You may be sitting on a brilliant pitch, with a potential to raise millions of dollars but it would be futile if you don’t have a system to share it with the right people. Circulating a pitch deck to investors is just as important a skill as that of creating one.
Investors are getting pitched regularly. For them to understand and value the crux of our pitch requires smartly grabbing their attention. Of course, that’s easier said than done.
Once your deck is ready, you need to take into consideration a few aspects related to its sharing. So, in this article, let’s dive into that.
Things to Keep in Mind When Sharing an Investor Pitch Deck
Raising funds for your projects is undoubtedly a painstaking process. To convince investors to invest their money and trust in you is no mean feat. Therefore, your approach matters here more than anywhere else. Be sure to bear the following aspects in mind.
Evaluate Your Outreach Process
You just can’t throw your spaghetti on the wall and hope it sticks. There needs to be a blueprint for your sharing strategy. This involves thorough research on your potential investors and finding out who you need to prioritize.
Make a list of the potential investors and rank them in accordance with how likely they are to invest in your project. Look out into their history of investments, especially recent ones. You don’t want to end up in a meeting with an investor where they recommend you to someone else for namesake. You want to hook their attention instead.
Ensuring Security
It goes without saying that securing your data is of paramount importance. You don’t want cybercriminals to breach in and have access to your sensitive business information. All things aside; you can’t compromise on this, no matter what.
You need to incorporate a file-sharing app like CloudFiles that can help you in controlling the activation of the links that you share, disabling/enabling file downloads, asking for validation from those accessing your documents, and pre-define link expiration, among other security features.
Managing First Impressions
One of the prevalent ways of reaching out to potential clients (in this case, investors) is through cold e-mails. However, investors and venture capitalists are busy individuals and usually don’t look at cold emails favorably. You don’t want to come across too desperate or be such a nuisance to them that they ignore and peg you down as a spammer.
Not that cold e-mails don’t ever work. But you can increase the potential of cold e-mails by doing little work in advance. Make use of social media accounts. Drop a DM on their social media and try and build a connection. This will warm them up and potentially make them more receptive to viewing your pitch deck. Also, while sending your cold e-mail, try and attach a small teaser of your pitch.
File Naming Conventions
When you assign descriptive names to your files, it will not only help you in organizing them efficiently but also in sharing them conveniently. File Naming Conventions (FNC) is a key feature of data management and it would help you in quick sharing of the right file to your investors to tell the exact story about the concerned subject.
They would help your investors in getting a small preview of the content and help them in figuring out the responsible party. The correct file naming convention would eliminate the problems of limited discovery and understanding of your content.
Analytics Data
Measuring up how your pitch deck is holding up with the investors will help you in assessing what is working and what is not. For that, you need to take the help of analytics.
CloudFiles help you in analyzing how many unique views our files are getting, how much time your clients are spending on which files, how many times they are downloading your content, and then some. Plus, you can download the analytics in a CSV file, giving you a comprehensive picture of the effectiveness of your pitch deck.
Short Video Narrative
An audio-visual story tends to have a better impact than a textual story. Your goal is to hit your potential investors through as many senses as possible. Investors would appreciate a short video-based elevator pitch before deciding whether they want to go through your entire pitch deck. This effort from your end would accelerate the process of getting more engagement and interest from your investors.
Constant Engagement
Sending a pitch deck and not following up is a half-measured step. You need to constantly keep in touch with your potential investors and try and be on their radar. Investors are being pitched constantly by numerous entrepreneurs and if you don’t make efforts to stay on the top of their mind, chances are that they won’t remember you.
And when they don’t remember you, you won’t be hearing back from them. That being said, persistence doesn’t mean spamming. Find the sweet spot between sending them gentle follow-up reminders and clogging up their inbox.
Trusted Feedback
Review your pitch deck from trusted sources and get their feedback before sending them out. You don’t want to run them by people who would only appreciate the hard work you put in them. Find people who would give constructive criticism and would help you in assessing what to improve in your pitch deck.
Easier Connectivity
Investors who are interested in your pitch deck shouldn’t have a hard time figuring out how to get back to you. In other words, you need to ensure that all the ways for the investors to reach out to you are easily accessible.
The goal here is to reduce as much friction as possible. Practicing flexibility pays dividends here. Provide multiple options to your investors for reaching out to you. This way, they can contact you at their convenience, thereby increasing the chances of you hearing back from them. Well, the CloudFiles viewer allows the reader to comment on your deck and you can get back via live chat.
Final Thoughts
As tedious as the process of fundraising is, you must power through it for running your business. Skillfully handling the process will ease it out for both you and the ones from whom you are trying to procure investment.
Make sure your pitch deck sharing methods are organized, scientific and consider taking advantage of file-sharing apps like CloudFiles to get a faster, more accurate, and efficient report of your fundraising efforts.
Find One Year Free Business CloudFiles license available for startups here, https://www.cloudfiles.io/startups
