Thanks for reading the 20+ posts that make up Never Lose Another Pitch.

As you may have guessed they amount to an illustrated guide on how to position your business and then pitch it to new customers.

It is also the rough foundation  for a book we are developing on the same topic.

The back bone of your business

Why did we choose Never Lose Another Pitch? We realized that a pitch deck is essentially the back bone of any business. Everything connects to it: brand, audience, positioning, price, everything. If you can’t pull together a persuasive pitch deck about your business offering, you can’t build a website, plan a marketing campaign, advertise effectively or in some cases make a product or service folks want to buy.

So, when you get the chance have look back over these posts. We believe that they not only tell you how to pitch, but also tell you how to position, brand, and sell your business too.

Good luck!

“Overcharging has no downside,” a colleague once said to me. “If you win the work you get paid more. If you don’t win it, you don’t have to do it!”

While I enjoyed his logic and firmly believe you should charge what you are worth, the best idea is to offer the right price and be able to explain why.

Without getting into the long weeds on how much money you should ask for your services, I’d like to offer some hard-worn wisdom on how you might frame that price.

It has been scientifically proven that if you want people to eat Apple, the best thing to do is to cut it into small pieces. The same goes for your price.

Another way to make your fees easier to swallow for your client is to delay the pain of payment. Most new cars are bought this way.

Use anchoring to make your price look reasonable compared with another, much more expensive option.

When people think of buying a new home, they usually have a fixed price in mind they are unwilling to go too far away from. In B2B the principle is the same. See if you can figure out what your clients’ “break points” are for this kind of work and charge appropriately.

Pointing to things is essential to guiding your audience around an idea. Here’s how to do it.

Whilst at Furthr our general policy is one of restraint, sometimes, you need things in your presentation to move. And it would be wrong to underestimate the impact it can have. I well remember sitting in a  pitch with solemn investment bankers in Geneva, and seeing them react with glee every time our pitch deck moved.  Scientifc studies support the idea that visualizations which move are often more memorable.

Mini move in just one slide

But animations must be used for a purpose. Say you wanted to explain what was in your cheese sandwich. You could use animations to show first the bread, then the cheese and finally – ta da! – the pickle, all on one slide.

Building your cheese sandwich story click by click creates a mini movie in just one slide. 

Here’s how to do that.

Think of your deck like a movie. A simple fade between slides keeps the narrative smooth.

This is how to achieve that in PowerPoint.

Imagine I had five pens and I wanted to throw them at you so that you could catch them all.

If I threw them all at once you might catch them, but chances are you would miss some if not all the pens.

A better strategy would be to throw one pen at a time. That way you would likely catch them all.

The same strategy applies to your PowerPoint deck. You need to throw one pen at a time.

That means one headline and an image at a time. As we have said, the ability to match the headline to the image is the foundation skillset for all modern communication.

Generally, the words come first closely followed by image. The image needs to match the words. This sounds simple, childish even, but every day we see headlines and images that do not connect. I would go so far as to say if you can match a headline to its image you are in the top 20% of content makers.

Go big

There are many ways to judge the quality of an image. The first can be, does it have people in it? The world can be a cold place and we like to look at human faces. If you put a person in it, engagement will likely go up. (Look at the Mail Online. Every image contains a person).

Another criteria can be emotion. As well as matching the headline, does the image make you feel something?

Another criteria is “display the benefit.” It is more engaging to show  the benefit of the thing you are describing rather than the thing itself. So don’t show a bottle of wine. Show people enjoying the wine with friends. Don’t show me a train, show me the pleasure of train travel.

Once you have chosen an image, believe in it. Don’t crowd it with lots of others. That smacks of insecurity. Go big. Remember: content is an all-in bet. There are no prizes for hedging.

Colour is the first thing people see.

Colour has meaning – it reflects emotion. It can also be used to highlight things. Colour can even  be a business model.

The colour of people’s credit cards – gold, platinum, black – makes them more desirable.  I know at least one business owner who, when he takes new hires out for lunch at the start of their employment, pays with his Amex Black credit card. “It lets them know I am for real and their career is safe with our firm,” he says.

Monzo, the FinTech payment card’s entire business model rests on the fact that it is fluro orange. Students open a Monzo account when they get to University not for the notifications, but because the Monzo card looks cool.

Opening slide

If you are making a pitch deck it is important you think about colour. And the first place you need to think about colour is the opening slide.

You need to put the opening slide in the brand colour of your prospective client.

The reason is simple but profound: your pitch is not about you, it is all about the prospective client.