media type=”youtube” url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_To7L1kQXL0″]

How has high yield performed recently?

Year-to-date, the high yield market has been a little bit up and down. Overall, we’re up a couple percent through the first quarter of 2015. January was a little bit of a weaker month. February moved up and then March has been a little bit up and down.

Overall, it’s been tracking energy pretty closely given the large percentage of the market that’s in the energy sector.

Outside of energy in general, we’ve seen [Matt’s note: “seen” makes it passive] money coming in to high yield mutual funds. That’s helped to support some of the prices. You’ve had a lot of supply coming on the market, so that’s dampened prices a bit [Matt’s note: “dampened” is more vague and passive than “lowered”].

Overall, default rates remain relatively low which has been [Matt’s note: note the passive construction] supportive for the overall asset class. In general, it’s been a positive year-to-date 2015 but a little bit of volatility in between.

[Matt’s note: note the heavy use of “overall” and “in general”]

Can you speak specifically to the energy sector?

The energy sector has remained very volatile over the past several months. Oil prices in particular have been going up and down and primarily down. We saw [Matt’s note: note again his use of “to see” — passive] some more recent lows over the last several weeks.

As a result, the energy space within high yield has been very volatile during that period of time.

We still believe longer term, there’s very good value in the energy space [Matt’s note: “space” is a vaguer term for “market”]. You have a lot of names trading at very distressed levels pricing in a high probability of default over the coming couple of years.

You will see [Matt’s note: again, note the use of “to see” (grammatically the sentence is active, but the meaning is still passive)] some very weak earnings from the energy companies over the coming quarters given the lower oil prices. Even natural gas remains near their recent lows. You will see some tough earnings and cash flow but we think many companies have liquidity to weather through [Matt’s note: this is a good phrase for “survive,” but “weather through” is softer, vaguer] the next several quarters.

We think longer term supply and demand should help [Matt’s note: “should” can be used two ways: to express an imperative need or command (You should do this = you need to do this), but it can also be used to express probability (X should cause Y = X will probably result in Y, but maybe not always, we’ll see)] to balance out the oil market in particular and give you some more upside to the oil price longer term. Under that scenario, we think there’s some pretty good [Matt’s note: “pretty good” is a vague, modest phrase for “excellent” or “great”] valuations to be had within the high yield energy space [Matt’s note: once again, he uses the word “space” instead of “market”].

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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The acid test of a good financial speech:

When you read the speech to someone who is not in the target audience, and ideally who barely even understands the subject, can you hold their interest to the end, without losing the interest of your target audience?

If you can hold the interest of the target audience AND the newbies, you know you’ve written a good speech.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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xxx

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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ZZZ

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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xxx

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of our clients is an executive at an international bank, so he presents to global management quite often. To be able to give his message using a few well-chosen words, instead of dozens of data-heavy charts and graphs, would be revolutionary.

We took one of his 30-minute presentations, and focused it, and focused it some more, but we couldn’t get it down below 15 minutes. Something wasn’t right, we weren’t getting at the core of the message.

So we said, “Let’s see if we can tell it in 6 words.” We did, and it ended up being one of the best presentations of his life (his words, not ours).

Now he uses this technique often around the world. Imagine that, a complex financial services company, teaching itself to distill hundreds of complex charts and graphs into messages that can fit on the back of a napkin.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of the most common questions we hear when people go onto the stage is, “What do I do with my hands?” Believe it or not, that question is actually more common than “Where’s the nearest escape route?” 😉

Watch Franklin Templeton’s Eric Takaha’s hands in this video…

See how he tends to point his palms down when he’s talking about numbers, and palms up when he wants to seem open and friendly, or is using “grease words” to make a bad thing sound good? Palms down tends to signal control and competence. Palms up tends to signal openness and friendliness.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of the best arguments for how people make decisions based on emotion, even when (perhaps especially when) they are making decisions about money…

Especially after expenses, most actively-managed funds perform worse than their benchmark.

If you listen to many finance people talk about themselves and their industry, they’ll tell you how rational and analytical things are, how everyone’s looking at the numbers only, etc. And perhaps, on a day-to-day executional basis, they are.

But really, at the root of all the work these people are doing, is that the client, at one point, said to himself, “I’m going to pay a little more in order to have my money looked after by an actual person.”

If the customer were really making a rational decision, he would just put his money in low-cost index funds, and most fund managers would be flipping burgers at McDonalds.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Michael Bierut describes not only the method we use, but why we use it, so well I read it and thought, “Yeah, that’s me!”…

http://99u.com/workbook/51901/the-method-actor-approach-to-design

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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The presenter is not the star of the show, the audience is the star of the show…

http://www.duarte.com/blog/like-yoda-you-must-be-2/

The fastest way to Death By PowerPoint is to think you are anything more than a midwife to the audience’s dreams.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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I love this article,…

https://decker.com/blog/pause-just-pause/

…Especially the third tip:

“Pause for a moment longer than you feel comfortable. Try pausing for 2 – 3 seconds. It might feel like an eternity to you, but it will sound perfectly normal to your audience.”

[content_upgrade cu_id=”13501″]Get this tip and more in Tips and Tricks, Vol. Five:[content_upgrade_button]Click Here[/content_upgrade_button][/content_upgrade]

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Sometimes public speaking doesn’t go so well…

http://fortune.com/2015/09/15/bmw-ceo-collapse/

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of the things I love most in the infographic below is the part that says avoid looking at your screen when pitching. Yes, this goes for pitching (selling) an idea or service. But it goes for just about any other situation, too.

When you look at your computer screen, you break eye contact with the most important people in the room, your audience.

And remember, humans tend to look where other humans look. So if you look at your computer, your audience will probably look at your computer, too. Except you’ll see a screen filled with lots of interesting charts and numbers, while your audience will see the logo on the back cover. “Oh, he’s got an Apple,” or “Oh, he’s got a Sony,” is that what you want your audience thinking about?

One more thing…

Have you ever been out to dinner with someone and then they whip out their phone and start playing with it? How does that make you feel? Do you want your audience to feel the same way?

So stop looking at your computer!

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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[twocol_one]You may have used a certain image, music or video in a previous Keynote presentation but you might no longer have access to that media to use it on your current project. If you still have the Keynote presentation that contains that specific media, you can reach out to that individual file. Here is how:

1. Locate the original Keynote that contains the media file you want access to.
2. Duplicate the Keynote file (Command +D)
3. Add the “.zip” extension to the newly duplicated Keynote file. (When prompted if you are sure, select “Use .zip”)
4. You will see the Keynote file magically turn into a zipped file.
5. Uncompress the zipped file by double clicking. This will create a new folder with the same name, housing all the files you used in the presentation, as well as some Keynote specific system files.

Voila! All the media files should be in a subfolder called DATA, where your favorite music, image and video files await for you.[/twocol_one]

[twocol_one_last]Check out this short video showing how to apply these steps:

Or refer to these screenshots for step-by-step instructions:
[go_portfolio id=”keynote_extraction”]
[/twocol_one_last]

About Alper Rozanes

Alper graduated from Baruch College in New York with a degree in management information systems. He loves to cook (his specialty is oven-baked honey mustard salmon). Among his other hobbies are tennis, bowling, and jumping from known flying objects at 10.000 feet.

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The five components of a story:

1. Hero
2. Goal
3. Obstacle
4. Mentor
5. Moral…

Thanks, Copyblogger, for making one of the simplest explanations of the components of a story I’ve ever seen.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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According to Jesse Scinto…

“A lot of people think presentations are about informing, but here’s the problem with that view…”

“Audience members remember very little of what they hear in a presentation.”

“If the purpose really is to inform, then consider writing a document that you can leave with people.”

[content_upgrade cu_id=”13259″]Get all 9 Jesse Scinto excerpts consolidated into one PDF:[content_upgrade_button]Email me the PDF[/content_upgrade_button][/content_upgrade]

Transcript:

Jesse: A lot of people think that presentations are about informing but, here’s the problem with that view. As I mentioned just a little while ago audience members remember very little of what they hear in a presentation. It’s just not humanly possible to remember that much, and people should know this from their own experience. You can walk away from a presentation thinking that was great, but you’re not going to remember any of the numbers that we put on the screen.

Matt: That’s completely true.

Jesse: Yeah. If you need people to remember those numbers there’s a better way to do it which is to give them a document to take away. A document that they can refer to whenever they need to, they can go back and reread. When we’re speaking we basically give the audience one shot to get the message. If they missed something they can’t go back, they can’t rewind, they can’t flip back. Again, the purpose really is to inform then consider writing a document that you can leave with people.

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Here Jesse and Matt are talking about Robert Cialdini’s book, Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, particularly about the importance of audience members making their commitments physical and public, and how we can do that in a presentation…

“One thing that every presentation should have is a call to action.”

“Make your call to action immediate and physical.”

“Get people to say specifically an action they are going to take when they leave the room.”

[content_upgrade cu_id=”13259″]Get all 9 Jesse Scinto excerpts consolidated into one PDF:[content_upgrade_button]Email me the PDF[/content_upgrade_button][/content_upgrade]

Transcript:

Matt: One thing that he mentioned is that it is very important for the show of commitment to be physical and public. Could you tell us a little bit more about that. You mentioned some very physical activities like raising your hand or handing somebody a piece of paper with a URL on it. These are very physical activities. That’s pretty important, isn’t it?

Jesse: It is extremely important. One thing that every presentation should have is a call to action. You want your audience to do something when you they get done listening to you. You should think carefully about what you want them to do, because if they take that action they are going to be committing to your way of looking at things. Let’s say we have to get up and give a quarterly report on profits, on revenues, the action might not be obvious. We might be thinking that I’m just informing my colleagues about our revenues. I would argue that there is no such thing as an informative presentation. Our point is never to inform, the point is always to get action. With something like the quarterly revenues, maybe the action is – I’m going to share some highlights from the revenues report, I would really love it if you would read the report. At the end of the presentation you hand out the report. The action that you are asking is for the audience to engage more with the report that you’ve made. If you can make your call to action immediate and physical, it’s all the better.

In other words, if you say, if you are at the end of your presentation and say, when you get home look up this website. Chances are people aren’t going to look up the website. If you hand them a take away with the URL on it, they are more likely to look it up. They will at least have that piece of paper at home and then three weeks later they might stumble across it and think, oh, I’ll look this up, and then they are continuing to engage with your message. One of the big challenges we have is that people remember very little from spoken presentations.

They might remember one or two points, so we need to give them a way to continue to engage with our message and we need to be able to continue persuading them after we get done talking. Handouts, pledges, URLs to be visited, raising of hands, anything that is physical. Ask for input from the audience and ask people to tell their own stories or ask them what they think they could do. What can you do when you leave the room to help move us forward on this. You get people to say specifically an action that they are going to take when they leave the room. Again, like you said that public declaration is really effective for keeping people on task.

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Matt and Jesse discuss a chapter from Robert Cialdini’s book Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion, specifically the human desire to seem logical and consistent, and how we can use this natural human desire to persuade our audiences…

Using commitment and consistency in a presentation:

[content_upgrade cu_id=”13259″]Get all 9 Jesse Scinto excerpts consolidated into one PDF:[content_upgrade_button]Email me the PDF[/content_upgrade_button][/content_upgrade]

Transcript:

Matt: There’s this book, it’s by this guy Robert Cialdini.

Jesse: A classic.

Matt: Yeah so the book is called Influence, it’s a classic and when was that book written? That book was written in the 1980s, wasn’t it?

Jesse: Yeah, I think it was around ’86 or so.

Matt: Yeah, and in one of the chapters, I think it’s chapter three. He talks about commitment and consistency.

Jesse: Yeah.

Matt: What does that mean, commitment and consistency?

Jesse: Great question. Consistency has to do with the fact that by nature, humans feel that it’s necessary to be consistent, because when we’re consistent with our actions they seem to be logical. It’s consistent actions, always choosing the same thing, doing things the same way, and trying not to contradict ourselves. If we contradict ourselves we’ll look to others like we’re being illogical, so we want to be Steady Eddies as we say in the United States. We want to show people that we can be reliable.

The way this comes in in persuasion is that if you can get someone to commit to something, to commit to seeing things your way, then it’s more likely once they’ve made a public commitment, it’s more likely that they’re going to continue to commit to that same behavior or action or attitude, simply because of the fact they’ve already announced to others that they’ve committed to it.

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and Lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Jesse and Matt discuss Adam Grant’s book, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success, specifically Grant’s concept of the power of powerless speech.

“When our audience can see that we have flaws, it really helps them identify with us.”

“You can’t learn anything from Superman.”

“The word expert and the word experience have the same Latin root.”

“You don’t become an expert by avoiding problems.”

[content_upgrade cu_id=”13259″]Get all 9 Jesse Scinto excerpts consolidated into one PDF:[content_upgrade_button]Email me the PDF[/content_upgrade_button][/content_upgrade]

Transcript:

Jesse: I’m going to add something which is that there’s this idea that’s been researched and that Adam Grant talks about in his book Give and Take, a notion called the power of powerless speech. That sometimes when we look human or when our audience can see that we have flaws, it really helps them identify with us. That therefore makes our message more acceptable to them, they’re more willing to hear our message because we seem human. You can’t learn anything from Superman, someone who has no flaws or faults, someone who overcomes each adversity with ease. There’s not too much you can learn from that person because they’re unrelatable.

When we reveal some of our shortcomings or flaws, we really invite the audience in to identify with us, to go through the experiences the way that we did and to find a human solution to human problems. There’s this idea that I toy around with sometimes, in English the word for expert and the word for experience have the same Latin root. An expert is someone who has had experiences, some of those experiences are good and some of them are bad but you need both to become an expert. You don’t become an expert by avoiding problems, you become an expert by facing them and trying different things and giving yourself permission to fail sometimes. It doesn’t matter so much if you fail, what matters is if you get back up again and try again.

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Jesse tells us what “progressive complications” are, where they come from, and how to use them in our presentations…

“If you can arrange your presentation in that kind of fashion [using progressive complications], it’s really gripping for an audience.”

“One of the reasons [progressive complication] is gripping is they [the audience] are going to assume you have a solution, that’s why you’re there talking to them.”

“If [the audience] can hear how you got there [to the solution], then maybe that saves them a little bit of difficulty in their own life.”

[content_upgrade cu_id=”13259″]Get all 9 Jesse Scinto excerpts consolidated into one PDF:[content_upgrade_button]Email me the PDF[/content_upgrade_button][/content_upgrade]

Transcript:

Matt: I have one more question related to your hooked seminar.

Jesse: Okay.

Matt: You mentioned the phrase, “Progressive Complications,” you remember that?

Jesse: Yes.

Matt: Okay, progressive complications, what does that mean?

Jesse: That’s a great phrase that I borrowed from Robert McKee, who is a well-known, screenwriting coach. Hollywood screenwriting coach. Progressive complications means that, in a presentation, let’s say you do a 20-minute presentation, you might talk about the ups and downs of the process that you went through to find a successful conclusion. For instance, let’s say you’re doing research and development. With the presentation, you might talk about how you went down one road, and it wasn’t a success. So, then you tried another road, and that wasn’t a success. Then you tried a third road, and that finally was a success. Those are progressive complications in that, when we take an action in the world, we are expecting a certain result. When we don’t get the result that we want, we have to try harder. We have to dig deeper. If you could arrange your presentation in that kind of a fashion, then it’s really gripping for an audience.

One of the reasons that it’s really gripping is, they’re going to assume that you have a solution or conclusion, that’s why you’re there talking to them. So, they’re not going to be worried about whether they’re going to get to a good place. They’re going to assume it’s coming, but, they really want to know how you got there. If they can hear how you got there, then maybe that saves them a little bit of difficulty in their own life. So, the ups and downs, when you string them together in progressive complications, then, what you do is, you build engagement from the audience. They can sense that they’re getting closer and closer to the solution, and they’re still not sure what it is. It’s just an effective way to transmit a lesson to your audience and keep them engaged while they’re listening.

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Often, our clients feel like if they talk about conflict or problems in their presentations, their audiences won’t respect them. It feels kind of risky. We asked Jesse about this. If a speaker takes the risk, what is the speaker going to get in return?

“The benefit that you get is a better connection with your audience.”

“A story generally isn’t interesting without a complication.”

“When we’re listening to other people we’re looking for ways to handle life’s challenges.”

[content_upgrade cu_id=”13259″]Get all 9 Jesse Scinto excerpts consolidated into one PDF:[content_upgrade_button]Email me the PDF[/content_upgrade_button][/content_upgrade]

Transcript:

Matt: One thing that you mentioned in your seminar at Columbia, you mentioned the conflict resolution thing. You know talk about a conflict and then talk about a resolution. Talk about a conflict and then talk about a resolution. I’m kind of worried. The risk is, I think that my audience they’re going to think that I’m a loser if I keep talking about this conflict and stuff. It feels kind of risky for me. If I take this risk what am I going to, what benefit am I going to get?

Jesse: Fantastic question. The benefit that you get is a better connection with your audience. You seem more real, more human. When you seem more human … I mean because humans face challenges. Humans have difficulties every day. Okay maybe some days are good. No but seriously they can be small difficulties or big difficulties. One of the stories I told in my seminar was about how I go to the grocery store and the cashier always double bags my groceries and-

Matt: Yeah I like it. It’s the one where you go home and then you tell Diane and she’s only moderately interested but then you say well maybe she’ll file it away for future reference. Is that the-

Jesse: Yeah. Absolutely. Some of the stories, some of the experiences we have are small and not that important overall and others are more meaningful. The fact is that we encounter challenges every day. We by nature put them into story format when we tell other people. Then people react with their own stories. I tell Diane that story and maybe she has a similar story that she wants to tell. It’s really interesting to pay attention just in every day life when you’re talking to friends or associates. To hear how they respond to a story. That they’re often times waiting for you to finish so that they can tell you what happened to them.

I mean back to the complication resolution thing. A story generally isn’t interesting without a complication because what people want to know is what can they learn from our experiences. We all want to reduce our costs. Right? If we can learn something without having a bitter experience, learning the hard way, then that’s fantastic. That really reduces our cost of learning. When we’re listening to other people we’re learning, we’re looking for ways to learn how to handle life’s challenges. That is what increases the value of our messages. Is that if we show the complication, talk about what we struggled with first, and then how we over came it. Assuming you’ve overcome the challenge, then you’re not a loser. You’ve learned something through the experience.

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Jesse demonstrates how to tell a story about a corporate restructuring.

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Transcript:

Matt: … But instead, let’s do an example of a story about a restructuring. How could you tell a story about that?

Jesse: First of all, a lot of times, people are reluctant to include negative information in a presentation. In other words, if your organization had a restructuring at the beginning of the year and then by the end of the year, that restructuring was successful and now you’re making profits again, people feel reluctant to talk about the past and what happened and to just focus on the positive things. Profits are way up. Everyone should be happy. When you do that, it’s like there’s an elephant in the room. Everyone in the organization knows that this restructuring happened.

All change has an emotional component to it and if you avoid the emotional component, if you avoid the negative parts of the story, then you leave people with the sense that you’ve left something out. It actually ends up hurting your credibility because everyone knows that these challenging things happened in the workplace. If you try to gloss over it and pretend that it didn’t happen, then you don’t seem honest to people that you’re speaking with.

What we’re talking about in terms of storytelling would be a presentation that acknowledges the tough times that happened earlier in the year. Yes, we lost a client. We were forced to restructure. We had to let 20 percent of our staff go. That restructuring was ultimately successful. We came out of that leaner and more capable of servicing the clients that we have. And because of that, our profits are way up.

You can still include your data or your statistics about how the business is doing, but you also include the story about what you’ve gone through together as an organization. It’s an opportunity not only to acknowledge the feelings of the audience and to show yourself as a human being, but it’s also an opportunity to let the audience understand what you’ve learned and how you learned it. What did you learn from this restructuring? There should be some lessons in there. It should have served a purpose. If your profits are up at the end of the year, that means that you definitely did learn something and did something right in that restructuring. Give people context. That context goes a long way.

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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One of our clients asked us how to tell stories in a business context. Jesse gives a great answer about that…

“When we’re talking about stories in a business context, we’re not talking about fables or fairy tales.”

“It’s a matter of how we organize our content.”

“We tend to file our knowledge away in the form of stories.”

“The big benefit in using stories in the workplace is that it’s a natural way for people to learn.”

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Transcript:

Matt: I understand the power of stories. When I tell a story to my daughter at bedtime, she loves it, but I’m a banker at work, and if I go up in front of a bunch of other bankers, and I start out my presentation with a story like once upon a time in a land far far away, there was this beautiful princess and this brave knight riding around on a big horse, they’re going to think I’m crazy. Can I use stories in a business presentation context?

Jesse: Yeah, this is a great question, because when we talk about using stories in a business context, we’re not talking about fables or fairy tales. In fact, what we’re talking about usually is true stories, and they can be stories about things that people within the organization have experienced together. For instance, a challenging client, or a restructuring of the organization, or they could be stories about true experiences that we’ve had outside of the organization, but that we think our colleagues will benefit from. I think that’s a great question. It’s not necessarily fiction. In fact, most of the time we’ll be telling nonfiction stories, but it’s a matter of how we organize our content, and story telling is a very useful way for people to learn, because we tend to file most of our knowledge away in the form of stories.

We tell stories all day long to each other. Every incident that happens to us during the day. If it’s memorable, we make a story out of it, and usually the stories are short. A minute, a minute and a half, but that’s how we relate to other people. The big benefit in using stories in the workplace is that it’s a natural way for people to learn. It’s very natural for people to listen to a problem that you encountered, and to hear your resolution. That type of structuring of content will bring up thoughts in your audience. It will help them remember what you’re saying. It will give them something useful, because they’ll see how you’ve overcome the challenge.

[hide]
Jesse had some more to say about using stories in a business context:

• Example of a story about a corporate restructuring

Other things he talked about:

• The credibility of being human
• What benefit am I going to get?
• Complication and resolution
• Progressive complications
• Presentations are not about informing
• Commitment and consistency
• Commitment must be physical and public

[/hide]

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Jesse describes a more interesting way to structure your information, one that will keep your audience’s attention better…

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Transcript:

Jesse: Most of us learn a pretty straight forward logical form of structuring our information where we have a thesis, some supporting evidence and a conclusion. It could be more interesting and your audiences attention better if you organize your information into a problem and solution structure or a complication and resolution structure.

Jesse Scinto is a public speaking expert and lecturer in the Strategic Communications Department at Columbia University in New York.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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There are a lot of reasons to watch videos of yourself practicing. Watching videos of yourself helps you improve your body language. It helps you improve your content, and it helps you improve your opening and closing.

But mainly, watching videos of yourself helps you get out of your head.

Watching yourself on video, watching yourself from the outside, is a reminder that the noise going on inside your head is almost never, NEVER, the same as the noise going on inside the heads of your audience.

You might be feeling really nervous. You might even feel like vomiting or fainting. But your audience is probably not thinking about any of those things.

And remember, when you are presenting, what’s going on inside the audience’s heads is more important than what’s going on inside your head.

So it doesn’t matter if you’re nervous. The only thing that matters is this: “Is your audience getting something out of your presentation?”

And if the answer to that is yes, you can relax, because, remember, your presentation isn’t about you.

It’s about your audience, and they only want to be able to answer “yes” if someone asks them, “Did you get something out of that presentation?”

They only want to answer “yes,” and your only job is to give them something they can say “yes” to.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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It’s a good question: Should I do my training in Turkish or in English?

The best way to answer that question is probably to ask yourself, “What do I ultimately want to be able to do?”

For example, if your ultimate goal is to give presentations in English, whether to visiting foreigners or at international conferences in other countries, you should probably do the training in English.

Yes, it will probably be harder that way, at least at the beginning.

However, when you’re done, you’ll be able to say to yourself proudly, “I took presentation training in English.”

And down the road, when your boss asks you to give a presentation in English, you’ll be a lot less nervous, because you’ll be thinking, “I did presentation training in English, and I lived to tell about it!”

And then, when you’re getting ready for those international conferences, you’ll want advanced training, and that training will be in English (because your presentation will be in English), and you’ll get more out of that training, because you will have already begun your training in English in the past.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Brevity is vital. But one thing that often gets lost is that brevity is not enough. If you can’t quickly articulate to an executive why he/she should care about your presentation, brevity won’t save you.

When people talk about a flood of information, what they usually mean is that there’s a flood of information they don’t care about.

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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Since I work in Istanbul, I run into a lot of people who are learning English. They often ask me for some tips.

They often look at me, slightly puzzled, and ask, “Why would that help? In real life, people don’t repeat their words 5 times.”

That’s true. But this is not real life. You are learning a new skill.

And if you listen to one thing once, and don’t understand, and then listen to something different, and don’t understand, and then listen to a another new thing, and don’t understand, what are you training your brain to do?

You are training your brain to hear English and say, “I don’t understand English.”

However, if you listen to the same 3 minutes, 5 times, and each time you hear a little bit more, what are you training your brain to say? “When I hear English, it’s familiar.”

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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A couple weeks ago I wrote about looking to see what grade level you’re speaking at.

Here’s another neat tip for seeing your speech from another perspective: put it into a tag cloud:

Go to the website, paste your text into the text box, click “Visualize!”, and see your words in tag cloud format.

TagCrowd is just one of many sites offering this service for free. Go to Google and type “free tag cloud generator.”

About Matt Krause

Matt began his professional life as an import buyer, and since 2006 has been teaching companies how to connect with their investors and clients better. His clients work in Istanbul, London, and Madrid for companies like Allianz, 3M, P&G, Citibank, and Reckitt Benckiser. He also walked across Turkey and wrote a book about it.

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