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Presenting

Teaser Deck

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Having a project and great ideas in your head is good. Having the money to finance their implementation is better. When you start to prepare a fundraising, the question of the pitch arises quite quickly. There is bunch of examples on the Internet, but it is not always easy to distinguish between them when you are new to this exercise. So what is the difference between a pitch and teaser deck ?

The startup pitch is a very coded exercise. In a context of increasing number of startup and DemoDays where dozens of startups pitch in a few minutes in large rooms, the startup pitch has become a structured discipline, with its research literature and experts.

When we hear the term “pitch deck” it can be considered a general presentation or principale deck, a presentation used for investors. However, there are variations in pitch deck, depending on where you display them, how you share them, and how you use them, like the “Teaser Deck”.

 

Is it necessary to create different pitch deck versions?

We believe the answer is yes. The reason for creating teaser decks is that each one should serve a different purpose. What is meant to attract attention briefly and very publicly is not necessarily applicable to what finalizes a funding round.

1. Teaser Deck

We’ll start with the shorter version, the teaser pitch deck. In it, you can share your startup’s basics with pretty much anyone you want: from impressing it with your young nephew to posting it on social media.

A teaser deck is a standalone document that’s consumed by itself without a presenter. In most cases, it’s read in one or two minutes, and the goal is to create enough interest for a follow up. It is not a sales pitch.

The image shows a computer with a sample slide

Teaser slides include quicker definitions of your problem, solution, and slide to market. It also includes a quick rundown of your team, as well as your startup’s trajectory to date. In other words, a teaser does not fit into your detailed financial data or confidential information. It is simply a very quick overview of your business.

Remember that teaser decks are meant to be read by themselves. Anyone who watches your teaser should be able to fully grasp it without you showing it to them, and they should be able to cover it within a minute or two of browsing.

  1. Lead with the opportunity resulting of the actual problem

  2. Share your target market and market size precisely with relevant data

  3. keep financial details out of your teaser

  4. Get the core team in context

Keep your teaser deck short with a maximum of 4 content slides. Remember that your audience won’t spend more than a couple of minutes on it.

2. Pitch deck

Other scenarios, like investor demand, require you to have the main pitch deck ready. They usually want to know a little more about your business than what’s on a teaser.

However, this request is not limited to this. Investors will actually try to get a picture of your business based on the major deck documents you send. There is so much information about pitching the way you do business that the main thing is more deck than what we tend to accept.

This is where adherence to known ideals for creating a paid pitch deck system. If you do your homework, you’ll find plenty of ideas for the sections that an effective pitch deck includes.

The reason you need to have the main deck separate from other pitch deck formats is precisely to show on these occasions that you are professional and serious about a great business opportunity. Think of it as a committed business card for venture capitalists, to some extent; a deck card that will start conversations about fundraising.

3. Corporate deck

There will be a time when more and more information about your business will naturally need to be shared, and this more comprehensive format of a pitch deck should help you achieve that goal as the discussions about your fundraising cycle begin to turn. more and more serious.

Prepare them by making a fuller pitch deck version, including business model details, before entering the fundraising cycle scene. This will save you considerable and much needed hours of sleep.

image contains team slide of company presentation

Fully share your pitch decks

We recommend that you share the only pitch decks with investors who are serious about doing business with you. Be careful not to give too much information about your private business to someone who is just playing games and wasting your time. There are unfortunately many people who serve as RCs, but they just don’t have the means or the experience to do so.

Differentiating between a reputable investor and one who is not can be difficult, but let interest in your business be manifested in the frequency of email exchanges and meeting needs.

Ultimately, being able to do this difference will be part of your business knowledge, but the advice we can give you now is to keep an eye out for those who waste your time and never really complete an investment cycle. Some of these so-called “entrepreneurs” sometimes try to get into an apprenticeship.

On the other hand, for investors with a good reputation (and we hope you will do as much research on people interested in your business as any serious entrepreneur), sharing your experience as you go along. Funding discussions progress should not be a problem.

Slidebean has interesting sharing and collaboration functions for your presentations, which will allow you to follow their performance.

Corporate and Pitch Deck

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What should a corporate pitch desk and a pitch desk contain

Many companies require funds to finance their evolution and thus allow their model to be scalable, whether during the development or seed stage. Funds can originate from an internal source (partners or founders). But most of the time, this is external funding from investment funds or Business Angels. Finding investors is not easy, however, given the large number of often competing projects.

It is therefore necessary to differentiate oneself from successfully completing the presentation elements desired by potential investors. To do this, here are the presentation documents to prepare.

Succeed in your deck

What is the “slide deck”? This is a text you will use to present your project. This document of about 10 to 20 pages should contain the main ideas of a traditional business plan. It must also resume the following phases:

  • the statement of the problem;

  • the formulation of the solution provided;

  • the reason (s) for which the project is most likely to succeed: “the secret sauce”;

  • the market or data from the various studies carried out, naturally with potential customers. This makes it possible to assess the appetite for the service or product offered: the proof of concept. You must validate here that you have a “Problem market fit”;

  • competition and the orientation adopted towards competitors. The justifications and explanations that will prove that your project is the best;

  • the team selected for the success of the project, because it cannot stand alone;

  • the road map or even “road map”, which sets the basis for the project with the actions to be established for its success;

  • all the objectives (commercial, technological, financial, etc.) that the company sets for itself in the long or short term.

Succeed in your pitch

What is the “pitch”? This is about the presentation of your project. This is an essential step which requires good preparation upstream. Indeed, knowing how to present your project will allow you to better convince investors. To do this, it is first important to follow the deck plan to the letter. Indeed, in order for the pitch to be persuasive, it is essential to start with a good introduction. You should therefore choose an introductory phrase that will arouse the curiosity of the audience.

You should not set aside anything afterwards with regard to the form. It is therefore advisable to favor a pleasant visual. The latter will have the advantage of catching the eye and will help you better capture the attention of your listeners. Powerpoint support will do the trick. However, you should avoid putting too many gadgets or images that could confuse the audience. The information you want to convey must be powerful. They should indeed serve as a memo for the audience.

The logo, important data and a few keywords form the common thread of the pitch. Your attitude is also one of the keys to the success of your pitch. How do you want your investors to be convinced of your project if you are not yourself? You must therefore be convinced of your project and show dynamism and enthusiasm. You should also avoid being too static, because good presentation also involves body language. Speak in short sentences, stay calm and smile.

Organize and prioritize your Pitch Deck
15 slides to convince:

  1. Coverage

  2. Finding

  3. Problem

  4. Value proposition

  5. Solution

  6. Product

  7. Business Model

  8. Market Size

  9. Market Adoption

  10. Market Validation

  11. Competition

  12. Competitive advantages

  13. RoadMap

  14. Financial Needs

  15. Team / advisors

Product Deck

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How to make a powerful sales presentation and product deck ?

The whole point of a party is to sell a product or service, and yet we’ve all seen a boring party at least once. Unfortunately for the speaker, we did not remember much. You don’t have to remind yourself that a presentation has to appeal to your audience’s emotions to be impactful. So you have to develop a common thread, tell a story, create twists and never neglect the form if you want to interest your customers. If you’re wondering where to start, here are the steps you can take to make a powerful business presentation and product deck template.

Start by writing the outline of your product deck

The best presentations are those that follow a common thread. You need to know exactly what will show on your last slide before you even start writing the first one. The point of departure for design is very often an insight which is defined by the Mercator as: “the consumer’s perception of an unresolved problem or dilemma concerning the category of products in which the brand operates”. From this insight, you will be able to write the message and set up the course of your presentation. Here is a very simple example: if you have to present a product catalog to a customer who wants to sell down jackets to athletes, the insight could be “the colder it is, the more athletes dress warmer”. The resulting message would be: “play sport in any weather”. Normally, if you have done your product catalog well, you already have the insight and the message that you have converted into a teaser on the cover. Build your presentation the same way. The solution to this problem is to purchase one of the down jackets. Always keep this in mind. So start your presentation by presenting the problem(s).

Remove the superfluous from your slides

A good product deck template contains very little text. Don’t use whole sentences, prefer keywords. No need to insert all your pitch in your slides. This may harm you. Remember that your audience’s attention span is limited: the person you are trying to convince may receive an SMS, an email, doze off for a moment … etc. Limiting the text of your presentations means limiting the cognitive fatigue of your listeners. Most of the time, you have to create slides that will be read in 3 or 4 seconds. The best way is to put only one idea per slide. This will allow you to create suspense, but will also leave a lot of room for all your oratory digressions. Guy Kawasaki recommends putting only two words at most per slide, taking the age of the oldest person in your audience and dividing it by two to get your font size. He adds that a minimum size of 28 or 30 is optimal for people in the back of the room to read you. If you want to be easy to read, use sans serif fonts. According to the journaldunet, “a study has shown that the two best fonts to use for a presentation are Gilles Sans and Souvenirs Lt.”

Insert animations to multiply the power of your ideas

To give your product deck template more impact, add animations. They will clearly help you bring the information you are presenting sequentially. Thus, it will give you the opportunity to create more surprise by not showing all of a sudden. Take the example of the product catalog for down jackets. Imagine an animation of a man running in the rain, well protected by his down jacket. All of a sudden, the rain turns to snow, and the snow then turns to hail. Finally, your catalog teaser appears: “Exercise in any weather”. This is still a basic example, but it gives you a glimpse of just how much animation can give your idea more power if you know how to play with suspense before revealing it. In addition to playing with the emotions of your audience, the animations will be used to draw their eyes to the information you want to highlight and to hold their attention for longer. France Culture declares that “the ability of human beings to concentrate has dropped by 4 seconds in 15 years, to become shorter than that of a goldfish”. Animations can be a solution to this attention deficit, but be careful not to insert too much either. Always ask yourself these two questions before inserting an animation into your presentation:
-Does this animation serve my narration?
-Does my animation allow my audience to better understand the idea I am presenting?

Get ready for the big day

Steve Job is considered one of the best public speakers of all time and he was practicing three weeks before his presentations. Success does not come overnight, it is not the night before you start training. If you want to master your subject from start to finish, you need to prepare yourself. This will save you the annoying blanks that can discredit you in the eyes of your clients and allow you not to read your slides. Dave Paradi, an author who has published more than 9 books on this subject, has conducted a study which proves that what irritates the audience the most during a presentation is the speakers reading the slides. We cannot control the things that are beyond our control and foresee everything, but we can at least prepare and try to anticipate events!

Executive Summary

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5 Crucial Parts of Executive Summary

Executives are, perhaps, the busiest people in an organization or a company. They have a lot of things on their plates and every second is precious to them. It is important for them to know everything about the organization. However they do not have enough time to analyze all the details. That is why it is important to deliver an executive project report that is brief, but effectively communicates the precise status of an undertaking.

The key to this is to craft the report in a way that the executive will have just enough data for them to get a concrete grasp on where the project stands at that time.

Note that it is much easier to build an Executive Summary based on you Business Plan, So better to Strat with your BP first.

Questions to Ask Yourself Before Starting to Craft an Executive Summary

When preparing an Executive Summary, be guided by the following:

  • Who will read it? It is important to remember that the reader of the Executive Summary should be able to find all the necessary information they need to know about the project. There shouldn’t be a need to read all the other reports. Even if the executive does read all the reports and other documents pertaining to the project, the Executive Summary should stand out on its own.
  • What is the main point? Try to come up with two to three sentences summarizing what the project is all about. It’s just like when someone asks you what the report is about and you try to answer the question in only a few sentences.
  • What is the purpose of the project? Briefly discuss the purpose of the project—whether it is to launch a new campaign, develop a new policy, conduct a survey or research, or test a product, etc.
  • If there are too many sections in other reports, which ones among those points are crucial to the understanding and appreciation of the project? Depending on their purpose, other types of project reports contain too many details, even if these are arranged into topics and subtopics. Some of these subjects or subtopics may not really be necessary if you only need to provide a summary of the project. Eliminate those which may not be needed immediately, and also any other information that will not affect the understanding and appreciation of the project if left out.
  • What is the recommended course of action, if any? This part may be one of the most important points of the project and must also be highlighted in the Executive Summary. Briefly, but concisely, discuss the recommendations for the project based on its results and key findings.
  • What are the benefits or consequences of this recommended courses of action?This is the other section that the readers will deem most valuable. This will enable decision makers to decide whether to accept the recommendations based on the project’s results and findings, or not. There is a limitation of how much can be discussed in an Executive Summary report. This means that it is important for the writer of the report to capture the essence of the entire project in a just few sentences without losing its value. In this section, the benefits that the organization will derive from the recommended courses of action, and its impacts, both positive and negative should be clear.

5 Crucial Parts of an Executive Summary

  1. Project Summary

    In two to three sentences, provide a brief description of the project, its purpose, and the main problem or issue it was supposed to resolve or address.

  2. Background

    Provide a brief history of the project and cite a particular event which led to its conception. Do not forget to mention if the project is the first of its kind or a part of a series of projects.

    It is also good to mention here if the project is carried out in partnership with other organizations or institutions, or if it has been funded by one.

  3. Process

    Discuss what departments are involved, how they participate, what their contributions are—and how long it takes for completion. Give an account of the key challenges and the problems or issues encountered during the project’s implementation. Also, highlight how the team can resolve and address such issues.

  4. Results and Conclusions

    Provide a brief discussion of the results and key findings of the project and how the organization can use this information. Briefly, discuss how the project resolved the central problem or issue it was to address, and whether the project really provided a solution to the problem or issue at hand.

  5. Recommendations

    Briefly, explain how the findings and results will be translated into actual policy or strategy. If there will be changes as a consequence of the creation of a new policy or strategy, discuss how they will impact the organization, the resources needed, and other matters the shift will entail such as any new procedures, guidelines, or business directions.

Common Pitfalls in Writing an Executive Summary

  1. Though it still needs to be as comprehensive as possible, providing too many details defeats the purpose of an Executive Summary. Specific details belong to other types of project report.
  2. Using terms in the Executive Summary which are different from those employed in other reports about the same project is confusing. As much as possible, observe uniformity by using the same terms and concepts used in other reports.
  3. Mismatching contents will also generate confusion. The Executive Report should have the same information as other reports, and the major points of the rest of the reports should also be reflected in the Executive Summary.

Executive Project Report

An Executive Project Report should include what the team is doing at the time of the report, the most tangible result or output so far, the major risks associated with the project, and what the executive can do for the project (e.g. decisions to be made, approvals needed, interventions).

Here are some points to take note:

Concentrate on the most important details

A project manager may be proud about developments on the project he is handling and be over-enthusiastic when reporting them. This means that they give a blow-by-blow account of how each of the tasks was carried out. This might work in some other kinds of project report but not in an Executive Project report.

The report can center on these four major points—the current phase of the project, the status of the project, milestones achieved, and the target date of completion of the current phase of the project, or the project, as a whole.

Be straight to the point

It is a skill to be able to provide a complete and comprehensive project status report in just a few words. One way to do this is through the use of bullet points to convey the message of the report. Express each idea in short but informative sentences and, if possible, refrain from using adverbs and adjectives unless the report requires the use of such.

Do not forget about project milestones

There are important details about project milestones which need to be included in the status report. These details are enough to paint an image of how the project is progressing. Include the name of the milestone, the percentage of its completion, the planned and the actual start and finish dates. It is advisable to list the milestones or the tasks chronologically to avoid confusion.