How To Nail Your Pitch Deck’s Narrative

How to nail your pitch deck’s narrative?

Having the right facts and data points is good. Everyone has that covered. How you present the narrative in your pitch deck can be far more pivotal.

How do you nail this vital part of the mission when getting ready to pitch investors who can help bring your vision to becoming reality?

A Great Startup Is Built On…

What is the key to building a successful startup? Is it the business idea? The market size? The IP you’ve registered? 

These things can all help. Though it is really all about the narrative. The story that it told. 

This is true of your startup as a whole. It makes all the difference in individual sales and securing sizable distribution channels. It is true for getting the best team to buy into the mission. For achieving the best M&A outcomes, and certainly for fundraising. 

If you start digging into it you’ll quickly find that the real value is all found, unlocked, and created by the story. So, how do you unfold a great one in your pitch deck and presentation so that you not only maximize all of these other parts of your business, but your fundraising efforts too?

Keep in mind that in fundraising storytelling is everything. In this regard for a winning pitch deck to help you here, take a look at the template created by Silicon Valley legend, Peter Thiel (see it here) that I recently covered. Thiel was the first angel investor in Facebook with a $500K check that turned into more than $1 billion in cash.

Remember to unlock the pitch deck template that is being used by founders around the world to raise millions below.

Find the Best Story for Your Pitch Deck

You do have a story. Your startup has a story. There is a great one hiding in there. Use it as a starting point of your business when thinking about how to nail your pitch deck’s narrative?

However, many entrepreneurs, especially technically minded founders either have a hard time seeing it, are afraid to tell it, or they try to replace it with lots of facts and stats, and technical specs. Because that’s how their minds work. Though it is not what sells a startup or an investment opportunity. 

Remember, at least for now you are pitching humans, not algorithms. Maybe soon, just like replicating hit songs, computers will be able to identify hit stories, it’s just not coming in time for this startup, for the next couple of funding rounds.

So your story not only needs to be unique and compelling, but personal.

If you can’t see it, or the story you are telling isn’t working as well as you hoped, then considering bringing in an expert storyteller who does this for a living. Have a conversation with them. Let them extract your best story and spin it in the best possible way. 

The Characters

Who is this band of characters in your story? 

Every great story, book, movie, and startup has a great cast of characters. Think Lord of the Rings, The Fantastic Four or the PayPal Mafia. Who are yours?

Who are the heroes on the journey? Who else will be a part of their journey and can also play a notable role, like the wizard in the Wizard of Oz? This covers your founders, advisors, and investors. 

Then you have your customers and employees. They are all telling themselves a story too. They want to participate in a great story. Like buying the latest iPhone, even if it is ridiculously overpriced, unnecessary, and offers little tangible improvement over the current phone. 

Or buying a $500 bottle of Tesla tequila. Or being a part of a world-changing that can stop climate change. Think about how you can include them when figuring out how to nail your pitch deck’s narrative?

These are parts of the story that will show up on your cover slide, team slide, competitive advantage, and product slides.

Your team slide also describes how life has prepared you for this moment and to be the one to champion this problem and bring the solution. 

Your Why

Your why can be the most important anchor of your story. It can be the most compelling part of the story that convinces others to come along for the ride. It also gives investors confidence that you will stick with this venture through all of the daily challenges. This is the big differentiating factor in startups and entrepreneurs that win. Even more so than the idea and product. 

This will probably show up in the problem slide. Be sure to explain why you are driven to solve this problem. How did you encounter it? What examples can you give investors of how they’ve encountered it and have felt this pain before. How will you send a pitch deck to investors?

How Are You Going To Be The Champions Of This Story?

What is the solution you are bringing that will make you the champions of this story and give you victory over the bad guys? What is the superpower you are bringing to the table? 

If there are pieces missing, what are they? What will you need to find or navigate to complete the journey? That’s a good starting point when designing ideas for how to nail your pitch deck’s narrative?

Paint Your Vision Of The Future with a Great Pitch Deck Story

Where the real art of storytelling and fundraising come together is in forecasting your vision of the future. What does the future look like when your startup is really being successful? What does success look like for them? You have to sell the dream. Some of that will be data-based. Yet, it also takes some art. 

Summary

Being technical may be the key to many things in a startup. Including developing a great product and IP, maintaining good unit economics, and establishing a technological competitive advantage. Yet, it is storytelling that unveils and adds the most value. The best narrative wins. Not the best product or most qualified and capable team. If you want the funds and all of the advantages that come with that, get a great story. Just make sure you can back it up with facts too.

You may find interesting as well our free library of business templates. There you will find every single template you will need when building and scaling your business completely for free. See it here.

I cover this detail on the video below called how to nail your pitch deck‘s narrative.

* * *

FULL TRANSCRIPTION OF THE VIDEO:

Hello, everyone. This is Alejandro Cremades, and today we’re going to be talking about how to nail your pitch deck’s narrative. Before we get started, make sure that you hit that subscribe button, and this way, you will never miss out on any of the videos that we roll out every week. 

At the end of the day, the facts are always going to be the facts, but the way that you deliver them is really what matters. In today’s video, we’re going to be talking about the positioning, the packaging, and how you’re going to be putting this in front of investors to get them excited. So, with that being said, let’s get into it.

A great story: That’s something fundamental because ultimately, you want to get that investor excited because they’re investing in you. They’re investing in your future, so you want to model out for them what you’re pitching them, the story and the concept of how the future is going to unfold. What is going to be the next 18 to 24 months? How are you thinking about the execution? Who is going to be part of this? What is a potential outcome, a potential exit? So it’s all about the storytelling. It’s all about how you’re sharing with them that compelling future, that story in which not only are they going to be investing in, but literally, they’re going to be sharing that journey with you. So the way that you create that excitement and the way that you can enroll them in that vision and mission is going to make all the difference here.

Who are the characters of the movie? Remember that every story – because we’re talking about storytelling. Every story has main characters. This is going to be all about the team slide. Here, you’re going to be talking about why you have the right people, why it makes them unique, why this team that you put around you is going to be very adequate to adapt to whatever the market is requesting from your business. And that is what is going to get investors super, super pumped. Essentially, you want to talk about their background. You want to talk about the accomplishments and why you have the right team to execute this and what is going to make you or give you that advantage over some of your competitors that are also directly or indirectly competing against you.

How are you going to be the champions? Every story has a really great ending. It has an ending where the main character is coming on top. Here’s the same thing. You want to really showcase to them what your solution is and why that solution has an edge. Maybe there are some distribution channels that you have. Maybe there are some pre-existing relationships that you’re going to be leveraging, perhaps in the form of partnerships to kick things into high gear, and those are some of the things that give you an edge that gives you that advantage over everyone else that your investors are going to want because here’s the thing: anyone can raise money and dump it into Facebook ads, LinkedIn ads, Google Ads, but it’s all about organic growth, especially during the early days because you do not want to waste a lot of time, get a lot of costly events on the marketing side. This is your chance to showcase to the investor what makes you unique and what that solution is, and that edge toward getting this in front of your customers or potential customers.

Then you need to paint your vision. When we’re painting the vision – just a quick question for you, imagine if you were to go to sleep tonight and you wake up in a world, let’s say five years later. It’s a tremendous snooze. You’ve never slept like this in your life, but you wake up in a world where your vision, the vision that you’re designing for this business yourself and also with your team and maybe your co-founders too, and you wake up in a world five years later where that vision is fully realized. What does that world look like? I think that this is a great question that you could ask yourself, that you could ask your team, and perhaps a great internal exercise that can help you come up with that answer that investors ultimately want because it’s all about the vision that you’re painting and getting them excited to jump in.

The narrative over the IP. Here’s the thing. You may be technical; you may have all the intellectual property in the world, but in summary, it’s going to be all about the narrative. It’s not about your past; it’s not about your present; it’s all about your future. So it’s all about making sure that you’re able to deliver that with a bang. There are great examples here on what you could do. You could watch, for example, the video of Steve Jobs when he presented the iPhone back in 2007, how he’s using certain worlds like revolutionary, first time, one of a kind. 

Or the video of Elon Musk where he presents the Tesla Powerwall where it makes you feel like you are part of that audience. He was speaking to 3,000 people, and it truly felt like if you were in that crowd, he was speaking directly to you. So, you want that authenticity to come across. You don’t want to sound robotic because you are ultimately living and breathing what you are doing. So, you’ve really got to make it count.

With that being said, I would love to hear on the comment section below what you’re up to. Hit a Like on this video and subscribe to the channel so that you don’t miss out on all the videos that we’re rolling out every week. And also, don’t forget, if you need any help with your fundraising or any help with your capital raising efforts, feel free to shoot me a note at al*******@pa**************.com. Thank you so much for watching.