Competition for investment is fierce. If you’re talking to prospective venture capital or angel investors, you can’t afford a single dead moment in your presentation. Every word, every slide, counts when big money is on the line.
Whether you are starting to create your investor pitch deck or working to refine it, these 3 tips will help you give a killer investor presentation.
Make Every Slide Easy to Understand
A strong pitch deck is always clear.
Too often, investor presentations can tip one of two ways – either going light on the important information or burying an investor under too much detail.
Remember that no-one knows your business like you, so make sure you don’t skip the basics about what your product or service is, the benefits, the market opportunity and the potential risks.
At the same time, make sure that you are only including key information. Your pitch deck exists to support your presentation and vice-versa. They don’t need to be a mirror of each other.
Keep ideas to a maximum of one per slide so that they can be quickly grasped by a potential investor. Also, make sure that you don’t fall into the trap of using jargon and acronyms that might confuse your audience.
If they can’t understand what your business does and the opportunity for them, they won’t invest
Tell a Story
A good investor pitch deck tells a story via the flow of information.
Asking yourself the questions that an investor might – such as ‘how big is the market’ or ‘how will you deliver this’ – can help you to order information in a sensible order. Not only will you pre-empt some of an investor’s questions, but your presentation will be more memorable as the information won’t be disjointed.
Remember that the ‘story’ in your investor presentation isn’t just about your business, but the benefits for the investor in exchange for their support. Make sure that they understand what they have to gain from this opportunity.
Cut Words
It’s easy for the length of pitch decks to spiral when you’re trying to include everything you can to persuade an investor to hand over their money.
However, if your investor presentation is too long you may lose their attention and your potential investment with it. Another common issue is overly wordy slides which make it harder for an investor to follow along.
It can also give the impression that you don’t know your business proposition well enough to communicate it in a short and simple way.
Always look for where you can cut words or communicate information in a visual way via graphics, images, bullets, charts, graphs, quotes and so on.
Your investor will be able to grasp the information faster and focus on what you’re actually saying because they’re not trying to read paragraphs of text.
Give yourself the best chance of getting the investment your business needs. Get in touch for help creating pitch decks and investor presentations that will get investors’ attention.