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Avoiding death by Powerpoint

By Chris Keall

Rod Drury has more experience than most New Zealand business people at making, or hearing, a pitch.

Xero’s Rod Drury.

Rod Drury: "I would never do a powerpoint pitch." (Image: Adrian Heke)

His key advice: get to the point, and don’t do it with slides.

Drury is CEO of a successful dot.com era start-up, AfterMail, a director of TradeMe and founder of financial software company Xero – currently pushing into Australia and the UK.

PowerPoint has become passé, he says.

“You always need to be unexpected and stand out from the crowd.

“I would never do a PowerPoint pitch.

“Hand them out a copy of something if you like but tell some stories and get them engaged.”

Presentation pros say if you must have slides, keep it to three or less.

Even assuming you’re directly pitching to a potential client – not wading through formulaic slides – make it snappy.

“Get to demo as fast as you can. It’s all theory until they see something,” says Drury.

If you do want to inject some multimedia, forget slides.

Take it up a gear.

No.8 Ventures CEO Jenny Morel says Datasquirt CEO Aaron Ridgeway made one of the best pitches she’s received over the past year.
 
“Aaron opened with a short video that explained his product offering really well.

“Within two minutes we all understood his core business proposition and he could then expand on how he planned to build the company.” 

This article originally appeared as part of ‘Perfect pitch’ by Chris Keall in Bright magazine on December 2008 / January 2009. Issue 31. 

More information

www.xero.com

www.no8ventures.co.nz

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