A pitch deck is an essential part of forming and developing your agency. One of the concluding actions in the process of bringing the potential customers over to becoming your customers is one of the key components for fostering the growth of your company, something 47% of marketing firms have difficulty achieving.
It is reasonable then to guarantee that your presentation deck covers everything and seals the agreement. No one wishes to be ill-prepared for a meeting with a likely client and disappoint their listeners. We’ve created a thorough tutorial on how to build a pitch deck to reduce the chances of anything going wrong.
Here’s what you need to know:
What Is a Pitch Deck?
Basically, a pitch deck is a slideshow that gives an outline of your company and the services or products it provides. Typically made by utilizing such programs as PowerPoint, Prezi, or Zoho Show, a presentation is supposed to be concise, engaging, and enlightening.
The focus should be specific as the purpose of a pitch deck may vary. As an example, these can be employed to illustrate to investors a company’s probable increase in value or demonstrate strategic maneuverings to possible partners and parties outside the company.
In this case, we are looking at ways in which your agency can utilize its presentation material to appeal to potential customers. Focus on the advantages you are able to offer and how they can improve the lives of your customers.
Pitch Deck Examples
One can find numerous real-world elevator pitch illustrations on the web, a good number of which concern distinguished B2B organizations including Salesforce, Microsoft, and LeadCrunch.
Studying a few of these presentations might be helpful, as it allows you to recognize common topics and get a thought of what is typically successful and what isn’t. You can utilize these findings when creating your own pitch deck.
To give you an example, we have focused on various examples of pitch decks that should be noticed.
1. Snapchat Ad Sales
Snapchat was designed for Generation Z and millennials and thus is an ideal advertising platform for organizations focusing on these demographic groups, but it experienced difficulty gaining traction among media buyers in the early years.
By pitching to advertisers, Snapchat decided to present the main advantages and facts in a fashion that was visually appealing and very easy to understand – much like the app itself. It puts an especially strong focus on the spending potential of these age groups in the future, and claims to have first access to a profitable long-term customer base.
2. LeadCrunch
LeadCrunch is a demand generation platform for businesses which utilizes AI to locate unutilized chances and minimize squander. Which sounds intriguing, but for many businesses, also unclear.
This is why the firm’s presentation is so effective. It makes sure that potential customers comprehend the issue that LeadCrunch is attempting to fix, and does not attempt to confuse them with terminology that only experts would comprehend. Rather than concentrating on the specifics of the company’s patented technology, the focus is on how it can be used to help clients.
3. Reddit Ad Sales
The presentation Reddit put together to promote their commercials reinforces the fact that presentations don’t need to be typical; in fact, it reveals that it can be more advantageous to establish a link between what represents your business. To provide context, Reddit starts off their presentation with a photo of a cat riding a unicorn and the rest of the 69 slides largely stick to that theme. Not to say that there is nothing of value in the presentation, though. The presentation of valuable information to brands demonstrates the benefits of an advertising affiliation with Reddit in an eye-catching fashion. Examples are given of how other brands have been able to use Reddit to their advantage in marketing strategies.
How to Create a Pitch Deck
Now that you have an idea of what a pitch deck is and its appearance, it’s time to start constructing one!
This task is composed of 8 steps, so here are the steps you must follow.
1. Research Your Business Prospects
It doesn’t do any good to create a presentation if you don’t know who you will be showing it to, so the starting point should be to find out about and research the potential audience. A Brevet Group sales consulting survey discovered that just 13 percent of patrons think that sales teams comprehend their requirements, hence if you can demonstrate that you have done your research, you’ll be in great shape compared to the opposition.
For each potential prospect, aim to understand:
- The products or services that they sell. This can be done by reviewing the company’s website. To get a better understanding of their most popular and valuable products.
- Their location. Again, you can obtain this information from the prospect’s website (or other online directory resources).
- Their direct competitors. For some companies, this information will be easy to obtain through simple Google searches. In most cases, however, you’ll need to dig a little deeper.
2. Personalize Your Pitch Deck
After gathering all the facts, the next step would be to modify your pitch presentation and tailor it to the individual potential customer. This is very crucial, since an elevator pitch that is targeted directly at a person’s current standing within their industry and that has been adequately researched and familiarized with, will be much more likely to have the desired effect.
A 2019 Semrush survey suggests that having a plan especially suited to the client is the most critical factor for a brand’s success, which is more important than the cost, measures of success, advantages, or examples of work. No matter how well you present your pitch deck, if it does not connect to the needs of your prospect, you could have difficulty getting them to sign up with you.
The key to having a productive sales presentation is not merely to promote your services, but to make clear to your listeners how they can use your services to solve their dilemmas. Each potential customer will have their own individual issues regarding their business and the market in which it operates, which is why it is of paramount importance to comprehend them in order to achieve a successful conversion.
3. Avoid beginners’ mistakes
For each slide, there are commonly committed errors which fresh founders can fall into.
You talk about the solution, not the problem
Problem means problem. The majority of originators converse about solutions, even though the title of their presentation is labeled ‘challenge’.
You should make sure your slide is as precise as can be and make sure it’s crystal clear that solving this problem would be a great advantage.
Though they are scarce, there are a handful of pitches that solely concentrate on providing solutions. Typically, those presentations center on facing a saturated market with various already existing solutions. Drop Box’s first pitch deck demonstrated a disorganized desk and then went on to state that in 2007 it was still difficult to (1) use multiple machines, (2) share documents with a group, (3) upload videos and photographs onto the internet and (4) maintain secure file backups.
Ensure that you concentrate on an issue which needs to be addressed. As an illustration, Robert Fitzpatrick’s work, “The Mom Test”, makes it perfectly clear that genuine troubles must be so agonizing that people or companies are prepared to spend a substantial amount of money to stay clear of the ache.
Overgeneralisation: A ‘strong team’ or ‘amazing technology’ is not an USP
Do not mention any Unique Selling Points (USPs) / underlying magic unless you are able to prove it. “Commonly used qualities and characteristics such as ‘a powerful team’, ‘advanced technology’ and ‘a unique product’ are not effective as unique selling points.” That is a widely known fact which all investors ought to be familiar with.
You can explain what makes you unique and how this particular skill or characteristic can help you generate a substantial income.
In addition, ‘enormous market’, ‘significant issue’, and ‘utilizing AI’ are not unique selling points. That means that everyone has the potential to capitalize on a massive market, a significant issue, and utilizing artificial intelligence. Anybody can target your massive consumer base or employ developers to create artificial intelligence programs. Rather than sticking to those topics on their own, combine them with other specifications to make them original.
In other words, if you are the only one that can tap into a large market due to your in-depth knowledge and relationship with members with access to distribution channels, you may be onto something amazing. Moreover, if your group has created an exclusive technology that is not able to be replicated. Put your emphasis on why it cannot be replicated and why it is a better option than other available solutions.
Your Business Model does not cover the whole value creation process
A good business model does at least cover the following components:
- How you generate value (this doesn’t need to be covered on your slide as you’ll likely have answered this in the previous slides)
- How you bring that value to the customer (distribution)
- Your method for capturing some of that value (pricing)
A successful presentation concerning business models should cover both how the product will be distributed, as well as how it will be priced.
Slides with a bad business model only contain a general cost without providing an understanding of how the figure fits into the broader scheme of the company, its opponents and the shoppers.
4. Creating your story skeleton
Once you’ve got everything ready, it’s the right moment to make the narrative clear.
Do not start by just building a slide deck. Instead of writing out the entire contents of each slide, list the titles and a single key point from each one and check to see if they fit together in a meaningful way.
You should be able to get an understanding of your business just by reading those sentences.
A (fictional) example could be:
- Problem: Trade marketing is messy and intransparent, making it impossible for managers to make sound, data-based decisions on promotions.
- Solution / Value Prop: We help managers make data-driven decisions about promotions. We do this by having created a user-friendly dashboard that plugs into existing company data sources and processes data through machine learning models.
- Underlying Magic: We’ve co-developed our model with our users who are colleagues of ours and have access to the president of the European Trade Marketing Organisation (ETMO), who is in our advisory board.
- Business Model: We charge a set-up fee (€ 10’000) and a monthly user fee (€1000 p/user) allowing businesses to generate millions in additional sales.
- Go-To-Market Plan: After having onboarded three NASDAQ customers, we’re building a sales force to further penetrate the market.
- Competitive Analysis: Our competition offers costly consulting services and deploy machine learning models that managers do not understand, while our dashboard is cheap and user-friendly.
- Team: Our founders have thirty years of experience in the trade marketing industry (Kate Miller) and twenty years of experience in building AI-driven software applications (John Doe).
- Financial Projections & Key Metrics: We plan to onboard 1800 customers within the next 7 years with 5 regular users each resulting in €108.000.000 in ARR.
- Current Status and Use of Funds: We have sold our prototype to three large corporations. We are now looking for funds to improve our product (30%) and hire a sales force to monopolise the market (70%)
You desire to construct a few adaptations of these tales. It would be ideal to draft up at least three different versions of your deck before you begin constructing the final product.
5. Finding the perfect length of your pitch deck
8-12 slides are a good goal. Presentations with shorter slides have difficulty providing the full narrative, whilst longer slides either lessen the overall meaning or take too long for the audience to digest. If your progress, Unique Selling Point, personnel or industry are very intriguing, you may be able to make do with a concise presentation. It makes sense to use a minimum of 8 slides in all circumstances. Investors tend to go through numerous slide decks daily when dealing with longer presentations. It is critical to avoid devoting their time to slides that do not add any value. Furthermore, if you are preparing a pre-seed presentation, using a lot of slides is a sign that you are unable to succinctly explain your message.
It is usually simpler to recognize when other people are not clear in their presentation decks than to notice it in your own. You will likely need to go through the feedback process several times to ensure your narrative is easy to follow and concise.
How to Create a Pitch Deck: Final Thoughts
An effective pitch deck should not be about your agency but how your agency can serve the customer by resolving their issues. No matter what type of business you have or what your operations include, it is important to take this into account as you put together your presentation.
The only approach to achieve this is by delving deeply into the details about potential customers and their respective industries. The greater your knowledge on the person or group you are pitching to, the more captivating and appealing your presentation can be, allowing you to shape your solutions in a way that addresses their particular issues.
