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PART
I
PREPPING YOUR DECK
A good pitch deck can be the difference between exiting an investorās office with a big fat check or a big fat frown. If your business is a shiny skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, then your deck is the architectural blueprint for how to build it. Itās the bones of your business plan. Without it, things will fall apart.
A pitch deck is also an effective way to put your elevator pitch onto paper. It forces you to organize and present your big ideas in a concise and coherent way, peeling off the fat and adding the muscle as you progress.
Like a good elevator pitch, a good deck is short, sweet, and memorable. How short? Some experts recommend that it only be 5 to 10 pages and 20 minutes long in duration. They should be heavy on the images and light on the text. And speaking of text, make it big and bold. This is your business planānot an eye exam. Twelve-point font need not apply.
Another number you should be mindful of is the 90/10 rule. Ninety percent of your deck should focus on the problem, while 10 percent should focus on the solution. People want to be able to relate to the problem youāre solving. The bigger that problem, the more valuable the solution.
Always insist on presenting your deck in person. Face-to-face meetings are far more effective than an email correspondence, only to be lost in a stack of unread messagesāor even worse, the spam folder.
Pitch decks are meant to be heard not seen. Anyone over the age of five can read aloud; itās the master pitcher who knows that they should be the center of attention and not some pixels on a screen. Think of your pitch less as a presentation and more of a conversation. Your goal is to get your audience fired up about your business. A good deck can serve as a supporting actor while you run the show.
But be warned, the pitch deck can also be a crutch. Entrepreneurs can become so enamored with their PowerPoint masterpiece that they forget the whole human interaction component. Their slides are covered with words and images that look more like a subway map than a sales presentation. These people use their slides as a safety net, reading from them with their faces buried in their laptops rather than addressing their listeners directly.
In the end, the best pitch decks tell a story with clarity and focus. Like all stories, they have a protagonist (you or your business) an antagonist (the problem in the marketplace), and a resolution (your business strategy). If you can get those points across by the end of the meeting, you should be golden.
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CHAPTER
1
HOW NOT TO WRITE A BUSINESS PRESENTATION
Tim Denning
My friend asked for advice on her pitch deck. She sent me two copies (always a worry). The first pitch deck looked pretty good because sheās clever.
I wondered why she sent the second deck. I opened the file and there were 30 slides, all filled with text!
I saw red. Swear words were right on the tip of my tongue to describe this crime against humanity. I was fired up! On the phone call to give my feedback, I did my best to practice a Zen state but within minutes demanded, āWho wrote that train wreck of a presentation?ā
The answer was ā¦ the accountant!
This second pitch deck reminded me of the long junk messages I get in my LinkedIn inbox every day that tell me way too much information about something that isnāt tailored to my needs.
When it comes to pitch decks, more than ten slides is a good indicator that youāre on the wrong track. You know youāve got it wrong when itās not simple. As Steve Jobs said, āSimple can be harder than complex: You have to work hard to get your thinking clean to make it simple. But itās worth it in the end because once you get there, you can move mountains.ā
What Is a Pitch Deck?
A pitch deck is a PowerPoint or slide presentation to persuade key decision-makers to either buy from you or invest in your business. Here are some basics to consider when creating a good pitch deck:
ā¢ Focus 90 percent of the deck on the problem your business solves and 10 percent on the solution.
ā¢ Mention your competitors if asked, but donāt bother having a competitors slide. No one is going to trust your biased appraisal of the market.
ā¢ Use clear language, and avoid acronyms and jargon.
ā¢ Make the pitch deck highly visual with the aid of a graphic designer.
Your pitch deck is not:
ā¢ A glossy magazine
ā¢ A scope of work or implementation document
ā¢ A 100-page brochure of every product your business has ever sold and will sell
ā¢ An operations or instruction manual
ā¢ A history of your industry since the beginning of time
ā¢ The job history of every employee working for you
The End Game
Never send a pitch deck you havenāt first presented in person. Closing a sale very rarely happens via email. When someone says to you, āJust email me the pitch deck, and Iāll come back to you,ā itās the same as when you tell the car salesperson, āCan you send the brochures out to me and Iāll get back to you?ā
The goal in sales is always to get a face-to-face meeting and bring along your pitch deck. At the end of the meeting (and only at the end) you can then send a copy to the attendees to look over.
Presenting a Pitch Deck
The most common pitch deck mistake is too many slides and way too many words on each slide.
People buy from people. Your slides should complement what you are saying, not be the focal point.
Professionals do this by showing a slide and then blacking out the screen once everyone has seen it. This way, people arenāt focused on anything but you.
Good slides have very few words and are highly visual. The detail should be coming from the words you are saying. Present your proposal using simple language. Some will know what you are talking about in depth, but others wonāt. Cater to the whole audience.
The goal of your pitch deck is to get the key decision-makers excited and then back up that feeling with well-researched, customer-tested facts.
The million-dollar question is: Who does the selling? Not the accountant. In the example above, there was one big problem. Someone with no sales background wrote the pitch deck. This is common practice in startups (including my past ventures). For a long time, many of the businesses I have been involved with never made any money. We hired relatively unskilled call center workers to do the selling. We paid them minimum wage and then became obsessed with hiring as many people as possible. This is where the problem lies.
Then one day we got some good advice and decided to only hire quality salespeople from then on. The first guy we hired was paid more than double what we had ever paid before. We gave him an incredibly generous bonus structure on top to ensure he knew that he was only required to do one thing well: sell as much as he could. Within a single day, he outsold everyone else on the sales team. I quickly realized that hiring people who are not trained salespeople is a disaster.
Your business cannot make revenue unless you make sales and you need the best talent there is to do that.
The fastest way to lose money is to have money going out the back door through poor sales efforts. You need high-quality salespeople combined with a good pitch deck to win business.
Sales is harder than it looks. Everyone thinks they know how to sell because they may have worked behind the counter at Macyās 20 years ago, but thatās customer serviceānot sales. Thereās a difference.
Donāt have the warehouse worker, accountant, financial controller, IT person, operations manager, or anyone other than a salesperson do the selling.
Hire salespeople who have proven results and ask them to show you. Find people who can take complex problems and simplify them. Find people who can make problems inspiring, beautiful, and a pleasure to solve when you do business with them.
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CHAPTER
2
WHY YOU NEED A MILLION-DOLLAR PITCH BEFORE YOU START A BUSINESS
Grant Cardone
You should not try to start a business until you can clearly articulate how you help people in a pitch. Pitching is vital to your success, so it makes sense that you need to master it before you can launch a business. Why? It forces you to focus on what you can do right now and what problem you solve in the marketplace. Itās the value of your business in just a few words.
You will need to pitch your product, idea, or service to:
ā¢ Turn strangers into customers
ā¢ Attract investment partners
ā¢ Hire new employees
Before anyone is going to do business with you, you have to get attention. A million-dollar pitch is a short commercial that will attract attention and make the benefits of your company tangible to a customer. It should be 20 seconds or less and help the person take an immediate interest in what you do. Itās a simple statement with a specific goal.
How Much Time Have You Invested in Perfecting Your Pitch?
If youāre saying to yourself right now that what you do is ātoo complicatedā to put in a few words, you probably lack clarity about what youāre doing. It might also be a sign youāre only thinking about making money instead of how you can add value to others.
A lot of people cannot articulate their value in a few words.
There are so many distractions out there, so you need a well-crafted pitch to cut through all the noise. People call me all the time on my shows with long-winded explanations about their business. When youāre pitching, no one wants to hear about your company history. I donāt say that to be disrespectful, but because itās just the truth. You have to give someone a reason to want to ask more about youāthatās what a good pitch does. The other party knows the immediate benefit and whether itās big enough for them to want to learn more.
What Can You Do Right Now?
Have you ever thought, āI could do that tooā when you heard about someone doing a particular activity to become successful? I always laugh when people tell me stories like this. Letās agree that you can learn anything. Hereās my question: is your idea something that you could do if you learned it, or is it something that you can do right now?
Before you can be successful, you have to base what you do in your reality. Ask yourself what you can do right now, not what you could do in the future. Unless youāre planning a career change, assess your income-producing skills that you currently have and center your pitch around that.
What Problem Does this Solve?
After you figure out what your skill is, you have to ask what problem it solves. If a lot of people are having the same problem, then it could be a great idea for a business. Who is your audience? Who do you already know in the marketplace that needs your product or that wants your product? Most likely, itās not going to be people around your street corner. Look for a market that already exists, and see how what you do can help that market.
Putting It Together
Now that you have a business idea based on these two requirements, create a 20-second-or-less com...
