As entrepreneurs it is unavoidable that we must make several business proposals or presentations to different kinds of people. It can be some guys from lending institutions, venture capital firms, angel investors, suppliers, and your regular customers. Not to mention the annual presentation you have to give to your employees regarding the state of your business.

More importantly, you must learn to tailor fit your presentations to each group you are dealing with. In fact, Instigator Blog cites that poor formatting and packaging is one of top ten reasons why proposals fail.

In case you are having a hard time fine tuning your presentations, just follow these rules from the experts:

A veteran of hearing numerous elevator pitches and business presentations, he is advocating that each presentation must have only 10 slides presented in 20 minutes with font size of at least 30.

The Art of Unexpectedness

Presentation Zen says make your presentation stickier by using unexpectedness as your tool.

You can get people’s interest by violating their expectations. Surprise people. Surprise will get their interest. But to sustain their interest you have to stimulate their curiosity. The best way to do that is to pose questions or open up holes in people’s knowledge and then fill those holes, say the authors. Make the audience aware that they have a gap in their knowledge and then fill that gap with the answers to the puzzle (or guide them to the answers).