If you need funding for your business, then you need to be familiar with the pitch deck. It is a brief presentation that gives your audience an insight into your business plan.
Your audience can be investors, angel group investors, partners, co-founders, customers, or clients who show interest in knowing the highlights of your business idea. It could also be people present in a pitch competition.
You can create a pitch deck using a powerpoint, keynote, or other tools available online, and you can use it during face to face interviews, online meeting, or send it via email.
Why you need a pitch deck design
A pitch deck helps to organize your business plan. You can use it as an outline before the main content of a business line.
And since it contains more images than texts, it helps viewers to visualize the concept of the business idea.
Creating a pitch deck design helps you get to write a better business plan since you can quickly fix any mistake before focusing on preparing the full business plan. You can also use it as a reference when writing the business plan.
For investors
Moreover, your investor might request to see your pitch deck to get an overview of your business plan to see if it’s something of interest to them.
Investors such as venture capitalists or angel investors would most certainly request for your pitch deck when you approach them.
They could ask you to present or email it to them after which they could ask for your executive summary or full business plan if they get impressed by the pitch.
For presentation
Your pitch deck also helps in telling a moving story to gain support from people who are essential to your business progress such as the prospective customers, co-founders, team members, and so on.
If you wish to get funds for your business, you will most likely enter different pitch competitions designed to help budding entrepreneurs.
These competitions organized by angel groups, startup incubators and conferences, and other entrepreneurship support outfits, will require you to give an overview of your business idea to an audience within a few minutes.
Features of a winning pitch deck
Consider these features if you aim at creating a pitch deck that will contribute to achieving your dreams of getting funds from investors and competition.
Pitch deck length
If you are going to use a powerpoint presentation, then it’s essential to know how many slides to add that will you can comfortably flip through when making a presentation.
Most investors believe anything from 5-10 slides makes sense when creating a pitch deck.
If you already have an idea of the allocated time for presentation, you can always design your deck to work with the time. Use most of the time for presenting and the remaining for a question and answer session.
Anticipate your audience questions
Your pitch deck should aim to answer what people would want to know about your business idea.
You should also know the aim of the presentation. Is it to win prize money, exchange business plans, or set up a meeting at a later date?
The content of your pitch deck must aim to answer all such questions your audience would need clarification on about your business.
Organization
Your pitch should show an organization of the highest level. Every slide should focus on an idea which you intend to explain to your audience.
Having an organized pitch deck also increases your confidence when presenting and makes your audience see you as a focused and organized individual.
It also helps prevent confusion that occurs when you try to fit two or more ideas into a slide. You might even forget the essential points you wanted your audience to hear.
Aesthetics
Don’t get carried away with designing the slides that you forget about the meaningful message to pass across to your audience.
However, the aesthetics of your slides also matters.
The first thing you should remember is that a pitch deck uses more illustrations, photos, tables, chart, and other graphics than written words.
So you want to ensure that you replace the words with necessary graphics. Eliminate unnecessary words that you can clearly explain using images.
Choose a template that will look good on a projector and a computer screen. It should also look presentable on a PDF in case an investor asks that you email it to them.
When picking a color scheme, ensure it is consistent with your brand colors for easy identification.
You also need to ensure you use the right font size for different situation.
For example, if you are going to send it by email, you can opt for average font size. But if you are presenting it before a broad audience, ensure you make the fonts bold enough and the images bigger so that people seated at the back won’t have trouble seeing what you’ve written or designed.
Keep the deck as professional as possible by eliminating any undesirable effects. For instance, avoid using embedded multimedia, sound effects, or animation that doesn’t serve any purpose. Remember, you are not there to entertain the audience but to educate them.
Creating a pitch deck
Creating a pitch deck is a straightforward process which every entrepreneur with the luxury of time can create. However, if you don’t have the time, you might want to contact our consultancy services.
Here is how you can create a pitch deck:
The first step is to brainstorm questions you feel investors will ask or what your audience needs to know about your business.
Then proceed to create a slide to answer each question. The title of the slide should bear the question while the body aims to give a reasonable answer to it.
Note that the question and answers are part of the brainstorming process. You do not need to design a pitch deck with questions and answers. You are only trying to organize your thoughts and place your ideas where you can see for subsequent modification.
You can keep modifying until you can create a compelling story that will speak to your audience.
The next step is ensuring that the designs of the pitch are in place.
Customizing your pitch deck
We’ve already established that your pitch deck can serve several purposes. You could want to use it to get investors or partners. Whichever way, you’ll need to customize your pitch to meet their specification.
For instance, if you are going to meet with a potential investor, you might want to use a lengthier slide than when meeting a prospective partner.
An investor wants to know how much revenue your product or services can generate and so you need to do a lot of financial forecasting which may take 10-15 slides on your pitch.
But a partner is only interested in the benefits the partnership will bring, and this would only take probably three slides for a detailed explanation of the benefits of cooperation.
If you would need us to design a proper pitch deck that will meet your prospective investor requirements, do not hesitate to contact us for further discussion of your needs.