Pitching deck perfection from an expert
âSend me your deckâ will be a familiar phrase to any startup founder. But how can you be certain yours will work? Claire Macmillan knows.
Claireâs background as a barrister at the Criminal bar in London taught her how to build the best story from any set of facts. Moving on to institutional equity sales at Merrill Lynch in London and New York, she saw first hand how investors react to bad pitches: âyou can see them switching off,â she says. Since then, Claireâs brought the balance of crafted content and persuasive delivery to hundreds of pitches at all stages. Here she reveals why the good ones work, and the bad ones donât.
Now is an unenviable time to find yourself looking to raise venture capital. But the bottom line is that if your business needs funding then you donât have a lot of choice. The good news is, despite everything, the basic truths still hold.
Tell your story
âPeople remember stories. A pitch deck template might give you the science, but the real art to pitching is storytellingâ, says Claire. The recipient will often skim through the deck first, âto get a sense of the whole story, to see if itâs interesting,â says Claire. âThen they go back through it at a slower pace.â On that basis, too much density and detail could sink your deck at first glance. âThe slides need to hang together as a set, as a whole story from beginning to end, not just with chapter headings but with the actual messages you want people to take away.â
Big impressive numbers and the need to define âthe problemâ can get in the way of simplicity and memorability. While thereâs no such thing as the perfect deck per se, there is the perfect deck for you. So be friends with the ârulesâ, not slaves to them. For exampleâŚ
The problem with Problems
Thereâs a lot of talk about starting with the problem. But sometimes itâs not a problem that youâre solving; maybe just a way of doing something better, or differently, in response to a shift in the market landscape, an evolution of technology, or a change in consumer trends.
âDonât get hung up on the problem statement if it doesnât work for your story, says Claire. For example, your story might start more with âwhat if?â, or âweâre changing the way peopleâŚâ. Remember that the really pioneering companies donât just remove problems, they create entirely new paradigms.
Yes, you do need to start with something attention grabbing that gets everyone on the same page fast. But remember that investors, like most audiences, have short attention spans, so you have to get to the point quickly. If you are going the problem route, then donât just state it, make your listeners feel it. Bring it to life, show them the pain and give them the context. As Claire says, âthey need to be nodding thinking, yeah, that needs fixing.â
Your deckâs purpose
Each element of the process serves a particular purpose. So the covering email’s purpose is to get the recipient to open your deck. The purpose of the deck is to secure a meeting, and to provide structure during that meeting. What happens next will be down to the meeting, the interaction, not the deck. In some ways this takes pressure off your deck: it does not need to say everything there could possibly be to say about your business. The deck can support you, but you need to own the pitch. You need to bring your story to life and show that you are the person, with the team, to deliver on what youâre promising.
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, itâll bounce along and bring your audience along with you, to the place you want them to be. You can load up your laptop with detailed appendix slides, but ditch the idea of a âsend ahead deckâ, differentiated from your pitch deck. Have just one: a single, simply-told story, that you tell over and over.
Delivery: talking with not at
Thinking of your pitch as a really well structured conversation is a good idea. It will change the way you engage with your audience. Youâll be talking with them, not at them. âTheyâre going to be more likely to listen, and youâll be less likely to just plough on regardless,â says Claire. Thereâll be a connection and youâll be able to respond and adapt.
A pet peeve
Claire is not a fan of explaining what you do by reference to someone elseâs business: âWe are like X (usually Airbnb, Uber or Amazon) for Yâ. Very occasionally this can be a useful remark to make verbally, but on the whole, steer clear. Investors love to pigeon hole and leap to conclusions. Your business is YOUR business, it’s unique! Explain it simply, concisely, and clearly, and you wonât need the crutch of the comparison.
Covid
You cannot not mention Covid-19 in your pitch.
Whether you create a new slide or two or whether you cover it off verbally is up to you, but you need to reference upfront how Covid affects your business now and going forward. It might be that the new landscape leans into part of the problem you solve. However you do it, you need to reference the near and long term impact of Covid in the context of your business.
Ultimately
Itâs about getting them to believe in the opportunity in the same way that you do. If your belief is strong enough (which, of course, it is) then your deck must communicate that.