A well-produced pitch deck can make a huge difference to how your business is received by potential investors, so it’s worth investing the time to get it right.
Why is the deck important?
Firstly, a pitch desk answers the fundamental questions:
- What does the business do?
- What does the team look like and how does that give an unfair advantage?
- What impact does the product deliver and how is this measured?
- How does the business make money?
- How big could this business be and what has to be assumed to get there?
- Who are the largest competitors?
- How efficiently will the business grow?
- What has the business achieved so far with its current investment?
Secondly, the purpose of the pitch deck is to get the audience sufficiently interested to meet in person. Don’t try to fit everything about your business into a deck. If a potential investor is interested in a meeting and wants more information, you can provide it later.
Thirdly, it’s a good example of how you can communicate the product, market and potential opportunity, which tests the core attributes of a successful sales person or CEO.
What financials should you include?
- High-level profit and loss forecast for 3 years
Investors understand that there are many unknowns and your business might not be profitable yet, but they’re interested in understanding the assumptions you’ve made and how you think about where growth comes from. They would expect to see an ambitious but achievable level of growth, and what the gross margin would look like over time.
- Historic financial performance
It’s useful to understand what pace you operate at and what kind of growth you’ve been recently generating, so investors can better evaluate the assumptions around future growth. This only needs to be on a profit and loss basis.
- Cash flow profile
While this is more relevant for later-stage businesses, it’s useful to understand how efficiently the business will scale in terms of marketing spend and customer acquisition. Understanding the monthly cash burn and where the current investment round would take the business is important, and can often be shown in a simple graph.
Tell your story
“People remember stories. A pitch deck template might give you the science, but the real art to pitching is storytelling”, says Claire Macmillan, a professional pitch coach. Too much density and detail can get in the way of simplicity and memorability – the deck needs to hang together as a whole story from beginning to end.
Start your story with something attention-grabbing. But this doesn’t always need to be a problem statement. Sometimes it’s not a problem that you’re solving – maybe just a way of doing something better in response to a market shift, a technological evolution or a change in consumer trends.
“Don’t get hung up on the problem statement if it doesn’t work for your story”, says Claire. For example, your story might start more with “what if?”, or “we’re changing the way people…”
To bring your story to life, Claire offers another perspective: each slide should set up the question the next slide is going to answer. You want your audience, whether in the room in front of you or facing a screen, to be nodding along. If each slide is answering a hanging question from the slide before, it’ll bounce along and bring your audience with you, to the place you want them to be.
Consider your delivery
Thinking of your pitch as a well structured conversation is a good idea. It will change the way you engage with your audience as you’ll be talking with them, not at them. There’ll be a connection and you’ll be able to respond and adapt.
Best practice
- Keep pitch decks to a maximum of 15 to 20 slides.
- Try to present in under 20 minutes, leaving plenty of time for questions.
- Clearly explain the fundamental questions and lay out the vision.
- Spend time polishing your pitch deck – front-end developers can be good for simplifying and tidying up.
Common mistakes
- Avoid overly long pitch decks.
- Don’t exaggerate your market and revenue forecast.
- Don’t deliberately ignore your most relevant competitors.
- Don’t forget to convey what the value to customers is.
- Try not to explain what you do by referencing another business (“we’re like X for Y”). Explain your business clearly and you won’t need the crutch of comparison.
View a number of example decks from Octopus Ventures.
This content has been edited for the Invest in Women Hub, but the original content was provided by Octopus Ventures with insights from Laura Willming and Will Gibbs. Read Laura’s original article and Will’s original article.
