Winning Investment Presentations by Joan Moser

I was happy I had a chance to catch the presentation by Joan Moser to the St. Paul SCORE monthly meeting on Tuesday, August 13.  She is the best speaker I’ve seen in some time.  Joan runs Spoken Impact, a business where she does consulting and coaching on presentations for businesses, particularly small and medium businesses want to ask for money, www.spokenimpact.com .

She started early on with a joke, asking the presenter “Did you skip the interesting part of your talk on purpose?”  She kept going on that theme – keep your presentation exciting and interesting.  Don’t start out with an agenda or topic list.  Start with an interesting question, quote, story, etc.  Then, make your proposal clear in an exciting way.  She talks about various ways to organize the main part of the presentation.  Usually it is “Problem – Solution”, but you can also use a story and an example, or an analogy, etc.

She says that when you ask for money, you need to answer three questions:
• How big and great is the need
• Is your differentiation unique, exciting and defensible? A unique selling proposition or the secret sauce is required.
• Can you answer my major objection which is …
The hardest one is probably the last, because it could be anything.  But, your initial discussion should address any major objections you anticipate, before they get raised as questions or, worse, keep your audience from focusing on what else you are saying.

You probably already have a presentation in hand, and then you should go through it with an eye to “So What?”  If you can, move all the details out of the main path, and into the appendix, or into the notes to the slides.

The best recommendation in my eyes was her recommendation that you go to www.ted.com and watch the very good presentations there.  It is a wonderful site for observing good presentation technique, and better yet, you will be educated at the same time in some useful topic.  You can keep coming back and learn new things every day. 

But, here are a few tips from Joan on developing engaging delivery –
• Connect with the audience and not with the slides – slides reinforce the presenter, not the reverse
• Use confident, open body language – no fig leaf posture
• Add meaningful gestures that pull the audience in
• Add some REAL personality

Joan went into a large number of recommendations that I won’t repeat.  You can get in on one of her small group presentations via her website, or many other offerings.  She did cite Guy Kawasaki’s guidelines http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2005/12/the_102030_rule.html.  I recommend you look at the other material in Guy’s  blog or get his books.

Joan also volunteers with the Minnesota Cup, coaching the finalist presenters in this contest.  See www.breakthroughideas.org for information on this great opportunity for entrepreneurs.