Recently, Aflac, the largest provider of supplemental insurance in the United States, utilized our PowerPoint prowess to create a pitch deck for internal use to promote a new sales strategy for their team.
Aflac has approximately 76,900 licensed sales associates in the U.S. and covers more than 50 million people worldwide, so internal training can be a daunting task for them.
An Aflac Insurance Agent needed to convey his effective new strategy to other sales associates. Insurance sales is drenched in statistics and probabilities, thus his pitch deck had a lot of data to incorporate in order to present his message effectively.
As we’ve said in the past, data and statistics can be very difficult to incorporate into a pitch deck in an engaging way, but when the prosperity of your company depends on getting these complex figures across clearly, this salesperson saw that he needed a professional pitch deck designer to help visualize his data effectively.
“How much does it cost to hire a graphic designer to create a pitch deck presentation for me?”
This is a common question we often get right off the bat from potential clients looking for a pitch deck specialist, but it’s not a simple question to answer. First, we need to know about your business needs, your resources, and your goals. Are you a small startup or a Fortune 500? Basically, it’s a very personalized process, and there’s no blanket answer for it.
It’s a lot like asking, “how much does it cost for you to make me a website?”
Pitch Deck Designer Cost
There are a myriad of factors that go into the cost:
How big of a business are you?
How high-end do you want your website to be?
Do you already have a website to use as a foundation?
What kind of functionality do you want the website to have?
Just like web design, there are quite a few factors that we custom tailor to the needs of each client when landing on the price for their deck. That means what your pitch deck costs can be a little… or a lot.
The Low End Pitch Deck ($1,000 to $3,000)
Prices in this range fall into two categories, returning clients looking to improve a deck they’ve already had designed, and they’d like to perform relatively minor improvements to it. A complete overhaul of a pitch deck requires much more time and effort.
The other group that falls into this category are those looking for a new, custom-designed deck, but are only willing to pay the bare-bones price for it, which we highly discourage. Having a solid visual aid is the second most important part of a pitch deck. The first is showing up. You don’t want to skimp on your pitch deck presentation, because that’s sure to leave a bad taste in the mouths of potential clients or investors.
Remember, a professional pitch deck presentation is an investment. An investment that will surely produce an ROI and help impress and attract new clients, which is the opposite effect that a mediocre pitch deck will have. A bad impression is worse than no impression at all.
Mid-range Pitch Deck Design ($3,000 to $10,000)
Most of our clients fall into this range. This involves either significantly revamping a previous pitch deck, or doing a new pitch deck involving a significant amount of animation and custom graphic design.
Pitch Deck Cost
The wide amount of variation in this range depends largely on the quantity of slides in your deck and the amount of graphic design and animation needed on each slide. Again, costs here can be greatly leveraged depending on how much copywriting, design, and multimedia is being brought to the table by the client.
The Upper End Pitch Deck Services ($10,000 to $50,000)
If you’re a young startup looking to breaking in to a competitive, high-end market and you don’t have much to show for yourself concerning branding or multimedia, we can do it all for you, but it will be a significant cost. Building a public, corporate identity through a pitch deck is a huge task, so it’s best to do it right the first time.
This range also includes multi-deck projects and large decks nearing the triple-digit slide count. Also in this range are the custom-designed slide libraries, which are essentially an interchangeable database of slides that can be catered to the individual needs of sales teams with in larger companies, while maintaining a consistent set of slides controlled by management.
We’ve found the most satisfied clients are the ones who view presentation and pitch deck design as an evolving, ongoing relationship. While a small startup may initially only have the resources for a fairly basic pitch deck, they are able to continue working with us, and improve the professionalism, appeal, and selling power of their pitch deck as their business expands, and they have more to invest in a pitch deck’s power to attract new clients.
This allows the client to not only spend just the resources they have available, they’re able to constantly pinpoint and customize exactly what they want out of a pitch deck, and consequently, as pitch deck designers, we’re able to figure out over time exactly what optimizes your business from a pitch deck point of view. We work best when our process and your business grow alongside one another.
The wildly successful ’80s comedy Caddyshack is famous for it’s nearly nonexistent script. Supposedly, the script only contained twenty minutes worth of dialogue, and the rest of the movie was largely improvised.
Although it worked wonders for this film, against all odds, this strategy is surely a guarantee for disaster. A script not only gives a movie its direction and purpose, but it’s a huge organizational tool. It allows the movie’s writer and director to adequately prepare for filming and to visually map out all of the movie’s components.
pitchdeck.com uses storyboards to plot out and organize each of its professional pitch decks.
Just as a script serves as a movie’s backbone, a “storyboard” is a vital tool for any professional pitch deck presentation, and it’s an essential part of the process here at pitchdeck.com. A storyboard is essentially a custom-tailored spreadsheet designed for planning out a presentation slide by slide, and it’s something we use for every pitch deck we create.
Storyboarding is the biggest step toward organizing your pitch deck, but there are several other important techniques useful before even opening up a pitch.
Your Topic
Condense the meaning or purpose of your speech down to a single sentence. If that task seems impossible, then it might be time to revise and trim the fat off your topic. After you put your pitch deck into its simplest form, make sure every slide you create contributes to this idea encapsulated in this sentence.
Pay Attention to Your Slide Headings
Do you have a lot of (Continued) slides? Do all of your headings appear to be similar or boasting about the merits of your business or product? This could be a sign that the pitch deck you’re creating could be more well rounded.
Cut the Word Count
After you’ve gone through and created your slides, go back and reduce as much as humanly possible. Question whether adjacent slides can be consolidated, or whether the information on the slides is made redundant by your talking points, rather than being complimentary.
Remember, an audience retains information from pitch deck much more effectively when slides have a small amount of information on them, and merely compliment what the speaker is saying. A cluttered pitch deck is often a sign of lack of planning.
After you’ve done this, go back through and once again, ask yourself, “Does each slide go along with the meaning of my pitch deck?” If you planned your pitch deck presentation correctly, this should be the easiest step.
