Have a new startup? Getting ready to meet with your first sales prospects? Do everyone a favor and do not do create a PowerPoint presentation. I would be interested to commission a study on the negative productivity impact of PowerPoint presentations on early stage companies. How about this for a strawman of wasted effort:

• Craft the presentation – Spend the time to storyboard the presentation, fuss with the text and key messages.
• Crank up the graphic look & feel – If you are going to be using this presentation in front of customers then it better look professional.
• Seemingly endless reviews – Can anyone ever agree on a presenation? Usually it takes a command decision to come to a conclusion and then there is inevitable grumbling about omissions or confusing slides.
• Sales training - Now comes the fun part. You have crafted the presentation, but can you get everyone to present it the way you want?
• Ad hoc modifications – I guarantee that unless you threaten to fire people that do it your presentation will undergo significant modifications by the people that use it. Everyone has a different style and one PPT does not fit all.
• Presentations in front of customers - Now the fun begins. It’s either too long, too boring, doesn’t describe your product quick enough, or has too many words.
• Net problem? One way communication – PowerPoint presentations don’t facilitate the most important part of early stage company meetings; two way communication.

Think of how much time and effort is often spent on crafting and refining presentations and how often they simply fall flat. So what should you do? Focus instead on these 5 key aspects of your meeting and make it a conversation.

1. Vaildate your customer problem – Don’t go in assuming that you know with certainty what your customer problems are. Validate your hypothesis regarding the customer pain you intend to address. You will often find opportunities to make your idea that much more powerful. For more on this process I recommend Steven Blank’s The Four Steps to the Epiphany.
2. Explain and demonstrate your approach - Early meetings ought to explain the key objectives you are trying to achieve with your product and demonstrations where applicable. Make your product the star and remove ambiguities about what it is you are offering to your customers and how you can help solve the particular problem you are addressing.
3. Establish your credentials – Why is your company positioned to solve your prospect’s problem? Have you proven it with their peers? Do you have deep industry experience? Can you point to advisors that they would know and respect?
4. Validate your pricing - Early in a product life cycle you should be attuned to your pricing to discover whether you are priced too high or too low. Whether it’s competitive pressures, ROI analysis, or optimizing price, you should get a lot of information about pricing in early meetings with customers. If you are solving a real problem, customers should be able to instantly grasp the value of your offering, in fact, they may already be spending money trying to solve it themselves.
5. Listen, listen, listen - One of the things I hate most about PowerPoint presentations is that they leave so little room for listening to your prospect. You ought to be listening at least 50% of the meeting. If you are not, then you will most certainly fall victim to good meeting syndrome where you come out of a meeting thinking they love you and then can’t understand 6 months later why the deal hasn’t progressed at all. You have more to learn from your customers than they have to learn from you.

Where are PowerPoint slides appropriate? Presentations are best when there is a graphic, chart, or illustration that adds to your conversation in a way that couldn’t be done just by talking. More traditional presentations are best when you have a demonstrated successful repeatable process that you can train a large sales team on and be consistent. In startups, this often comes several years into the life cycle of the organization. Until then, you should be ready for a more interactive sales process with participation from executives, product managers and founders until you are really ready to grow and build your company with a proven, repeatable sales process.