Are Bank Pitchbooks Too Boring ??? Would Trendy 'Start-Up' Style Decks Work In This Industry ?
As the title suggests, are bank books too boring ?
- 50 slides long
- Graphs underneath text inside graphs beside text
- 18 bullet points or 220 words in a single slide
- Tables with 20 columns and size 16 text
- Diagrams that mimic the Apollo 11 Landing Gear
Too boring ? Too Wordy ? Are these decks ever even read ?
If you google "best presentation designs", the overwhelming response suggests short, snappy and concise works best every time. It's hard to describe complex financial products in just a few sentences but perhaps the start-up tech company's have the right idea. Would short and concise work in this industry ? Particularly for initial, introductory pitch books ?
Here are some examples below; (I can't post links but you can figure it out)
medium(.com)/the-mission/the-greatest-sales-deck-ive-ever-seen-4f4ef3391ba0
yesware(.com)/blog/sales-presentation/
slideshare(.com)/redmorton/presentations
Keen to get the opinion of the folks on this forum, are bank decks too boring ? Has your shop tried exploring alternative versions, would you try it and if so, what has the response been like ?
Hi jthunderbolt, just because I'm a bot doesn't mean I don't have feelings...I'm hoping these links are helpful. If not, feel free to throw monkey shit at me...
No promises, but thought I'd mention a few relevant users that work in the industry: Mr. Bateman PhilzCoffee juniormistmaker
Fingers crossed that one of those helps you.
Sadly, I think 50 slides is selling the pitchbooks of today a little bit short...
In certain parts of APAC the pitchbooks get up to 200+ slides long. It's ridiculous.
Jesus Christ. I’ve never seen a book anywhere close to that. Who the hell actually reads all the way through one of those?
No one. That's not the point.
1
Would say the short version is the executive summary in the book.
Made a book with a sweet ExSum of 15 pages which covered everything and then every page had about 10 pages behind it for elaboration. So the MD would discuss the first 15 pages and if the client wanted to go into depth he would go to that specific section. So, the first 15 pages were discussed and seen, the other ±150 only saw daylight when I had to flip through them to make sure there wasn't a printing error.
The big issue is trying to convince old and traditional MDs to switch to these trendy pitchbooks.
This is an annoying suggestion to hear people make because it ignores the typical audience. Most CEOs/CFOs/Corp Dev heads want market updates, target screens, target profiles, and models so that they can be smarter executives.
While being clear and succinct around complex points is obviously always a good thing, unless your pitching Soul Cycle, your decks will usually be long and dense.
Not once in any pitch I ever sat in on did we cover more than 15-20 slides. They were 10-15 slides that we knew would be covered from the very start, + 5 or so wild cards. Didn't stop us from turning out books that were 50-75 pages.
One of our MDs even called it the "thud factor." He always asked for extra appendices to "thicken the book" so that it would hit the table with more force, one of those subliminal power things that communicates the time and effort we put into this extremely important pitch.
He was an idiot. The best pitches we ever had were explicitly tailored to what the prospective client was asking about, and very clearly weren't spit out of a slide farm. At least for us, clients responded to a highly personalized pitch that didn't include unnecessary garbage. "Thud factor" just made us like everyone else, walking through the same dumb pitch.
Also, pie charts are the fucking worst.
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