Are you thinking about how to get your storytelling right for your Pitch Deck?

A great story is key to selling your fundraising campaign.

How do you create the best storytelling in your pitch deck so that your startup gets funded?

Storytelling Makes All The Difference In Fundraising Success

As I share with members of Impakt Tribe where we help from A to Z with everything related to impact fundraising, storytelling really can make all the difference in the world when it comes to startup fundraising. 

You can have a truly brilliant idea and flawless technical expertise in building a product and even solid numbers. Yet, without strong storytelling your startup still may never get funded. The opposite can even be true too. You may be weak in all of these other areas right now, but with a powerful story and great delivery, you can get funding and overcome these factors.

Fundraising from investors is still very much a human experience. Even when everything is being done online between LinkedIn, email, Pitch Decks hosted in virtual data rooms, Google Meet video meetings and digital signatures.

When wondering how to improve storytelling in a pitch deck that our human history and consciousness is built on stories. Stories we read, that are shared with us, and that we tell ourselves. We are hardwired to use stories to connect, survive and thrive. That’s been true for thousands of years, and since we used primitive paintings to communicate before written and organized language and alphabets. 

If you want to win the funding game, improve your storytelling. 

Where Storytelling Shows Up In Your Pitch Deck

There are several stories or parts of the story that show up in a successful pitch deck. 

The Financial Story

This is much less a story, than a flow of key factors which checks off the boxes for investors, but it still connects the dots for investors to tell themselves a good story in their heads. 

 Financing startups is a financial decision. So, this part of the pitch includes telling prospective investors about the sales, cash flow, revenues, profit, growth, and what a great investment this is. As well as instilling the fear of missing out they will experience if they don’t get in now. 

The Problem Story

This is probably the most important story in your pitch deck. You won’t have time to tell anecdotes or mini stories with each slide in your pitch deck, but you can really set things up right here. 

Tell the story of your why. How did you encounter this problem? What pain did you feel? How can they personally relate to this in their own lives? 

When thinking how to improve storytelling in a pitch deck you need to ask yourself how have you engaged customers to verify and clarify this main is wide spread enough to become the foundation of a very big business?

The Team Story

Having the best team of heroes to champion this venture is really the number one factor investors are looking at. You need a strong problem, but that is irrelevant if you don’t have the right team to execute on it. 

Use a storytelling format to show how your team is the best equipped to take this on, and has the grit and resilience, coachability and problem solving talent that will carry their investment through to being a profitable one. 

The Vision Story 

Your story starts with the challenge, and lays out the heroes of this story and how they will solve the problem. Then you are painting a big vision of the future and the outcome. What it looks like when you are victorious together. It shows them how smart they will look and what that success will do for them personally. Either financially, in their career, or in their life. It’s the story they will sell themselves on and their committee and partners. 

 Use Pictures That Tell Stories

They say pictures say more than 1,000 words. So, don’t overlook using images in your pitch deck to help tell the story and drive it home. 

Use graphs to show traction, growth, and your competitive advantages. Use diagrams of your startup’s story timeline and milestones. Use pictures of your team. Use images of your product in use in the real world. 

Extracting Your Best Story

Not many startup founders feel that they are great storytellers. Many may have incredible IQs and education. They are geniuses in many ways. They may be thorough in getting all of the facts down on paper and on slides and websites. Yet, all too often they are too close or too technical to really tell a winning story. Or they just aren’t confident in the emotional side of the story their startup owns.

Storytelling is an art. It takes a creative mind and talent. A skillset that can often be at odds with the skills many entrepreneurs have programmed themselves with through engineering school and tech careers. 

So, if you really want to master this critical part of the pitch, and marketing your startup, brand and product in general, leverage the help of a professional storyteller. A pro copywriter, brand journalist, and master of words. 

Hopefully, this post provided you with some perspective as you are looking into how to improve storytelling in a pitch deck. 

Please let me know in the comment box below, what is your nr 1 learning from this blog post.

Thank you in advance for sharing your thoughts.

Your biggest fan,

Jeroen van der Heide Co-founder & Ecopreneur

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