How to create the perfect pitch deck
Whether you are in the process on raising money for your company or approaching investors or VCs you will need to have the perfect pitch deck. Certainly, as a startup consultant, we have had to pitch many times and creating pitch decks as the best pitch deck design is always our ultimate goal.
From my experience, the ultimate goal of the pitch deck is to inspire investors with a bold vision and a detailed plan to capture market share, showing the strength of the team and the power of the product or service that you are providing in front of other competitors.
Furthermore, there are many lessons sales leaders can learn from their entrepreneurial background. A well-architected pitch transforms big ideas into actionable steps and identifies through words and images how a product, service or a company is uniquely appropriate for the buyer.
The key to the perfect pitch is three things: The Audience, The Tools, The Story
The Audience:
Approaching investors is different than VCs, or Accelerators, but creating a pitch without knowing your audience always lead to a mislead approach to them. Your Pitch deck should be tailor-made for the people to whom you're presenting, and it should provide more than information. Research the audience and present ideas that speak directly to them: personalize slides with their branding, offer relevant statistics and other engaging material.
The Tools:
Building a great pitch takes time, but smart sales tools can make light work of assembling the best assets, information and insights in a highly personalized way. These tools can help you glean valuable insight into how people are reviewing and reacting to your material long after you've packed up your presentation. Great tools exist that unlock the power of data and analytics to transform a pitch from an antiquated PowerPoint into a true sales asset. Leveraging these tools makes it possible to deliver an effective presentation anywhere, from any device.
A well-crafted pitch is your best chance to present your vision for a better business, whether you're selling your ideas or your venture. It's more than just a slide deck: it represents your company, what you stand for and what you can do for your audience.
A slide with a bullet point about your company's rapid expansion won't have the same impact as a bar graph showing year-over-year growth. Ensure your slides illustrate a story and that you can match the illustration with supporting anecdotes.
The Story:
The main focus of the pitch deck should be the story, the company timeline, so that you need to make every slide in your deck as an opportunity to make the audience experience extraordinary. According to research, 92% of consumers want brands to make ads that feel like a story. Furthermore, the same infographic shows that messages delivered as stories are up to 22x times more memorable than just facts.
The first tip is to create a relevant character that'll make it easy for potential investors to get emotionally investing in your pitch. Investors are more likely to relate to Jack, a self-employed illustrator looking for the perfect accounting software than to a nameless business owner.
Then as mentioned earlier, the great storytelling pitch deck presents the problem, creates tension, and then shows the solution. In other words, your pitch deck needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end; as all great stories do. So here are few clues:
- Start with how you discovered the problem. Introduce your character and draw a picture of how their usual day looks like. What does the character do? What problems does he face?
- Paint a vivid picture of how the characters’ life looks like if they don’t take action. Use sensory words to help you describe why the problem needs to be addressed now. Then, transitionly introduce the solution by sharing the after picture and how the character would feel once the problem is solved.
- Share the solution and explain why your solution works. This is where you can incorporate statistics and facts to back your story as well as share real-life stories from your existing users and customers.
- Lastly, be sure to present your company or team members and share the qualifications and expertise as well as how long you’ve worked together so investors can sense your team’s know-how and connection.
Finally, here is a sample of how the final layout will be:
- cover slide ( company logo ..etc)
- problem, tension & solution
- business model, competition & competitive advantage
- market size, marketing and expansion plans
- team
- investment & summary
Now after you have drafted your pitch and ready to proceed to the next step, here are the two most common approaches:
Emailing a Pitch Deck
So, the material you submit over email should be self-explanatory. Your reader will be on their own trying to comprehend your business purpose, vision, even your competition!
Hence, including a smaller font and a bit heavier text makes sense as the person will most likely be on their own on their computer trying to figure out the behind-the-story kind of content to the material you have submitted. Thus, enter text here that truly gets your most solid concepts and ideas across, without over-extending in what you mean to say or using too lengthy sentences to convey your point.
While you can include text that makes sense, do not - include full, long paragraphs whereby everything is absolutely stated or every single detail is part of the presentation.
Your idea is to get responses to a live meeting or further conversations with investors or other parties; thus, consider this as an attention grabber for further efforts and not just your one chance at saying everything about your company.
Before we move on from this point, consider adding a way to monitor which slides have been read and which have been skipped or simply overall unread after you have emailed your pitch deck.
This will be essential knowledge for you to control how to, follow-up email conversations with investors or other interested parties after you have engaged in your contact efforts.
Have they read 100% of all slides? If not, which were the ones - they were most interested? Have they even opened your deck and shown any interest or are there other efforts needed to reach that same party?
This tool works as a compass for your follow-up and should be an ally for you in your funding efforts, rather than missing out on this significant piece of info.
Presenting a Pitch Deck
When presenting live, on the other hand, remember you will be the key feature to your slide presentation.
As you will guide the audience through and most of the attention will be paid to you more than anything else on stage, make of your presentation your perfect companion and resource it with appealing visuals, numerics, charts and other data that help drive your verbal point across. It shouldn’t take over in any waybut get the perfect design and back-up content to get your verbal communication across better.
In that sense, small font does not work well at all, as your audience will be far from your presentation slide projection and should be able to read whatever you put upfront.
Lastly, Here are a list of free templates that can be used Here. & Here is a compiled a list of 30 of the best startup pitch deck examples to serve as inspiration when it comes time to create a pitch deck of your own.
1. Facebook
2. Airbnb
3. Buffer
4. Square
5. Linkedin
6. Mint
7. MapMe
8. LaunchRock
9. MixPanel
10. Moz
11. Buzzfeed
12. Youtube
13. Manpacks
14. Foursquare
15. Flowtab
16. Dwolla
18. Bliss
19. Adpushup
20. Wealthsimple
21. AppVirality
22. SteadyBudget
23. Podozi
24. Fittr
25. Swipes
26. Canvas
27. Ooomf (now Crew)
28. Cubeit
29. Castle
30. Sequoia Capital