What Is The Best Order Of Slides In A Pitch Deck

What is the best order of slides in a pitch deck?

The correct order for a pitch deck can be broken down into 10 stages. They are Problem, Solution, Market, Product, Traction, Team, Financials, Investment Amount, and Appendix. This order ensures that each slide leads logically into the next and builds a persuasive case for investment.

The Correct Order For a Pitch deck 

To understand why there is a pitch deck order that works as opposed to others which don’t, you should familiarize yourself with the gold standard for pitch deck structure. You can read about how to create a pitch deck to learn this structure, but let’s summarize quickly.

Your pitch deck has 10 stages – 9 slide stages within your pitch and an appendix stage at the end for answering investor questions.

The first stage is the Problem. Here, you describe a problem that potential customers face. The next stage is the Solution stage where you outline how to solve the problem. The third stage involves your Market slide so you can outline the market niche where your product/service will compete.

After this, you move to your Product slide where you show your product/service and how it works. This ensures that potential investors understand what you are developing. The fifth slide shows any Traction your business is getting: sales, growth, etc.

The next stage is your Team slide. This is where you show the talents and accomplishments of you and your team so that investors know you are a safe bet. The seventh stage is your Financials, which is the perfect place to show growth projections for the next 3 – 5 years.

Your final slide during the initial presentation is your Investment Amount slide where you clearly show how much investment you are looking for and how much investors will get in terms of equity etc. 

Your Appendix slides are only used when potential investors ask questions about your pitch. Your appendix slides include information that expands upon points made during your pitch, as well as supportive data and points you left out of the main presentation for brevity.
In this article, I’m going to explore why this order is important and how you can use this structure to make sure you have the right order on the slides of your pitch deck. You can also watch the video below where I cover in detail how to create a pitch deck.

Is this the Only Order for a Pitch Deck?

Technically, no. When thinking about what is the best order of slides in a pitch deck, you could go in with any structure or order, but your chances of success would be significantly impacted. Investors are acclimatized to a specific order and so if you don’t adhere to this, they could conclude that you haven’t done your research on how to conduct a pitch.

In some instances, some sections may be dropped completely from your pitch deck. This is common with the Traction stage as sometimes newer companies don’t have sales to show just yet.

I highly recommend sticking to this established structure to maximize your chances of investment. But don’t just take my word for it, let’s explore why this pitch deck order really matters and works best.

Why You Should Use This Pitch Deck Order

Keep in mind that when thinking what is the best order of slides in a pitch deck the primary goal of a pitch deck is to bring in investors. Your deck is absolutely essential in order to fund your business idea and take your product/service/brand to the next level. To do this, your pitch deck has to be as effective as possible.

If you speak to anyone with a sales background, they’ll tell you that persuasion is essential, this is clearly true for any business pitch as well.

It’s not the only thing that matters about a pitch deck, but without being persuasive your pitch deck will suffer, perhaps even fatally. Your goal is to use persuasive language, images, metrics, research and concepts to secure the investment you need. At every step, you must think about how best to persuade potential investors without being misleading. 

The Art of Persuasion

From a psychological perspective, a key component of persuasion is flow. You see, when someone is being truthful and confident, their statements flow organically from one point to the next. If we see an argument that stutters, we are less likely to believe the speaker.

This is unfortunate as it can also be that the speaker is simply nervous.

In order to be persuasive about your pitch, it has to flow nicely from one stage to the next. You are building an argument about why your business is a great opportunity. If the argument flows nicely, then investors will feel more confident about what is being presented. 

A flowing pitch deck structure implies that research has been done and that the person doing the pitch is capable.

What’s best about this is that, even if you are someone who isn’t the best public speaker, with a good pitch deck structure behind you, investors will pay more attention to the information than your style of presentation. 

Even in the competitive world of business, preparation trumps a confident personality.

Coherence and Pitch Order

Another reason to use this established pitch deck order is . A critical part of persuasion is being understood as easily as possible. The more someone has to strain to understand a business concept, the more they will be put off from investing.

With an established structure that flows from one stage to the next, you can make your argument for investment in a coherent way. If the structure jumps around in a random fashion, then everything becomes more difficult to follow.

To recap, then. In order to be persuasive, you need to have both flow and coherence in your pitch deck. While pitch order isn’t the only way to do this, it is an important part of any effective pitch. Follow the above pitch deck order and this will provide a sound foundation on which you can build.

Remember that storytelling plays a key role in fundraising. This is being able to capture the essence of the business in 15 to 20 slides. For a winning deck, 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.