10 Tips for Crushing Your Next Presentation

What's up, everyone. This is Alex Lieberman, co-founder and Executive Chairman of Morning Brew. Welcome back to Founder’s Journal, my personal audio diary, where I give you, the business builder, the tools you need to think better in order to build better, whether that's building a business, a team, or a new product. Today, I am giving you 10 tactics to crush any presentation. Let's hop into it.

10 Tactics to Crush any Presentation

So I'm going to be sharing these lessons today through the vantage point of when I and my co-founder Austin, we're pitching Morning Brew to investors when we first raised money in 2016, and I break these 10 tactics in basically to two buckets, big ideas, and then the actual micro tactics. 

#1: Present something you actually believe in

So let's start with big ideas. The first thing you must do to crush any presentation is to present something you actually believe in. Selling a vision or asking for something becomes exponentially easier when you believe in what you're selling, so much so that you feel like you're doing the person you're selling a service to bring to their attention whatever it is that you're pitching about. And that is exactly how I felt when selling Morning Brew in the early days. I oftentimes when presenting to potential investors actually break the fourth wall of the sale and say to them, like, I would literally say exactly this: I am never going to try and sell you on this. I want to tell you what I believe in and what I believe the vision is for this company. And I only want you to hop aboard if you see what I see . I would say that in almost every presentation. I found it to be an incredibly strong strategy. And the only reason I could do it is because I believed so much in what we were building.

#2: Understand the goals and incentives of who you’re presenting to

Strategy number two, or big idea number two, in crushing a presentation: Understand the goals and incentives of who you're presenting to. You need to understand who you're talking to, what their incentives are, and how you can make them look really, really good. So in the context of Morning Brew, we raised $750,000 from 28 individual investors, and they wrote different-size checks from $2,500 to a hundred thousand dollars. And they all invested for very different reasons. So to give you examples, the University of Michigan had an entrepreneurship fund from a large donor. They wrote the biggest check into our round. They wrote a hundred thousand dollars check. Their goal in writing checks was they simply wanted to back alumni that were passionate about the school. So of course, when we were presenting to what was called the Zell Lurie Entrepreneurship Fund, we leaned into Austin and my fandom for the U of M brand because we knew it was so important to them that their alumni wanted to stay connected to the school. Another investor wanted to vicariously relive the entrepreneurial journey through us because they had basically done what we had done 20 years earlier. And they were looking for that boots-on-the-ground experience again. So when we were presenting them we leaned into the opportunity that they would have to get monthly peeks behind the curtain of the business with updates that we would send them. And then finally there was, I would say, a more traditional set of our investors who wanted to make an angel-like return, in which case we talked about what could be possible if we reached our vision. So we talked about what our vision was, how big the business could be if we reached that vision, we used comps of other media companies who had reached their visions and how big they were, and basically gave a sense of how many multiples their money could increase if we were able to realize that vision. 

#3: Sell a result, not a product

Next up, sell a result, not a product. People do not care about features. People care about how something makes them feel, and if it helps them accomplish their goals. This doesn't feel like a very controversial thing to say, yet people in presentations tend to always over-index on selling features, numbers, and other things that are jargony and technical. When I would sell Morning Brew to investors, I would never mention newsletters, open rates, or things like subscriber growth. I would sell the vision, which was to be the brand that our generation thinks of when they think of the word business. Newsletters and open rates were just the way that we were doing that at the time, but if we realize this bigger vision, it would be so much more than a single channel or a single metric. And so I'd even go as far as to tell specific stories of who our audience was, describing, you know, a University of Indiana student who is in the Kelley School of Business, who in their free time would look at 10-Ks because they were managing their portfolio of single-name stocks and they wanted to go up the curve of learning about business quickly so that when they ended up working in investment banking or investment management, they were years ahead of their contemporaries. I would go as far as also saying what the world would look like if we realized our vision. I would describe a world in which if you were down on Wall Street, if Morning Brew realized its vision, you could go ask 10 people, “Hey, have you ever heard of Morning Brew?” And you would get very specific answers like, “Oh yeah, isn't it that company where I go to business events to meet other ambitious professionals around my age who are also really intellectually curious?” Or, “Oh yeah, isn't it that company that has this individual creator around personal finance, who keeps me up to date with how to manage my finances, think about budgeting, and think about investing?” I would paint this picture of what this future world would look like. And the point of this was I wanted people to get a vivid enough picture, such that they could truly imagine a world where Morning Brew becomes ubiquitous. Because it gets them away from thinking about what they are doing today, or what Morning Brew is doing today, and instead gets the investor to think about, do I believe in a world where what Alex and Austin is describing is both possible and exciting to me? Now, the only way to do this is by doing what is the next tactic for crushing a presentation. 

#4: Create and then relieve tension 

And that is by creating tension and then relieving tension. What I just described to you by selling a vision and not features is relieving tension, but you need to create tension in order to make the impact stick. As a founder, it is critical to make your audience feel it: feel the frustration, feel the obstacles, feel the questions, the doubts, the problems. Now you have to remember, while every business venture starts by answering the same two questions, which are what is a really painful problem that lots of people experience? And how am I solving that really painful problem in a compelling way? Other people, whether it's investors, or if you're talking about a problem related to your company that you're selling to senior management, other people have not necessarily thought about these questions, so you need to frame the questions and problems in order to create the amount of gravity in this situation that you want everyone to feel. You need to set the table in order to serve dinner. 

#5: Create urgency

Final, big idea. Before we move on to tactics: You have to create urgency. People are always going to wonder why now, in a world of competing priorities and fragmented attention? Unless you give them a good answer to “Why now?” they will always push what you are asking for down the priority list. So for pitching Morning Brew back in 2016, I made the “Why now?” very simple. And it was a very genuine why-now. We raised one round of capital and we never raised again. And so what we said to investors is, if you believe in our vision and you believe that Austin and I are the people to realize that vision, this would be your one and only chance to participate in that journey because we would never raise again. And we were true to our word. We only raised the 750k before selling the business in 2020. 

#6: Use less words and more white space and pictures

Now let's go to some tactics before we finish up. Tactic, one less words, more white space and pictures. It blows my mind how much people crowd presentation slides. You should think of your presentation more like index cards, rather than TV scripts. You want your slides to act as a visual cue so people know what you're talking about, and so you have a mental reference of what you're talking about. But the more words that you have on screen, the more time that people are going to spend focusing, reading sentences on the presentation, rather than listening to you. And so my rule of thumb is there should be a visual, at least every three slides. I prefer to do it almost every slide and no bullet or text should be longer than seven words. Remember: The presentation is for visual cues. Most of the content is going to come from your mouth. 

#7: Know and use your X Factor

Next tactic: Know your thing. Know, know your X-Factor, that thing that makes you different from everyone else who could give the same presentation. For some it's humor, where you can mix education with entertainment. For others it's relatability, if you've been in the same shoes as the person that you're pitching or presenting to. And for others, it's stories, if you find yourself to be a really imaginative and specific storyteller, so you can paint a visual picture for people. My thing was storytelling. I knew it wasn't humor. I'm not that funny. I'm a little snarky and quippy, but not funny. And so I focused on stories. 

#8: Front-run questions or concerns

Next tactic, front-run questions or concerns. As you run through your presentation, meaning like practicing it before you do the real thing, ask yourself, what is the biggest pushback or most frequent questions that I'm going to get when I present to my audience? For Morning Brew, I knew people would ask us about a few things every single time without fail, They would ask us, why should we bet on first-time entrepreneurs? It's a fair question. They would ask, how are you going to use the $750,000 you're raising or, better yet, how are you going to spend my money? They would ask, why do you think you can beat The Wall Street Journal, a 900-pound gorilla who's been in the industry for a century. And they would ask, why do you think this will be able to make money? Because remember, at the time when we were raising for the Brew, we weren't yet making money. And we would answer these questions during the presentation to show that we were thoughtful and we deeply empathize with the audience and it allowed us to control the narrative of the presentation. And it actually in some ways answered one of their questions, which is, why should we trust first-time entrepreneurs? Because one of the things you look for in any entrepreneur is how deep of a thinker are they. And this was almost a little case study for us to be able to provide to investors of look, we thought really deeply about the things you were going to ask and we answered them ahead of time. 

#9: Leverage repetition

Two more tactics before we go, The first is leverage repetition. This is an age-old tactic for presentations, for giving speeches in companies for pumping your team up. At the end of the day, people need to hear things dozens of times in order to know what's important and for it to stick. So as you think about your presentation, think about the one-to-three things that if people only leave with those one-to-three things, they only remember those one to three things, ask what those are and make sure you repeat them, seriously, at least five times over the course of your presentation. If you do not present it that many times, if you do not repeat it that many times, you can assume people will not remember it. Leverage repetition.

#10: Make the ask super clear

And finally, the last tactic to crush presentations: Make the ask super clear. I left this for last because it is the most important, the most obvious, yet the most woefully under-remembered. You are presenting something to an audience and taking their time because you are asking something of them. And basically your story, thet presentation, is selling a vision, selling urgency around a problem, such that they will say yes. I cannot tell you how many presentations I've been given or been a part of where the whole story is told and there is no ask made at the end, such that the audience likes what they saw, but they have no idea what comes next. Just remember you asked people for 30-to-60 minutes of their time because you wanted to ask them for something. Don't forget to ask them, and maybe as you're making that ask super clear, use the last tactic that I mentioned, leverage repetition, where you mention the ask multiple times in your presentation so, you know, it is without a doubt, the one thing that people need to think about when you're done with the presentation. 

I want to hear from you

And so those are my 10 tactics for crushing presentations, whether it is raising money for investors, selling an idea internally, or pitching to a prospective client at your company. Now I'd love to hear from you: What is the number one thing that you do to crush presentations in your work? Shoot me an email at alex@morningbrew.com and I will share a few of the best responses in an upcoming episode. Thanks so much again for listening and I'll catch you next episode.