What are pitch decks, exactly?

A pitch deck is an essential part of any presentation made for people who aren’t familiar with a company or product yet. It is often the medium through which people will first meet, interact and discover a brand intimately. There’s no second time for first impressions, so a good pitch deck has a lot of challenging work to do.

The good news is that a potential client or investor asking to see your deck means they’re already willing to listen to your value proposition. With your prime audience already acquired, a great pitch deck makes or breaks what comes next.

What makes a good one?

A simple-yet-effective deck provides a clear value proposition to customers and stakeholders in as few words and slides as possible. This is true whether it's meant to talk to people for raising funds (investor deck), delivering a key sales presentation (sales deck), or going for a more general pitch deck across stakeholders. Simplicity and brevity are key.

However, within that tiny amount of deck real-estate, a pitch deck is expected to succeed at—well, pretty much everything. For newer or complex products and services, it needs to first explain what the product or service is, how it relates to the market, and highlight why it's important. From there, its job is to engage the target audience to ask questions and win over their intrigue by providing relatable solutions to their experiences. Finally, a deck must powerfully show any competitive advantages or unique selling propositions that your firm has to offer. 

The best way to combine all of these points is to use narratives that flow as a storyline, rather than hitting the audience over the head with facts and data that they may not absorb. A pitch doesn’t always need to convince an audience to decide right away, but it should get them to relate, ask questions and want to find out more.

As a creative digital agency, Clipatize has been fortunate enough to pull from our expertise at explanation, design and user experience to craft successful decks of all kinds. We’ve put together a few different examples of pitch decks we’ve created for clients, and why they were so effective at winning over their target audience.

Why choose a pitch deck over a typical slide presentation?

We’ve worked with many types of presentation formats over the years. A pitch deck is simply the most effective way to tell a good story to people unfamiliar with what you’re about to pitch. A series of product slides can leave audiences disconnected—fracturing their attention from different bits of information without taking them on a clear journey.

A pitch deck is more than combining a bunch of slides that describes your product features and benefits. It can show these things, of course, but it’s better if they play supporting roles to a grander idea. Great pitches are often accompanied by decks that do the following:

• Limits information to basic, supporting roles of the bigger story
• Focuses relentlessly on the current problem, unique value proposition, differentiation from competition and the solution.
• Favors beginning, middle, and ending narrative, rather than disjointed features or product descriptions.
• Concisely summarizes the market opportunity, team strengths, and looks toward future plans
• Identifies problems and provides a vision for solving them in simple human-relatable terms
• Captures an audience with no prior information

Reworking a Persuasive Sales Pitch Deck: Shell Card Online

Capturing the essence of an audience’s pain points can be done easily by leveraging their human experiences. When Shell tasked us to rework their sales presentation slides, we transformed their sales deck to focus less on the product’s features, and more on sales narratives that engage people with their most pressing woes at work.

The new sales deck discarded generic information, and instead posed questions that real employees encounter in their professional lives. It eliminated excessive product feature-descriptions, while boosting visual navigation and improving the visual user experience. 

As professional storytellers, digital agencies like Clipatize can give your sales teams the edge to help win over prospects by creating more engaging decks.

Crafting a Winning Investor Pitch Deck : NeuroDevice

Investor decks are often confused with other deck types. Unlike sales or customer presentations, an investor deck must put all of its energy into securing investment. This means it must provide raw data that solves a problem, and quickly identifies competitors, market potential, business models, pricing and even exit strategies. Again, simplicity is key, which means employing strong design principles and minimal-yet-effective text is paramount.

With the NeuroDevice and their product Lifetone, our goal was primarily to introduce the product to investors, and secondarily to early adopters (parents) and potential business partners (B2B). As mentioned before, an investor deck should be different from other decks when pitching customers. So, we broke the collaterals into two formats: a quick pitch poster for investors, and an animated video targeted more at the customer and partner segments.

By making the most of the product’s Product, Solution, Market Potential, Business Model and Target Groups, we crafted a deck that explicitly showed how a global problem could be solved by Lifetone, and how the product would impact specific markets and groups.

 

Visual Storytelling in a General Pitch Deck : Trinity One

A general pitch deck can often double as a brochure—a simple asset that presents an offer in a neatly packaged, well-organized and visually appealing way.

Make no mistake, a pitch deck or brochure should be treated as one of your products. It’s the first thing many customers or prospects will see, touch and smell. With many product brochures and general pitch decks under our belt, Clipatize was able to work with Trinity One, a striking new office building based in Warsaw, Poland.

We prepared this pitch deck by analyzing the interests and needs of office tenants and matching them with the features of the property. We worked on the formulation of value proposition, messaging, copy and design. We also managed the printing process. The copy and visuals also paralleled the design of the building—spacious, ultramodern, yet inviting. The deck ultimately encouraged business owners and office renters to commence a long term lease.