Summarising in Pitching
Not just for the conclusion of your pitch decks.
When I think about summary, I used to think that it is only for the conclusion of a document, in this case, a pitch deck. Thinking back my reports preparation days and dissertation writing days, writing the abstract section also requires my ability to summarise. In my last post, I spoke about summarising information when preparing your pitch deck instead of cramping all the information into a slide. Today, we will explore how to summarise.
Not Just About Shortening
While the purpose of summarising is to shorten, it is also important to remember it is meant to communicate your point in a way best understood by the recipient. What do I mean by best understood by the recipient? Have you ever encountered a situation when you are trying to explain something to someone and it just suddenly clicked and your friend suddenly starts agreeing and even chiming in? That is the moment when your point is best understood. In order to do this in your pitch deck, you need to look at the point from your audience’s perspective. One of the most common rule in summary is to avoid jargon if you’re speaking to someone outside of your industry.
Understanding your audience
The first step to avoiding jargon is to know your audience first. Are they industry experts? Investors? Institutional investors? Knowing your audience would help you prepare the right words that they can immediately pick up on what you’re saying and minimise the opportunity of a miscommunication. Additionally, using their language can help create a form of resonance to make your point relatable. How does this apply to a summary? Instead of trying to describe steak in restaurant A tasted like a perfectly grilled, full of flavour, juicy, tender, etc. It could be summarised to “it is like restaurant B that we tasted the last time but juicier.” It would paint a better picture because your listener has a reference point. However, this would only work when you understand your listener.
Avoiding Jargons
Jargons, I loved using them because it made me felt professional especially during my early days in pitching. Until one fine day, my cousin jokingly said “It is like you’re trying to confuse me when you can’t convince me.” Then it hit me. Hard. Since then, I started replacing jargons with analogies because it helps convey my point. Since then, miscommunication started reducing and my clients have a clearer understanding of my solutions.
Three to Four Points per Slide
There’s a lot of tips on presenting and preparing your slides (peppered all over Tiktok and YouTube) and they would recommend you keep your slides clean and lean. When it comes to having to convey the many benefits your solution brings, it has to be shortened instead of being in a list. How I would recommend it, is to summarise key takeaways for your listeners. This can be applied to different section of your pitch deck in order to reduce lengthy slides with two columns of writing.
To sum up, today’s writing is about using summary for different sections of your pitch deck in order to convey the points in a clear and easily understandable way. Remember to know who your listeners are, avoid jargons and keep it short and easy to understand. Hopefully my experience would give you some ideas during your pitch preparations.