Adam Sigel’s Anatomy of a Winning Presentation

Congrats to my good friend Adam whose company, MyEnergy, just won the Best “Doing Good” Innovation award at the 2013 MTIX awards. Adam helped deliver the winning presentation, and shared some tips on his blog here:

  1. Do not stray from the task at hand: I had a very specific goal with my presentation: to convey the social impact of MyEnergy and justify why we deserved to win an award for doing good. I wasn’t trying to win users, customers, or investors. Our user experience and our technology were not the focus, nor was our business model. I only referenced these aspects of the site to support my main argument that MyEnergy had the greatest positive impact on society of all the nominees. It’s easy to fall into the trap of “pitching to yourself” and giving a full overview of the product, but that rarely ends up being necessary.
  2. Know what your audience knows (and doesn’t know): It would be close to impossible to explain MyEnergy’s impact on the utility industry in three minutes to someone who doesn’t know the industry, so I decided off the bat to downplay that angle. Instead, I focused on our impact with users, namely how we save people money and help them take control of their energy usage. I offered a simple explanation of our technology, but only in the context of how it extends our reach—and therefore our impact.
  3. Make them care, make them pay attention: Too often, presenters want to jump to the ask or the critical point in their pitch. Before you can do that, though, you need to win your audience over. You need to create an emotional connection with them and hold their interest. I opened my presentation by getting people to admit that they don’t take any time to think about their utility bills. Immediately, they’re on my side. On the next side, I drop the big number: 10 quadrillion. It’s an impossibly large number, so I put it in context—and add a little humor—by explaining how that’s enough energy to go back in time 2 million times. I spent my first 35 seconds, or 20% of my presentation, making sure they would listen to the next 145 seconds.
  4. Position your product as a solution: With the audience’s attention, I identified the two problems MyEnergy solves: (1) The average household spends $3,500 on utilities each year and never think twice about it, and (2) your bill is incomprehensible, and that keeps you from making smarter decisions about energy usage. Only now do I introduce MyEnergy, combining both emotional appeal (we save you money!) and rational appeal (better understanding of your bills leads to lower energy usage). The slides that follow are the technology demonstration, which simplify the way we access utility data and allow me to reiterate our reach to 90% of the U.S. population.
  5. Make it tangible to keep it emotional: Earlier in the presentation, I used an enormous number to highlight the scope of energy consumption. Now, I wanted to focus in what the site means to each individual user. The savings numbers are nice, but it’s always helpful when you can put it in tangible terms. $66 dollars sounds nice, but a month of free coffee is more likely to stimulate an emotional reaction from the audience. I localized the presentation even more, showing how people in Massachusetts save even more, and how the site saves you enough money to send a family to a Red Sox game.
  6. Reiterate and repeatMy last slide recaps all the points I’d made in the past few minutes. It’s my wordiest slide because I left it up behind me during Q&A. This is an opportunity lots of people miss. During Q&A—the longest portion of the presentation, mind you—they’ll usually just leave up their last slide, or go to a blank screen. I wanted to spoon feed the answer to them, literally spelling out the reasons we should win.

Adam’s slides are here: