Pitch Deck specialist Archives

The Top 3 Ways to Win Over Your Boss with Pitch Deck

Posted on December 2, 2013May 3, 2023 by Rick E

Presenting to your boss, in any situation, can be a very nerve racking and stressful process. Of course some of the steps you can take to win them over would be to do your homework and prepare adequately, and dealing with bosses with extreme expectations, say for example The Office’s Michael Scott can be tricky. So how do you exactly ‘wow’ your boss with a great pitch deck presentation? Follow these specific steps for a pitch deck that will leave your boss impressed.

Keep A Specific Slide Maximum

You should plan on having no more than 15 slides- maximum! Too lengthy of a pitch deck will cause your boss to lose interest-fast and as Leonardo da Vinci once said, “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication”.

Use Metrics

Utilizing the appropriate data while encompassing this information with graphs and charts is essential in broadcasting your knowledge on the particular subject. Double check your facts in research with other sources before presenting. Showing your analytical skills through graphics and visuals will allow for you as the presenter to elaborate on these ideas within your pitch deck.

Leave Behind

Always come with the essential materials, make sure you have a printable copy of your pitch deck and or a downloadable PDF for your boss to further review, this will also show them you are prepared. Professionally printed executive brochures will place you a step ahead of the rest.

Though everyone knows Michael Scott may be the most irrational boss that ever came across national television, he does encompass some ordinary superior traits we can all relate too. The more advanced your pitch skills are, the better impression you will leave on your boss, showing your technical, marketing and basic research skills.

Comment below and let us know what your favorite Michael Scott moments are!

Selling Your Wife with Pitch Deck: Why it Works

Posted on November 26, 2013May 3, 2023 by Rick E

The universal question remains, “How do you win an argument with a woman?”

Just like Phil and Claire Dunphy on ABC’S Emmy Award-winning show, Modern Family, it’s almost a daily struggle to prove who’s right and why. This timeless debacle has stumped husbands across the years as countless disagreements and failed persuasions have led to broken compromises.

We may believe that the common day pitch deck presentation is merely just for business lectures but the marketing and persuasive ability of pitch deck slides may actually be one of the best explanation tools. When dealing with certain difficult issues such as mapping out your financial plans for the year, a pitch deck presentation has the capability to share information in the most persuasive and simplest way possible; therefore allowing for more agreements- and fewer arguments.

1. Starting Off Your Pitch with an Attention Grabbing Quote

Just like in any persuasive essay or speech, the appeal of pathos (or emotion) when presenting your idea will catch your wife’s attention from the beginning. Your quote can also be a personalized statistic, say if you were trying to either sell or buy a substantial item or place that sums up a main purpose.

2. Utilize Visuals and Graphs

Images speak louder than words, too much text will cause anyone to lose interest fast. Using bar graphs and pie charts to explain your financial forecast or using graphics will make for any explanation to be easier and allow for more efficient points to be made. Talking numbers make for more confusion- but showing numbers allows for more information to be digested easily and this is essential in any great pitch deck presentation.

3. Minimal Bullet Points

The simpler, the better. Bullet points are acceptable in family pitch decks and allow for direct and specific statements to be made without too much wordiness. You as the presenter are responsible for elaborating these ideas, but visually they should be presented in the simplest form.

4. Using If/Then Analogies

Creating an if/then scenario within your pitch will give you the ability to show your wife why your point is valid and using examples will assist in positioning your argument.

Convincing somebody of anything is not an easy task, and just like Phil and Claire try to make sure their points are the “correct” ones, you can utilize pitch deck to share your ideas with your spouse and explain them in the most effective way possible.

Comment below and let us know if you’ve used pitch deck to persuade your wife.

Raising Capital? Consider a Scrolling Web Pitch!

Posted on November 8, 2013May 3, 2023 by Rick E

Raising capital is complicated. There are a lot of pieces to put together, including selling your audience, knowing your valuation, how much capital you need, use of funds and much, much more.

The initial hurdle for countless companies comes at the intersection where entrepreneurs and investors meet. Entrepreneurs often stumble building their investment deck and effectively pitching which makes it that much harder to get people to give you the capital. Investors must believe in you and your abilities to manage and grow a company. The problem is that showing who you are and what you’re capable of can be difficult let alone doing it in a 10-15 minute window.

For that reason you need to put your heart and soul into the pitch, but not just the content, also the delivery. What does a perfect pitch look like, you ask? That is a matter of opinion and you’ll never see the “perfect pitch deck”, but recently its all about presenting your company in a unique way to stand out from the crowd. One additional option you may consider is a scrolling web pitch. Scrolling web pitches incorporate a unique scrolling technique that allow the presenter to replace the generic professional pitch deck click-by-click slides with an interactive, more organic and lively design. This is not meant to be a replacement for the face to face pitch but a reinforcement and/or teaser to get the meeting. Here are 4 reasons why you need to use scrolling web designs for you next investor pitch deck:

Keep Content Up to Date

In using a scrolling web pitch, you are making any future edits or updates to your text as easy as can be. This design simplifies the process and maximizes your use of time.

Stand Out from the Crowd and be unique

Most people email their large, boring and lifeless pitch deck presentations to prospective investors, but it really doesn’t make sense to do that. Without context from the entrepreneur you’ll risk a misinterpreted message or worse they might not even move past the first three slides. Treat you pitch with respect. Why be dull and lifeless when you can be unique, creative and memorable?

Monitor page analytics/views and keep consistency

Data, data, data! Being able to keep your pitch up to date online and get analytics will help you assess the effectiveness of your deck. Additionally, you’ll have created another venue to market in. A great scroll web pitch will be able to sell itself without you being there, so any viewer could potentially bite in your concept.

Create more interest and leads

Analytics and views lead to increased interest and leads. Garnering and extrapolating public interest in your concept will serve as evidence to any potential investors as quality and a great opportunity.

Think of it as pitch deck presentation Darwinism: evolve your pitch or have it die. Though raising capital may be intimidating, challenging, and maybe seemingly impossible at times, the process starts with how you present yourself to people.

If you have any questions or comments about scroll pitches just comment them on this post?

An Angel Investor’s Guide to Cracking the Mind of an Angel Investor

Posted on September 20, 2013May 3, 2023 by Rick E

“I would like to introduce myself to you. I am an angel investor. You may not have met the likes of me. I play several different roles. I am a listener to your presentations, a challenger of your strategy, an investigator conducting due diligence, a negotiator over investment terms, and finally a check writer to fund your growth.”

Who better to give advice for an angel investment pitch, than an angel investor himself? Edward Harley, Angel Investor and member of the Keiretsu Forum, lays out exactly what you need to do to become part of the “top 5% of all presenters.” Though his context lies in the world of investor pitches, his advice is true and useful for anybody presenting about any subject.

Usually, you’ll have about 10 minutes to “pitch” your idea to an investor. Within those few minutes you need to successfully tell Harley’s seven stories:

1. The ‘fundamental business logic’ story

This is the part of your pitch deck that illustrates how you don’t just have an idea, but a logical approach to making a business out of it. Great ideas are valuable, but relatively useless without proper execution. Its great execution that changes the world. That is what investors, and really just audiences want understand from you; the steps you took or are taking to realize your idea. In other words, share your story.

2. The ‘total available market’ story

This section of your pitch deck is essentially the evidence you are using to support your “fundamental business logic story.” You are highlighting the path your business will walk on, and explaining how wide the passageway is.

3.’This is a $50m to $100m business’ story

Continuing on the “evidence” of your business logic story, this portion of the pitch deck is meant to display a sense of value. Your need to make your audience understand that your business venture is not only credible, but an enticing and convenient investment for them.

4. ‘The product can be differentiated’ story

Here, you’ll show why and how you are different and/or better than your competition. This is a key point. Your audience wants to know and identify your specialty. After all, it is that very specialty that people will remember you by. Harley says it that his “expectation is that [he] will hear about a solution that is significantly better for the customer than all their existing choices, by ‘significantly better’, [he] mean[s] 10X better.”

5. ‘The product/service can be sold’ story

This area of your pitch deck should circle back to the past four sections. Here you should reaffirm that your product or service is reliable and has the potential to lead to satisfying results.

6. ‘This management team can do it’ story

You’ve made your case for the product or service, now you have to establish your credibility, and the credibility of your team, as a valuable, effective, and reliable workers.

7. ‘This is a good investment for the investor’ story

This portion of the pitch deck should sum everything up and reiterate the essential selling points. Here you are making the idea of an investment, sale, or whatever call-to-action concrete.

At the end of all this, it is time to ask yourself through the mentality of an investor, “Could I, your listener, replay to another person the very basics of your venture and how your target customers will benefit from using your product?”

If the answer to that is yes, then you have successfully boosted your chances to realize your pitch deck’s call-to-action.

Harley sums it up best by saying, “If you can passionately tell me those 7 stories while building a rapport with me where I eventually become an investor, we can jump over obstacles together. In addition to being a source of funds, I am a member of a terrific network of successful colleagues who are willing to assist you in your entrepreneurial effort. Our knowledge is both deep and wide, crossing industries, technologies, markets, and distribution channels. Thus, I encourage you to make the upfront effort to tell me your story. We can be successful together!”

Reference:

How Entrepreneurs can be Successful Presenters to Investors (PDF) – Edward P. Harley, Angel Investor, Keiretsu Forum Member

Aflac Uses pitchdeck.com to Present a New Data-Heavy Sales Strategy to Its Team

Posted on August 26, 2013May 3, 2023 by Rick E

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 Should a Pitch Deck Cost?

Posted on August 16, 2013May 3, 2023 by Rick E

“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?”

How much does a pitch deck cost? — 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.

How much does a ppt deck cost? — 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 Importance of StoryBoarding: You Wouldn’t Make a Movie Without Writing a Script

Posted on August 15, 2013May 3, 2023 by Rick E

Want to try out a professional storyboard used by PitchDeck.com? Download our template here!

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.

SlideGenius uses storyboards to plot out and organize each of its professional presentations. — **pitch**deck.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.

References:

“Caddyshack.” Rottentomatoes.

“Study Shows Simplicity Is Key When Creating a PowerPoint Presentation.” SlideGenius. July 24, 2013.

3 AngelList Startups Revolutionizing the World of Pitch Decks

Posted on July 12, 2013May 3, 2023 by Rick E

In 1965, Intel co-founder Gordon E. Moore wrote a predictive paper in which he described the phenomenon that the number of components in integrated circuits had doubled every year since their inception, and predicted that they would continue to do so. David House, another Intel exec at the time, then established the law that the number actually doubles approximately 18 months. Moore’s Law, as it is now famously called, is not only uncannily accurate, but is now serves as a long-term planning guide for the entire semiconductor industry.

What can we learn from this? We can understand that times are changing, and FAST! This is true in almost every industry, including the world of pitch decks.

We have gone from speeches from balconies, to hand written poster boards, to professional pitch deck, to presentation experts working as pitch deck consultants. While the presentational industry may not be doubling exactly every 18 months, it sure is growing quickly.

AngelList has quickly emerged as an indispensable resource for connecting entrepreneurs with investors, and has now become a unique platform for the presentational industry. The work AngelList does has given rise to several innovative start-ups rapidly changing the work pitch deck designers are doing. Presentate, 9slides, and GoAnimate are three currently revolutionizing the field of pitch deck design.

Presentate is a new online presentation software that works great in almost any resolution, on any desktop computer, tablet, or smart phone. With Presentate, you won’t have to worry about your pitch deck coming out misshaped or with the wrong font or link. Your layout will be the same everywhere you open it. Their site has a fun example of how it works … I guarantee you’ll be entertained, at least for a minute.

9 SLIDES is another innovative communication that “allows users to capture and share experience of ‘being there’ in the presentation room with a remote audience, anytime, anywhere.” The app is used for interviews, better transparency through inter-company communication, effective training, and interactive demonstrations. “Your audience can watch it on a PC, Mac or even iPad without downloading any app.” 9SLIDES’s concept as a whole is ultimately bringing the world an effective medium to share videos along with corporate pitches in a synchronized format.

GoAnimate is a do-it-yourself animated video website that believes it “might be for fun, to make a pitch deck, to illustrate historical scenes, make a demo video, or produce a piece of professional training.” With that they realize “producing video can be difficult, time-consuming and expensive. And sometimes it still comes out dark and blurry, with muffled sound.” Because of this issue, GoAnimate was created to minimize difficulty, hassle, and expense of video design and implementation. They have a sleek concept and pride themselves on being the fastest and easiest way to make a video!

Each of these start-ups is uniquely contributing to the prevailing advances in the pitch deck industry. We wish them the best, and know they will continue to impress us!

Fortune 500

Mid Market

Small Business

Startups

Agency Partners

Robert H.

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