A few months ago, a friend of mine — whose career as a professor and writer has been highly successful — shared a recent, rather humbling experience. He and a colleague were seeking to spin off an institute into a separate nonprofit. To do that, they needed venture-capital money. So he prepared a presentation and practiced it in front of what he called “critical friends.”
And boy were they critical. His presentation, they said, was terrible. Too long. Overly detailed. Uninspired. He’s a popular lecturer and has given more than his share of public talks to varied audiences but he had no idea how to ask for money from venture capitalists with short attention spans. What he needed to do, his friends said, was hire a consultant.
Getting big money requires spending big money, apparently. He got in touch with a young consultant who, for a $10,000 fee, showed my friend everything that was wrong with his “pitch deck” and how to make it better.
Last spring, I wrote about the “power of the pitch.” It’s an underdeveloped faculty skill, whether you are seeking a job, a book contract, a raise, or a grant. But I had never heard of “pitch deck” until this conversation, and it immediately struck me as a potentially handy strategy for academics to “sell” their work.
The phrase originated among entrepreneurs but has leaked into common usage. Unlike a lot of business jargon, pitch deck is an easy concept to grasp: It’s a concise presentation, delivered with a small number of slides, to help investors or clients quickly understand a business, a product, or a proposal. The magic numbers for a pitch deck are 10/20/30: 10 slides, 20 minutes of talking, and 30-point font (and no smaller).
Like most Ph.D.s, my friend was used to giving presentations with a ton of slides and giant blocks of barely readable text. We routinely create such PowerPoints even though we don’t enjoy watching them. For faculty members used to having a captive audience for an hour or more, 20 minutes can seem like an impossibly short amount of time to convey big ideas.
Nope, the pricey consultant told my friend, not big ideas. One idea.
Most faculty members are not, in fact, looking for money to set up a new business. But we do seek money and contracts and support for a whole mess of other things. And we are in the business of communicating information to an array of people whose attention spans are much shorter than ours. Too often, however, in making our case — to students, parents, grant agencies, mainstream readers, editors — we get lost in our own archives. We have been schooled against the dangers of oversimplification. But then we obsess about details (but they’re important!) that threaten to overtake our main ideas.
The pitch-deck concept forces you to focus on one idea. What is the problem? Who cares about it? How can we solve it? Why are we the ones to do it? What will be required?
What intrigues me most about all of this is that my friend — who recently decided to retire — only learned this important lesson at the end of a long and wildly successful career. As a writer, I like to say I’m always looking to steal good ideas. As soon as I heard about it, I swiped the pitch-deck idea and used it to boil down some presentations I’d been working on.
If you haven’t asked venture capitalists for money lately, here’s a typical breakdown of the 10 slides in a pitch deck:
- an introduction
- a statement of the problem
- your proposed solution
- a model
- the “special sauce” or value you bring
- a marketing and sales strategy
- notes on the competition
- an introduction to your team
- the financials
- the current status and timeline
All of those things should be in any pitch you write to a journal, publisher, or foundation. But the pitch deck is a way to convey the critical details more quickly and intentionally, and thus, more successfully. Perhaps soon you’ll just be able to ask an AI bot to create a great pitch deck, but until then, you have a choice. You can opt to bore your audience silly with long, overly detailed PowerPoint presentations — or, you can learn a few lessons from the pitch deck and communicate an idea that people will actually want to hear. A few tips:
Less is usually better. Really, when was the last time you were happy to sit through a PowerPoint or Prezi presentation where someone read aloud from a long series of text-dense slides? If it’s important to provide sources or deeper explanations of a topic, have a link or a handout that you can make available after the pitch/talk.
Focus on the big takeaways. Even the best students and scholars have a limited ability to take in vast amounts of information. If you’re presenting at a conference, you don’t have the time — and the audience doesn’t have the bandwidth — to get into the swampy weeds. We all understand there are swampy weeds. Just power through them to land where you are trying to go. You can answer questions after the lecture.
Think TED Talks instead of job talks. There’s a reason that platform has been so successful. Big ideas are presented in compelling ways. Are they complete? No. Are they nuanced? Not usually. But TED talkers learn (and are coached) to be able to distill the most interesting and unexpected points they want to make and figure out how to make them sticky (often by starting out with a narrative).
Audiences (especially students and nonacademic listeners) are looking for visuals. At this point, it’s hard to imagine any professor coming into a class and reading a lecture from a ragged yellow notepad. I’m sure some people still do, and I’m pretty sure I also know what their teaching evaluations look like. All of us are accustomed to different kinds of images — moving and still — that amplify a message. Finding the right illustrations to drive home your ideas will be more effective than droning on.
Try it out on others. Clearly, you don’t want the first people hearing your pitch to be the ones in a position to reject it. Find critical friends. After I helped someone draft a book proposal, he asked his wife to read it. Her review: “It unexpectedly didn’t drag and held my interest.” That’s honest. Ask your critical friends to point out any parts of your pitch deck that drag or that don’t hold their interest. And pay attention.
Trust yourself. One of the reasons we’ve all come to rely on vast numbers of PowerPoint slides filled with information is because many of us are afraid of forgetting important stuff, afraid of overlooking some reference, afraid of not coming off as knowing it all and getting called out. When I see someone give a presentation with 30 or more slides, I assume they’re scared. Trust yourself enough to cull those slides into something less insecure and more compelling.
It’s hard to give a good presentation. It’s even more challenging when there’s something major at stake (like funding, or a job, or when you need people to make big changes). Especially now with the rise of the robots, we need to remember that technology should provide us with tools to make things better and easier. It doesn’t matter if you’re sitting on a great idea or a giant pile of groundbreaking research if you can’t communicate the material effectively.
The pitch deck is less a tool than a way to refine a concept: You are telling someone what you want them to know. And isn’t that all teaching really is?
