At Auxano we have received numerous pitch decks till date.
Having spent hours into research over these decks, common observations yielded were:
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- The flow of the pitch decks greatly coincided with the templates available online
- The headings were perfectly in place but the context was usually missing.
A common practice noticed was:
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- Browse the first 3 pages over the internet for templates
- Identifying a suitable flow to structure the business pitch
- Adapt content in a similar pattern as illustrated
Key criteria for drawing the pitch deck were:
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- No. of slides
- No. of words per slide
The decks were filled with:
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- Sound bites
- Multi-billion dollar market size
- Exponentially growing revenue and valuation projection
Castles were being built in the air which would catch the viewer’s eye but miss the engagement due to absence of the underlying foundation. These castles a.k.a pitch decks were being sent as mass mailers & flooding inboxes but leading to very low engagement ratios.
The contributors to the unengaging pitch decks were:
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- The relevance of “headings” reduced to just titles of the slide
- Lack of critical business information owing to adherence of strict slide and word limit
- Increased irrelevance of data due to biased approach used to float the castle
- Missing elementary data sources, hypothesis and methods of forecasting
Interactions in due course revealed the prospective investors – learning from experience & not devoting time on the decks due to
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- Over supply of decks
- Factitious content rendering no substantial learnings
The approach adopted was surface level filtration leading to low engagement & missed impactful opportunities.
The identified inefficiencies could be eliminated by:
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- Preparing a Master deck with comprehensive information
- Preparing multiple abridged versions
- Sharing data relevant to the stages of communication – Introduction, Early Interest, Discussion
- Creating & Sharing pitch in form of presentation as well as short videos
- Looping/Engaging the connected investor for lifetime with the business updates
Such practice would render increase engagement, value addition, develop relations and most importantly hasten the fund raising.
Stay tuned to create an ocean impact!!
