Investment term analysis: Pitch vs Deck
Deck = a slide prepared purely for marketing presentations or financing, with minimal text + images to assist presentations.
Pitch = a form of expression in which entrepreneurs convey project content to investors in a brief and effective manner in a very short time and arouse interest.
What is Pitch?
The word Pitch comes from the professional term “pitching” in baseball, and the purpose of Pitch is to let the catcher successfully catch the ball he throws.
In the process of entrepreneurship and investment, Pitch means: to introduce investors in a short and very effective way, so as to make them interested in your project/product and then develop a deeper level of cooperation.
Why do we need a pitch?
Although anyone may have the most brilliant idea in the world, if you cannot effectively convince/attract others (partners, investors, users…) to accept it, then everything is equal to zero.
More importantly, when you have the opportunity to introduce a project to others, if you don’t prepare a PPT and can only rely on your language, then it will be very difficult: you may be a technician or designer, and this kind of speech opportunity that appears at any time requires you to become a eloquent speaker, and you may attract the other party to have greater interest in your product with just a few words.
What are the common scenarios for Pitch?
The correct answer is all scenarios:
Pitch investors = financing; Pitch companies = cooperation;
Pitch media = reporting; Pitch talents = recruiting talents;
Pitch users = marketing; Pitch governments = policies;
So creating a high-quality Pitch is extremely important to you. In order to use the corresponding methods and content to Pitch in different scenarios, you may even have to prepare 3–5 different versions of Pitch with different information.
Suppose you attend an investor party, then as soon as you meet, you only have 10 seconds to quickly whet the other party’s appetite, otherwise you may miss an opportunity.
If the other party expresses a higher interest and is willing to talk to you, then you can take out the prepared, more detailed and accurate pitch containing more information.
What is a Deck?
A Deck is a short presentation format, usually written in PowerPoint, that is used to quickly and effectively summarize your core competitive information such as product features, team achievements, and business plans to different audiences. It is usually used in offline or online meetings with potential investors, users, partners, and associates.
Importance of Deck
Technically speaking, whether it is PPT, BP or Deck, they are all created and presented in the format of slides, because no one reads business plans with dozens or hundreds of pages in document format.
The reasons are mainly the following:
1) Slides usually have a high information density, and business people represented by investors usually want to understand the core characteristics and competitiveness of a project or company in the shortest time.
2) The document format is relatively rigid, while slides are more graphic and helpful for understanding.
3) The document format is designed for printing, while slides are more convenient for demonstration and explanation, and can also be printed into books.
We now understand what Pitch and Deck are. Usually, Pitch and Deck appear at the same time, and in a meeting, Pitch+Deck is unbeatable. The presentation plus your eloquence will quickly attract investors or users.
Imagine a presentation that can condense your brilliant business idea, market potential, and winning team into a concise and engaging format. This is the magic of Pitch deck, similar to sales battle cards. This presentation is your chance to get funding, build partnerships, and inspire enthusiasm for your startup.
Next, let’s talk about the issues that need to be paid attention to during the production of the Pitch Deck.
In fact, most people don’t want to read your business plan in detail. For investors who really take you seriously (especially investors you want to find), you can probably get four slides to attract their attention.
So, let’s assume that you let them open the deck…but before that, what format should the deck use? If you send them a Keynote presentation, or toss a password-protected link, these things that don’t work immediately, they may not be interested in reading it, so stick to using Powerpoint.
The Pitch Deck Itself
‘As we said, you have 2 to 4 slides to grab my attention. Use them wisely.’
In general, a deck (not counting the appendix) should be around 12 to 15 slides. Too many and the other party will be overwhelmed and the persuasiveness will be weakened. Too few and you may not be able to make your point.
Next, first, before making your pitch deck: Think about how your presentation will go? How do you plan to hone your WHO, WHAT, WHY, HOW, and WHY NOW to attract investors? How quickly can you communicate your value proposition?
After thinking it through, you can now create your perfect deck.
The slides should include the following:
Company
Problem
Competition
Solution
Demo/Use Cases
Value Proposition
Expected Revenue
Business Model
Future Growth/Plans
Market Size
Team
Questions/Use of Funding
Contact Information
After this information is determined, you need to design your presentation. If you have excellent design skills, you can do it yourself and complete all the work by yourself. But if you are a technician or planner and do not have the ability to design an excellent PPT, or you do not have much time and energy to do this work, you might as well try to use AI to help you make PPT (you can try Bestppt). Bestppt is an AI tool that automatically generates pitch decks
Bestppt can output the outline of the presentation after you enter the production theme. After you check and modify it and then choose the appropriate template, you can complete the production of the presentation within 3 minutes. You only need to modify it online, save and download it. And Bestppt provides a large number of templates that can perfectly adapt to various industries.
Conclusion
Pitch decks are hard to make, but they are extremely important. You are asking someone to give you a ton of money to help you grow your business from almost no resources. There are too many founders looking for investors to invest their money. You have to make the most of yourself and your time, otherwise they will keep hearing sub-par pitches.
So, hopefully the above points can help you perfect your pitch deck and get the meeting.