Tips To Shape Up Your Investor Materials

You’ll need tips to shape up your investor materials to present to investors. As a business owner, finding investors is a crucial part of your startup company.

It is not always simple for you to find the right investor, and part of this might come down to the investment materials you have and how prepared you are.

If you lack the suitable investor materials and the right message, you will encounter even more difficulties.

Finding the right way to improve your investment materials is your best chance of getting the right opportunity for investors and finding the perfect team to help fund your new venture.

If you’re looking for ways to improve your chances of finding investors, here are some proven ways that will help you improve your investment materials to find the appropriate sponsors for your firm.

Improving Your Pitch Deck

Your pitch deck is one of the most critical aspects of your investor materials because this is what you generally show your investors first.

A fantastic pitch deck will typically be between eight to sixteen slides and not much more than that. Anything more, and you might be sabotaging yourself.

A general outline of an excellent pitch presentation follows this structure:

• Cover Slide
• Company Overview
• Elevator Pitch Slide
• Market Opportunity
• Your Solution
• Your Competitive Advantage
• Team
• Market Traction
• Business Model
• Competition
• Financial Projection

Some individuals might opt for a more detailed presentation to give a better idea of the company, but many people appreciate a short and sweet presentation.

Investors like to have something concise and clear so that they understand your business quickly.

The most important part of preparing your pitch deck is making sure that you have a suitable template.

There are several templates online for you to choose from, and many of them are proven winners when it comes to impressing investors. Use them as tips to shape up investor materials.

Focus on simplicity, your motivation for your new venture, and make sure that you get your investors excited. If you do this, your pitch deck presentation will be a success.

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.

A Clear Business Plan

Creating a clear business plan is another significant step that you can take to improve your marketing and investment materials.

When it comes to your business plan, it shouldn’t be more than one page.

This is crucial because you want to make sure it’s concise and straightforward for your investors. Everything should be brief to swipe through.

Attached to your business plan is usually an executive summary. This is another essential item that you can include and should also only be one page.

Generally, your executive summary should consist of and sum up how you’re going to solve your customer problem and some specifics about your business structure.

Here is a complete list of what you should include in your executive summary:

• Your Customer Problem
• Large Market Opportunity
• Competitive Advantage
• Business Model
• Team
• Financials
• Potential Investor Return

Business plans used to be the essential part of your investment materials, but now it is just an aspect of your collection of materials.

Now, business plans serve as a roadmap for your business and show your investors what lies ahead, while being more of an internal tool.

That is compared to your deck which is your advertisement.

If you keep your business model simple and straightforward, your investor materials will be impressive to the right investor.

Have a Strong Financial Model

Another way to improve your investment materials is by making sure that you have a solid financial model backed by essential data that you have found.

Use the numbers as tips to shape up investor materials. The most potent financial models are generally three years of financial projections. This is based on the market, the industry, and authoritative research.

You also need to make sure that you are clear about the amount of money you are raising and where the capital will go.

If your investors are not sure where the money is going, they will not want to invest in your company.

You need to make sure that you are clear on this so that your investors see the value being added to your financial plans.

Do your research and discover what the range of valuation should be for your company.

Even if it takes a little more time, this is well worth the effort to make sure that you do this right at the beginning.

You’ll have more credibility with investors, and perform better in negotiations.

If you would like more information about the interesting data and facts you should add in the pitch deck, check out this video I have put together. You’re sure to find it helpful.

Create a Data Room

Any information that you can share with investors, you can add to a cloud-based file for your qualified investors.

A virtual data room is an excellent idea for you to invest in for your time and to ensure that your investors have access to this wherever they are.

A VDR makes pitching investors and following up with deeper data more efficient. It also gives you far more control over your data and access to information.

As well as the ability to track and improve your fundraising performance.

Perfect The Pitch

Perfecting your pitch is single-handedly one of the essential parts of your presentation. And, you going to need tips to shape up investor materials

If you cannot concisely explain your business goals and your goals within the one to the two-sentence elevator pitch, your investors will likely be convinced that you are not focused or as prepared as you should have been.

It’s also essential to make sure that your verbal presentation matches with your slides.

You want to create a cohesive experience for your investors to follow the presentation and what you were saying with ease.

This will create a significantly impactful presentation for your investors and prove that your business is worth investing in.

More so than this, perfecting your pitch is also about making the proper research assumptions available to back up your claims and projections, and being able to skillfully answer questions about your pitch and company.

You can always leverage assistants and outsourced help to compile and filter this data so that you have more objective information and enough data.

Have an FAQ File

Branching off the idea of the last section, you should probably have a FAQ file that you always keep on hand during your pitch presentation, and in your data room.

It will prepare you to be the expert in the room and show the investors that you know what you’re talking about and save you a lot of time while keeping your verbal pitch streamlined.

These questions that you compile should be arranged from anything relating to business, financials, industry trends, and anything else that you believe is most important to understand your firm.

You also need to make sure that you can provide this information to your investors readily if, upon request.

If you don’t have this ready, your investors might deem you unprepared.

Having an appendix in your data room or in an extended version of your pitch deck in your data room can solve this.

You can continually update your FAQ as your business progresses, along with your funding rounds.

A part of this may also be used more generally on your website for customers as well.

Repurpose content everywhere that you can to get the most value out of it and your time. Use these simple tips to reshape up investor materials.

Appropriate Marketing Materials

While not inherently related to investments, you may have some examples of what your marketing materials will look like for your company.

Whether you sell products or services, you should have a variety of different items that you present to your investors as an example of what you are looking to sell.

After all, you’re not only selling the investors to your company–you’re selling them on the idea of your product or service.

If they don’t like what you sell, you or your presentation won’t sell them. This helps them see the quality of your marketing, as well as that you are seamlessly following through with the focus from your deck to your advertising.

These items may include press releases, content marketing, product demos, and online ads.

Even if you can only present a video showing a product demonstration, this will be astronomically important to showing how marketable your product or service is and how your products will attract people to your company. While making it much more real.

Have The Right Attitude

While seemingly cliché, having the right attitude can be the difference between having a fantastic presentation and a subpar one.

No matter how you are doing the presentation, your attitude should be positive, upbeat, and friendly. It helps to be highly professional and personable.

Some of the ways you can make sure you have the right attitude are by ensuring that you believe that every pitch deck presentation you have is a learning experience.

As a startup company or even with many companies under your belt, you should see every opportunity simply as a chance to learn. Then you have no need to fear failure.

Be Confident and Ready for Suggestions

While being humble and coachable are highly beneficial and sought out, it also helps to be able to walk into that room with determination and confidence.

After all, if you have done the research, you are the expert, and you will nail the presentation exactly as you practice it thoroughly beforehand.

If you have the energy and the confidence, the investors will see this.

If you are not confident during the presentation, people can see through this, and they will know that you are not prepared, and doubt everything else.

No matter how your presentation goes, be open to suggestions for improvement.

Maybe you’ve fumbled on one slide. Perhaps you misplaced a notecard.

Or you even forgot the source for a statistic that an investor requested more clarification on.

No matter what happens, having the right attitude will allow you to see that every opportunity is just an opportunity to improve upon the last attempt.

Conclusion

While there are many ways that you can improve your presentation for investors, some of these will be more impactful than others for your individual startup and fundraising process.

Look at your presentation and see where you specifically can improve. Not everybody will have to use all these suggestions, but it’s more likely than not that one of them will apply to you.

Make sure to infuse the right tips to shape up investment materials.

If you’re unsure about your presentation and your investor materials, show your friends and family.

Even show some of your colleagues who will have comments and questions that will pertain to your industry.

It is perfectly acceptable to do market research with the people you know to prepare for the presentations you have with people you haven’t met yet.

Even if the presentation in practice does not go well, it will still be a step in the right direction to prepare you for the formal presentation.

They can give you feedback and tell you what they think of your pitch.

Though consulting a professional in this space who knows what investors want right now is highly valuable 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.