Finest Ideas to create Impact for your Business Pitch

My first job role at corporate was in ‘Brand Solutions’

I was working with Bloomberg TV India – one of the leading Financial News and Business Impact platforms. Straight out of MBA Marketing, my responsibilities involved #ideation #brandbuilding #marketingcontent and #brandcommunication for brands that were the big guns across sectors

I would spend around 8 hours daily on preparing content, downsizing it into a crisp and sharp copy text and making world class presentations.

One of the BIGGEST and FINEST learning I had back then was, to build #effective and #impactful pitch decks

Here I am today, Empowering Business Owners and Start-up CEOs as a Business Impact Coach and I am sharing few of the top tier ideas in the following article.?

What is a Pitch Deck?

A startup pitch deck is made up of several slides that let you quickly and clearly communicate the idea and potential of your startup.

A pitch deck doesn’t delve into the minute details of the startup like a business plan, but instead, it provides a top-level overview of the business with the goal to be clear and concise rather than comprehensive.

A startup pitch deck is most commonly used for fundraising – to present your business to angel investors and venture capital funds.

That said, a pitch deck is useful for a lot more:

• To clarify and refine your initial idea.
• To attract co-founders or mentors/advisors.
• To gain initial feedback from customers.
• To hire early team members.
• To secure strategic partnerships.

In a way, the pitch deck can serve the role of a mini business plan. Most stakeholders wouldn’t usually have the time to commit to reading a 30-page document on your business, so a 2 to 15-minute presentation can be the perfect entry point to get them interested and hopefully involved.

Since the pitch deck will be the first thing that potential investors or partners are exposed to, a good way to think about it is as a trailer of a movie. The point is to give people the essence and to get them interested.

How many pitch decks do you need?

Surprisingly, it’s usually a good idea to have two or more!

First, you need a lean pitch deck. It typically has less than 10 slides, and the slides should have very little text on them and as much visually presented information as possible (graphical elements, graphs, etc.). This pitch deck is ideal for two to five-minute presentations, which is extremely useful for startup pitching events or as a start of conversations about the business.

Second, you need a more detailed version of your pitch deck with more text-heavy content in the slides. This can be used for longer presentations (15-30 minutes), but it is also very?useful as an email attachment when you are doing out-reach: the text-heavy nature of the slides means that the deck will be understandable even if people just read it.

What to include in a pitch deck?

The structure of a pitch deck is one of the most important aspects to get right.

It’s usually a very bad idea to try to be overly creative with it. Most startup investors go through a very large amount of decks. Because of this, they have a checklist that helps them select the projects that fit their investment profile best and to weed out the bad matches as fast as possible (research says, on average, investors spend just?3 minutes and 44 seconds?on a pitch deck).

This means that it is in your best interest to cover all the topics that investors expect to see. If you have a weird structure, you risk hitting fewer check-boxes on the list, in which case the investors won’t have a reason to consider your project more closely.

?The keys to a successful pitch deck are:

1. To present your idea as clearly and concisely as possible.
2. To differentiate your idea from other startups.
3. To convince your audience of the high potential and high chances of success of your idea.

Each slide should be created with these three principles in mind.

Generally speaking, there are 10 main topics that each startup pitch deck should follow. This usually means 10 slides, but keep in mind that if you have more to say, it’s possible to cover a topic with more than one slide.

Moreover, if you are doing a two-minute presentation, you might have to cut out a few topics. If you are forced to do that, make sure to preserve the topics that contain the most convincing arguments for your business. For example, skipping to talk about competition is fine, but skipping to talk about your validation or traction, if you have it, is a big mistake.

What to include in a pitch deck?

1. Introduction - Communicate clearly and concisely what your business is offering.
2. Problem - Convince people you are solving a real, acute pain.
3. Solution - Present your business offering and unique value proposition.
4. Market - Convince your audience that the project has an extremely high upside.
5. Product - Demonstrate your product.
6. Validation and/or Traction - Give evidence of problem-solution or product-market fit.
7. Team - Show you are the right people for the job.
8. Competition - Present other players in your market and clarify your competitive advantages.
9. Financial projections - Present a financial trajectory of the business.
10. The Ask - What are you willing to achieve with this presentation?
11. Additional Slides - Give other important and relevant information.

DOCUMENTATION TO SEND AFTER A PITCH DECK

If the pitch deck is the trailer to the movie, then it follows that people need to be able to see the whole movie if they are interested.

This usually means follow-up conversations, and you can make a great impression if you have further documentation to send to the people you’re talking to. Just sending the pitch deck (especially if it’s a short one) is rarely enough.

LEAN CANVAS:?A whole detailed business plan (30+ pages) is rarely used for early-stage startups because it takes a lot of work to produce while the nature of early-stage startups necessitates that it’s going to change a great deal every time customer feedback forces you to iterate. Because of this, you can send a lean canvas - the so-called one-page business plan.

BUSINESS PLAN AND EXECUTIVE SUMMARY:?A detailed business plan becomes more important once your startup is at a stage at which the direction is clear, as it gives more details about the strategy and execution which are likely to hold at least in the mid-run. It’s a good idea to accompany the full business plan with an executive summary – summarizes the key points of the plan for people that aren’t interested enough in the business to read a whole 30+ pages document.

TECHNICAL DOCUMENTATION:?For high-tech startups, investors would usually want to verify your claims with a technical expert, so you should be ready to showcase what you’re doing and how.

FINANCIAL DOCUMENTATION:?An excel sheet displaying your revenue and cost structure and giving 3 to 5-year projections is very useful to have ready in case people ask for details about your finances.

With the information from above, you should be more than ready to prepare an impactful pitch deck that will help you attract the interest of partners and investors.

Don’t underestimate the role of marketing your project and idea to partners and investors – it could be equally as important as marketing your product, especially if your project is ambitious and innovative, as it will require all the help you can get.

May this lead you to the finest and the best outcome during rounds of funding and contract wins. ?

All the best!