5 tips for creating a killer pitch when raising funds

There are lots of opinions on what makes a good pitch deck, much of it misguided. This article takes my experience of successfully funding around 50 companies and combines this knowledge with research completed by DocSend to find the perfect formula for an engaging, compelling and ultimately easy to digest deck.

1. Create more than one deck

The first misconception is that you should have just one deck. As a bare minimum you should prepare three different documents before you start reaching out to investors:

- The exec summary - a standalone teaser document that gives them everything they need to decide if they want to spend the time looking further.

- The presentation deck - a version of your pitch deck that has only images and no words at all, which is designed to be presented over, either in person or on a video conference.

The investor deck - this is what most people create in an attempt to fit everything into one document. But, of course, if it’s the first thing an investor sees, there is no context, and so the chances of them getting to the core of your opportunity are slim at best. The investor deck should be treated as a leave-behind only.

2. Put your deck together in the right order

Primarily, it’s important that you get the investor deck in the right order. Rather than employing guesswork, you can build your deck around a DocSend/Harvard Business School study into 200 startups that completed their Seed or Series A rounds. This study tracked the effectiveness of these 200 decks, and arrived at the following as an optimised order in which to put your slides:

1. The purpose - i.e. a summary of what you do and why they should care.

2. The problem - the problem you’re solving, or more accurately, the market opportunity you’re meeting.

3. The solution - how your solution is uniquely placed in the market to solve this problem.

4. Why now? - why is this urgent now?

5. Market - a deeper dive into the size of the market, its trends and your potential penetration.

6. Competition - who else is tackling this problem? Make sure you do extensive research because if your investor finds a competitor you missed, it’s a surefire way of them exiting the opportunity.

7. Product - a deeper dive into the product and any sales you’ve made so far.

8. Business model - how do you make money now? How do you make it in the future? How do you market your product/services and how do those costs fit into the overall model?

9. Team - show how every team member is relevant, and if they don’t add value take them out.

10. Financials - a financial summary, not ten pages of your entire financial model.

3. Tell a story

Investors are people, and the final decision as to whether they should invest is ultimately an emotional one. People relate to stories and narratives. They provide so much more flavour and texture to your pitch, which helps the investor form an opinion about you.

4. Make it about them, not about you

Your pitch documents are essentially marketing materials, and even experienced marketers make the mistake of talking from their perspective rather than the customer’s (in your case the investor). Here are some tips to help you deploy more empathy in your writing:

- Visualise your perfect investor and write your documents specifically for them.

- Read back everything you write out loud. If it sounds like a robot then the reader is less likely to engage with it.

- While you’re reading everything back to yourself, ask yourself of every paragraph, ‘why should an investor care?’

- Use fewer, better words to get your point across. Strip as much as you can away without losing the meaning.

- Personalise your deck...

5. Personalise

Finally, do your research on the investor you’re meeting with and personalise your materials accordingly. It’s amazing how much you can find out from LinkedIn. If they seem like the type who invests more on a gut feeling, then put your team slides and backstory at the start. If they come across as more analytical, or are known for having a scoring system for appraising new investment opportunities, focus more on the numbers, statistics and evidence.

If you follow these five steps then your chances of successfully finding an investor will increase.

John Auckland is a crowdfunding specialist and founder of TribeFirst, a global crowdfunding communications agency that has helped raise in excess of £14.5m for over 50 companies on platforms such as Crowdcube, Seedrs, Indiegogo and Kickstarter – with a greater than 90% success rate.