Customized For Steph Curry

Steph Curry, the superstar of the Golden State Warriors, is going to sign a $1 billion lifetime endorsement contract with Under Armour before his current deal expires in 2024. By several measures, the deal could easily have gone to Nike, one of Under Armour’s chief competitors: Curry wore Nikes in his college days, he wore them when he first went pro, his dad, who played in the NBA wore them, and one of Curry’s first endorsement deals was with Nike.

Nike lost the new deal because they gave a presentation to Curry with a corporate deck that went wrong. According to a story on celebritynetworth.com, “the slides that were supposedly a custom pitch for Stephen Curry, actually had been recycled from another pitch [Nike] had delivered previously…one of the slides literally had Kevin Durant’s name all over. It was a cut and pasted.”

Nike was unfortunately repeating a familiar business practice. In a well-intentioned dual effort to maintain message consistency and reduce revision cycles, companies regularly hire management consultants, design studios, and public relations firms to develop a slideshow known as a “Corporate Deck.” Ostensibly, anyone in the company can use this deck to deliver a pitch to identify and describe the business to any audience. But this practice can also be the cause of failure.

One size does not fit all. While every audience needs to be able to understand a company story, not every audience needs to hear the whole story and, more important, every audience needs to learn specifics that are of interest only to them. For example, an investor does not need to hear about all the features of a company’s product or service, and a customer audience does not need to hear about the long-term strategy to penetrate new markets.

Does this mean that you have to start from scratch and change your slides every time? Not at all. You can use the same core material, but you must customize it for every audience. Here are four ways to do that:

1. On your first slide, as well as throughout the deck, show the audience’s logo, whether for an individual company or an industry event. Unlike Nike, take the trouble to check and double-check all the slides. It is absolutely worth the effort.

2. On your first slide, show the actual date of the presentation. You can readily do this by programming your presentation software to update automatically.

3. Throughout your presentation, drop in slides with information unique to the audience. Find this information on their website or on their partners’ and/or customers’ websites.

4. Make your deck as current as possible by adding slides with relevant stories from the media.

Use these same techniques to customize a one-time-only presentation, as well as every presentation you ever give to every audience.

Deliver each iteration of every presentation as if your audience is seeing it for the first time. Make your eightieth iteration as fresh as the first. Create the illusion of the first time every time.

There’s an old aphorism “Don’t shoot the messenger,” meaning that the bearer of bad news is not responsible for the message. But a variation on the theme is also true: the messenger can shoot the message—if you’ll pardon the wordplay—in the foot.

Customize or fail.