A pitch deck is important for every business. All successful SMEs in Africa know this: your company, idea or business venture will need financing from external investors sooner or later. Generally, most African entrepreneurs’ financial support comes from friends, family or government grants. Eventually though, and depending on how well your SME is growing, you will need to secure investors for your business. This means that you’ll need to communicate your ideas to potential financiers in a way that gets them excited about investing in your business.
In other words, you’ll need a pitch deck.
Now a pitch deck is a brief presentation that provides investors with an overview of your business, whether it’s showcasing your product, sharing your business model, giving a look into your monetisation strategy, and introducing your team. It is also known as a start-up or investor pitch deck because it is a presentation that helps potential investors learn more about your business.
You must present investors with an idea that intrigues them and gets them to engage with you. A pitch deck presentation usually consists of several slides that help you tell a compelling story about your business. You can put one together using a generic software like PowerPoint, or use a modern tool like Visme or canva to create something more amazing.
The purpose of an effective pitch deck isn’t just to secure the funding your business needs; it’s to interest your potential investors enough to invite you for the next meeting. There are many different opinions about what makes an effective pitch deck, but here are the top 5 tips you need to create one for your business:
1. Focus Your Message To Tell a Good Story
Understand that your potential investors need to know about your company is vastly different from what your friends or your customers want to know. If you don’t present your information to your potential partners in the right way, you’re going to lose out on the investment your business needs to grow.
Once you’ve identified the right organisation and investors to pitch, make sure to have one clear message. Your message should communicate two things: the problem your target customers are struggling with and the solution or how your product or service aims to solve that problem.
Investors really want you to demonstrate that you truly understand the problem you want to solve with your business and why your solution will be valuable and better than the current way that this is done. Painting the picture of the problem your customers are facing—and how you’re the company uniquely qualified to solve it—is how you’ll prove your value potential to your potential investors. How are other companies missing your point or proposing inadequate solutions? How is your product better than others?
When possible, open your pitch by telling a real customer story that addresses the problem your product or service solves in the marketplace. Avoid using buzzwords and tech talk when you tell your story. Instead, use real names and real customer challenges. Keep it simple and realistic. In the end, what people will remember after they walk away from you are the stories you tell, so it’s important to have a few compelling customer stories ready to share.
Pictures, screenshots, demonstrations and interactive text will go a long way here.
2. Introduce Your Team and Highlight Their Track Records
SMEs in Africa or beyond, particularly at their beginning stages, are often focused on the human capital as they are on the financial resources. So to present an effective pitch deck, understand that your potential investors will inevitably base their decisions on whether they can trust in you, on your team’s capabilities, persistence and achievements.
Make sure you highlight both the range of skill sets and the necessary experience that the founding team possesses. Your team’s capacity to execute plans matter more than you think so for this slide includes images and accompanying titles for each key team member. Share brief summaries of their educational attainments and prior employment to show their expertise.
Talk about each of the founders and executives and how they complement each other. Talk about their past experiences that relate in some way to the solution and product being built and proposed. This way, you will be demonstrating to your audience precisely why your team is the right one, among all to solve the problem you’ve raised by building the specific product you are pitching.
3. Marketing and Sales
Almost any SME owner can come up with a creative idea for any business problem that’s out there. The defining quality is if you can show that your own novel solution is a real business opportunity with a real market to serve.
Put differently, and you need to incorporate your marketing strategies for the idea or services you are pitching into your pitch deck. This slide is meant to provide investors with insight into how you plan to grow and market your product or service. It’s also a slide with a lot of latitudes. You can include anything from the various market channels you’ll use to promote your product (paid search, social media, or email marketing.) to hiring plans.
You can also include your general market focus, your target market and a clear definition of your ideal customer. Are you selling to enterprises or small businesses? To individual consumers? Include the relevant information about who your customers are and what their core needs are.
4. Talk about your Business Model
Showing investors that you have a real business on your hands is the most important part of your presentation. It’s a certainty that they’ll want to know how you plan on generating revenue, so you should have a slide that explains just that. Whether you have a subscription-based or recurring revenue model, a one-off payment model or any other kind, you must be able to clearly articulate your business model or how you’re getting paid.
What are the milestones and developments of your product and their timeline? How are they forecasted to impact the acceptance and growth in sales of this product? Are you going to expand nationally or internationally? If so, what is the number in sales and revenues that can have your company safe if the expansion goes wrong so that you limit your losses? Give insights into how you think about the business’s future and what growth you believe is achievable.
5. Don’t Forget Your Request
This is the sum of your entire pitch deck, and to realise your business vision, you need to make a slide on precisely what you need from your potential investors and partners. What exactly you need from your audience– is it money, connections, technical advice – or all of the above?
Also, why do you need these requests fulfilled? What are the priority projects and milestones to be reached? Why do you need the amount that you are requesting? Can you do it with a little less or substantially less if you get access to a market through high-level connections from your partners and investors? Would it decrease the need for capital? Ensure that you answer these questions in 1 to 2 slides stating clearly your request and investment amount.
Finally, deliver your pitch deck with passion and excitement, or it’ll be for nothing. Investors need to know that if they give you the funding, you’re going to have the passion and fortitude to make it through the inevitable setbacks and failures that come your way. The business model is important, but your passion alongside the excitement you bring to the table if anything is even more crucial.