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Bullets or No Bullets?

The use of bullets in presentations can be useful because it’s always better to have as few texts as possible on your slides. People can immediately read your content as soon as the slide is shown to them; however they usually find it hard to read and listen at the same time.

At times, Bullets also present other issues:

* Some will associate your presentation with dreary ones
* It represents a template for lists
*It is a delineated way of presenting information

Bullets Make Your Presentation Dreary

Presentations with a lot of text and bullets are often not appreciated. Avoid using bullet points in your presentations or you’ll risk losing your audience’ interest.

Bullets Represent a Template for Lists

As long as messages are carefully and logically arranged, you can go away with a list format for your presentation. An example is when you write about something and you mention related information such as supporting numbers and related examples. However, your slides shouldn’t just contain a number of lists; instead they should cover the entire topic.

When using bullets, it is your speech which expresses the progress of the topic however the audience feels you are only providing them an outline.

Bullets are Non-Graphical

PowerPoint slides are made to put together both graphical and verbal means of communicating, so they should be made graphical. Always remember that the PowerPoint presentation isn’t the core of the presentation, but is your actual discussion.

A good number of researches have proven that useful images help express a clearer point, and audiences remember images better in contrast to texts. Audiences also comprehend the discussion better in general.

When choosing an image to use for your presentation, make sure it is significant to your topic. The images should help express your message and help the audience connect to the presentation at an emotional level.

Moreover, if you make use of irrelevant images, recalling the message of the presentation becomes harder.

More PowerPoint Tips on How to Avoid Bullets

It might seem impossible to avoid using bullets when you have so many important things to say. But these PowerPoint tips offer great ideas on how you actually can!

You simply have to put one idea in one of the slides and disseminate the bullets into other slides. Make sure to add images related to the topic. Should you want to summarize all your ideas in the end, you can add all of it on the last slide. During this part, the audience will be familiar with your ideas and you will find it convenient to use all of them at once.

If you are raising capital from a number of potential investors a perfect presentation could be a key component of achieving your goal. Over 150 investor presentations given in the past decade concluded in raising millions of dollars of equity capital and millions of dollars of debt equity provides a good basis for understanding how to deliver a superb presentation.

What does experience say about a good investor presentation?

1. Clearly describe the investment.
2. Clearly define what you will ask of the investor and how much they can invest.
3. Describe the time frame for the investment.
4. Explain how the invested capital will be held prior to closing the investment.
5. Define what the investment life will be and what return to expect.
6. Describe how the project(s) will be managed.

Describe the background and experience of the principals. Where they worked, accomplishments, investing experience, significant volunteer work and so on can be included. Some interests and personal information is good to add as it makes the principals into people and causes them to have color and depth in your presentation.

Return tables, sources and uses, and pro forma tables are critical components of the presentation. All of the information above should be included. However, the meat of your presentation should be the things like:

• How much money the project will make, why that is reasonable, and what could effect it.
• How much money the project will cost, why that makes sense, and what may impact the costs.
• How risk is being managed and why this is a really smart way to do so.
• How opportunity is being captured and why this is the smart way to grab the brass ring.
• How you will manage the project.
• How you will market the project.
• How you finally get the investors capital out of the project.
• What you will do to keep the investor completely in the loop on the project.

These items in a top line sense are the “features” of your investment. From the features, you should be talking advantages of the investment. Finally you hit the emotional button. Your presentation should be heavy on emotions for why investment and those emotions should be backed up with great graphics that say the same thing in a very visceral way to your audience.

With all this in place, you have created a compelling investor presentation that explains what the investor is getting into, all the great reasons they are doing it, and why is such perfectly exciting and wonderful thing for them to do with their money.