All posts by : Abhimanyu Tadwalkar

Raising money for your business can be a tough job. However, presenting a compelling business case with an impressive pitch deck can make your job easier. A great pitch deck has the ability to engage as well as excite your potential investors about your business idea. This further initiates a conversation between you and the investors about the various aspects of your business and finally culminates into an investment.

Maintaining the right flow, using the right colour scheme and crafting an attractive design are factors that need to be considered while making an investor presentation in order to grab the attention of investors and keep them engaged. Being simple and clear with your presentation can help investors with a better understanding of your business idea. Also, performing high-value research to present significant statistics and reports that showcase your competitive advantage is essential in establishing your brand and winning the trust & confidence of investors. 

Here are 10 actionable insights for you to master the art and science of creating a compelling pitch deck for your investors.

1. Seamless Narrative: Maintain a Natural, Logical Flow

Establishing a suitable pitch deck order that works best for you is one of the most important factors that can maximize your chances of getting investments. An ideal pitch deck is the one in which statements and arguments flow seamlessly through different stages. The right sequence of investor pitch deck ensures that each slide leads organically into the next and builds a persuasive case for investment.
The order of your pitch deck should be as follows – 

1. Title

Make a great first impression with a compelling logo, brand name and an effective tagline in your title slide

2. Problem Statement

Articulate the problem you plan to solve in a simple, straightforward manner. This effectively builds context to the product/service you intend to provide. 

3. Solution

Paint an objective picture of how your strong solutions can solve the problem and ensure 100% customer satisfaction.

4. Business Model

Clearly define who your customers are and what value they find in your offerings. Explain how you maintain business relations with your clientele and how you ensure the profits of both. 

5. Unique differentiator – Proprietary material

Showcase your key differentiators and explain how your services/solutions are superior to all the other ones.

6. Marketing Plan (Customer acquisition plan)

Layout your long-term customer acquisition strategies and exhibit the LTV of a customer to generate revenue estimates.

7. Competitor landscape 

Give details about who your competitors are, how you fit into the competitive landscape and how you are better than the alternatives present in the market.

8. Team

Explain the knowledge and expertise your team brings to the table and how it is the best team to effectively deal with the problem at hand.

9. Current Status – Current Traction

This slide should include sales, growth, SEO rankings and other performance parameters that put you in a good light to make investors confident about your business.

10. Projections

Provide detailed analysis about your past expenses and revenues. Making projections or forecasts based on your current traction can be useful in winning trust.

11. Funding Needs

Your presentation should clearly voice your funding needs in terms how much money you will need and what it will be used for. Also, make sure to clarify other parameters such as ownership percentage, rounds of financing, and the expected outcome.

12. Exit Strategy

This slide should outline who your potential acquirers might be and how you plan on providing investors with their desired returns.

Hence, your presentation should begin by mentioning the problem and your proposed solution. This should be followed by mentioning the USP of your product and outline the market niche to make investors aware of where your product will compete. 

After explaining the benefits of your product, the next thing is to exhibit your accomplishments to ensure investors’ trust and confidence. Finally, you can showcase the traction your business is getting in terms of sales & growth, and display your growth projections for the next few years. With this order, you can ensure that the transitions between slides are logical & organic, which helps in building a persuasive case for investment.

2. Minimalist Design: Achieve More With Less

Crafting a compelling and attractive presentation with strong, powerful words and eye-catching graphics can be crucial in effectively providing necessary context and sending across your message clearly. Adopting a minimalist design approach can help you to express your ideas in a clear, concise manner. This further helps in finding the perfect balance between content and graphics by simplifying design and thereby, focusing only on the most essential features of your presentation. Thus, by incorporating a simplistic and minimalist design approach for your investor pitch deck, you can easily win the confidence of investors and raise substantial funds.

3. Colour Psychology: Invoke the Right Emotions

Even after finalising on the structure, content and graphics, there is still an important element that needs to be considered – the colour scheme of your pitch deck. Different colours have the ability to invoke different emotions. The colour scheme of your presentation can have a major influence on how the investors perceive your funding proposal and on whether you get a follow-up meeting or not.

Using brand colours for your pitch deck can be a great idea to create a unique image of your brand. Making small modifications like using green colour for all the stats & numbers can easily instill positivity as green signifies growth & prosperity. Red is often associated with mistakes and poor performance. Hence, avoiding the use of red colour is necessary as it can raise literal red flags about the potential of your business. Thus, by using different colours and implementing different colour schemes, you can make your investor deck more vivid and lively and thus, streamline the process of raising series A or series B fundings.

4. Scalability: Decipher Your Competitive Advantage

What investors really look for in a pitch deck is your business’ ability to scale and maintain a competitive advantage. Investors are interested in knowing how you plan on expanding your customer base and growing your business across different geographies, verticals, etc. They want to understand your edge over your competitors and the barriers to entry.

Performing competitor analysis using a matrix, where you compare yourself with major players across different criteria can be a good way of showcasing your scalability factors in various aspects of the business. It also exhibits how you fit into the competitive landscape and provides investors with the recipe to the ‘secret sauce’ that only you possess. This, in turn, will explain how the end-users will prefer you over other players and thus, make the investors more confident about your product.

5. Maintain Clarity: Devise a Simple & Crystal-Clear Pitch

A key skill necessary for you to have as an entrepreneur is to be able to effectively articulate and convey your idea to the audience, even more so when you are pitching to investors. You need to understand that between you and the investors, only you are the expert in your domain. Hence, it is necessary to be simple, clear, and avoid using specific business terms to successfully explain your business idea to investors.

You can only have the undivided attention of your audience for a limited time and you need to make the most of it. Making the presentation relate to the investors or being more interactive can result in the investors being more receptive to your pitch. By identifying the problem and explaining your solution in simple words, you can keep your pitch short and concise, and thus, be sure that the investors have heard you out attentively and are acquainted with the key areas of your business. 

6. Narrative by Numbers: Build Credibility with Statistics

No matter how strong and attractive your business idea is, at the end of the day, numbers are all that really matter. As you progress through the fundraising rounds, numbers become more and more significant for the investors. Adding simple reports to your pitch deck that showcase revenue, net profit, gross profit, etc can provide the necessary evidence to prove that your business idea has the potential to be profitable.

You can give a brief overview of your acquisition costs to explain your customer acquisition strategy to the investors. Further, you can also exhibit the customer lifetime value number to give the investors a good sense of how you will deploy your capital if they invest in you. This way, numbers can play a great role in showcasing your traction and thereby, help in effectively building credibility.

7. Practicability: Create Enchanting yet Realistic Projections

The point of financial projections is to make predictions about opportunities, growth, and profits in the form of numbers. A numerical framework that complements and reinforces your vision can be crucial in winning the confidence of investors and securing your desired funds. While doing so, it is very important to showcase numbers that put you in a good light as well as numbers that are not in your favour.

Even though projections are basically predictions, you should never make unrealistically high profitable projections that you yourself are not sure of accomplishing. Investors immediately get skeptical about hockey-stick shaped growth charts, which can severely hamper your credibility. Hence, as you make financial forecasts and growth assumptions while pitching for your potential investors, it is necessary to ensure that the numbers you promise are well-researched and achievable. 

8. Show Your Sources: Ensure Authenticity and Reliability of Your Claims 

Using numbers to make projections and to showcase your KPI’s can be a great way of winning the trust of investors and securing funds for your business. However, if asked, you need to prove the credibility of these numbers. Investors give more importance to numbers with credible sources rather than numbers that are picked from unreliable sources. 

While making your investor pitch deck, investors sometimes might want to know about the source of a specific report or statistic. So, you need to be prepared with a repository of sources of all the numbers and statistics that you have included in your presentation. This way, investors are completely assured and confident about the authenticity of all the projections, KPI’s and statistics that you have mentioned.

9. Gain Trust: Build Strong, Transparent Relationships with Investors

One of the most important things to take care of while presenting your pitch deck is to be completely honest and transparent with the investors. Being honest not only helps in providing investors with key insights to your business but also helps in building trust and reliability. Hiding vital information or misrepresenting certain numbers can reflect poorly on your business and also affect your relationship with investors and thereby, affect their funding decision.

From details about the stakeholders to details about debts if any, investors deserve to know everything about your business. The more transparent you are with the investors, the more clearly they will understand your business needs. While exhibiting your achievements will put you in a good light, being transparent about possible risks and pain points will showcase your dedication and make the investors realize that you are thinking about the business beyond the pitch. 

10. Show Your Research: Compile all Assumptions and Sources

Investors might, at times, want to know more or verify the authenticity of a specific report or statistic. In such a situation, if you don’t have all your reference sources together, you could end up spending more time finding the necessary referral link and lose the attention of investors. 

Every successful investor presentation consists of a meticulously researched sheet that comprises referral links to provide more information and prove the credibility of all your claims. Thus, having a sheet that keeps all your assumptions and sources handy and in one place is turning out to be a great factor in making your presentation as effective as possible.

11. Build Credibility: Showcase all the Relevant Accomplishments

The team slide is one of the most important slides in your pitch deck; attaching a few headshots with names and titles underneath is certainly an opportunity missed. A good team slide not only covers the ‘who’ but also addresses the ‘why’, as in ‘why is this a team that the investors should believe in’. 

While doing that, it is necessary to ensure that your team slide is as crisp and precise as possible. The quicker you explain the establishments of your team, the sooner you get to the meat of the presentation. This goal can be accomplished by succinctly citing the team’s prior achievements in the relevant domain, and thereby building credibility of the founders and the entire team.

Telling compelling stories about how your product can solve customer problems instead of just presenting facts can be a great way to generate interest and make the investors excited about your business idea. Investor pitch decks must be able to go beyond just providing information and also establish relevance, convey emotion, and finally, end with a positive outcome. Thus, by keeping your presentation simple, precisely conveying your idea, explaining the other business dynamics and leaving room for questions, you can make your investor pitch as successful as possible and raise funds for your business.

Early in this year, I expressed the desire of working with 2 Fortune 500 Brands within the first half 2017 to Akshay. We both agreed that it was a rather ambitious goal, but we decided to give it a shot none-the-less. In Sales, when there is intent and action, results follow. As we are closing in on completing the first half of the calendar year, we are happy to have already worked on THREE Fortune 500 companies, on significant projects and are looking to expand our footprint.

Here is the story of one of them. In February 2017, the consultants at Mercedes-Benz India, approached us with a unique proposition. Unfortunately, it was the kind of work we had not done earlier. But fortunately, it was the kind of work, no one had done earlier. We jumped on to the opportunity and started working on a project which grew very dear to me and proved to be a big opportunity for Till it clicks.

On June 5, 2017, this project was inaugurated by the top management of Mercedes-Benz India and today, official social media accounts of Mercedes-Benz India featured the project.

The ‘Hope Planting’ mission has made our facility in Pune happier & greener. To know more: https://t.co/mcbCjbURH0 pic.twitter.com/oUCJyQRyx8

— Mercedes-Benz India (@MercedesBenzInd) June 8, 2017

Such a proud feeling. Here are a few reasons why we are elated:

1. We always knew we were building up a talented unit, but “Talent is nothing without opportunity”. And this project provided us with that wonderful opportunity.
2. It kick started our journey of working on noteworthy projects from noteworthy brands. We have bagged some good customers after that. 🙂
3. Personally, I come from a life sciences background and I am a conservationist at heart. So I understand the importance of the initiative Mercedes-Benz India took. It does really make the world a better place.
4. It was so unique that we had be the trailblazers. All the R&D with no set paths to follow was painful. But now that we have come out of it, we feel we have grown into better Technology Marketers than we were 3 months ago. Talk about hard work paying off.

Just want to wrap this up by saying a big ‘thank you’ to the team involved in this project from Till it clicks. It is your hard work that makes us all look good.

For details about this project, visit the official website of Mercedes-Benz Hope Planting Mission – www.mbenvironment.com

My team is missing in the photographs, but here is a shout out to Akshay (my co-founder), Kiran, Pratik, Aditya and Deepti.

– Abhi

The media and especially the main-stream media doesn’t present a healthy, beautiful body. Platforms like Instagram where models post their skinny pictures, are followed by millions. But this longing to attain too skinny, unhealthy bodies spreads a wrong notion in the society.  Remember what a healthy and natural body looks and feels like, and aim for that. All bodies are different. Respect, the already amazing body that you have. Try to reach your best, rather than longing for what is considered ‘perfect’ by the society. Keep working hard and eating right until you look noticeably better.

But in your journey to become your best, the DON’Ts are as important as the DOs. Here is a short list of what ‘you need to stop’, to make yourself fit again.

1. Thinking ‘career first, self later’

You need to focus on your body as much as your career or what you want to achieve in life. Would you rather be a sleek looking CEO or a grumpy old person, no one likes. Your life is happening now, and your body is a part of it.

2. Cursing the mirror

Looking into the mirror is good. Having friends who show you the mirror is even better. But rather than bashing yourself, take measures. Start indulging in something which you enjoy and which makes you fitter as a side-effect.

3. Thinking ‘looks are everything’

Yes, looks are important only to a limited extent. You need to focus on your overall health, which includes your physical fitness, mental well-being and spiritual contentment. Your body is nothing but a reflection of your mind.

4. Fighting with yourself

Life is hard in itself. There are enough things to deal with outside. Don’t create enemies within. Stop fighting with yourself and deal accept your shortcomings. Focus on what you enjoy. Not everybody is meant to have a chiseled physique.

5. Blaming your body

If only I was fitter, looked better… It doesn’t matter. And it’s certainly not your body’s fault. If you really think it is, change it. There are some things which you can’t change, thankfully, your body isn’t one of them. Don’t spend time contemplating, start doing.

– Abhimanyu Tadwalkar
Director,
Till it clicks Studio Pvt Ltd

One year after Flipkart completed the acquisition of Myntra, Myntra moved to App-only model, shutting down their website for e-commerce transactions. My reaction to this was – bold move – perhaps Flipkart is trying to kill Myntra. Bigger brands killing smaller brands they acquire is not uncommon in global business, I thought. Turns out, Flipkart was taking a calculated risk or may be conducting an experiment, which seems to have produced the right results.

Couple of weeks back, when Flipkart announced that they would be shutting their website down by October 2015, there were several eyebrows raised. An article in Times of India on July 9, 2015, analyses why Flipkart is shutting down its website and states ‘cookies’ as one of the most important reason. When I continued reading the comments below the article, I was dumbstruck. Not a single person who had commented seemed to have been happy with the announcement. Not that the app is not good, it is one of the best mobile apps in India for which over a million people have rated and yet the app enjoys a massive 4.2-star rating on Play store. The data from the comments obviously made for some awesome market research. But has the largest e-commerce company in India not thought about the repercussions of its massive leap of faith. They obviously have and yet they are ready to pull the trigger. Let us analyse what the advantages and disadvantages of apps and websites can be:

Apart from the ones mentioned above, there are obviously some more advantages going with the App-only approach:

Data – Flipkart claims that 70 to 75% of its traffic already comes from its mobile apps. It would be interesting to know what percentage of them actually buy and how these percentages fare against those which buy from the web. If there is a negligible difference or if the percentage of conversions through the mobile app, outnumber that of the website, Flipkart’s move starts making sense.

Predictions – Clearly, all global estimates say that eventually, people accessing the internet through mobile is going to be huge as compared to those accessing internet through desktops. In 2014, the former has already surpassed the later. So, there is no question that a major chunk of e-commerce is going to be through mobile devices (m-commerce). It’s the timing of the move that is concerning.

Cost cutting – Since only 25 – 30% of the traffic comes from non-app platforms (and considering that there is negligible difference between the conversion rates through the mobile app and non-app platforms), Flipkart would be spending unreasonable to maintain the non-app platforms. The cost of maintaining the website includes:

1. Designing and periodic redesigning
2. Infrastructure – servers, support, maintenance, etc.
3. Imagery – millions of products sold need millions of images in different sizes
4. Testing – On all browsers and screen sizes
5. Support – Cost of training the support team

Sellers – Buyers are used to 30-day replacements, no questions asked. The sellers need to bear these costs of replacements and re-deliveries. Flipkart charges a considerable fee from the sellers as well and this is putting an enormous pressure on the sellers. I have personally spoken to a couple of sellers and they are contemplating moving away from selling online. If Flipkart can cut down it’s own cost of operations, perhaps they can relent on the sellers and it will be a huge relief for the sellers.

Inspite of these, the move comes as a surprise to many, including me. Does Flipkart have any hidden agenda behind this move that none of us have been able to decipher? Or is it as clear as it looks? Will the big fish fall prey to its own move? Only time will tell.

If Flipkart is able to pull it off successfully against all odds, they deserve all the respect in the world for this bold move. What do you think?

Corporate presentations are generally made in PowerPoint because of the flexibility PowerPoint provides and ease of making them. Lately, new tools such as Prezi and Keynote are also used primarily because these tools provide some advanced animations, the quality of which at times becomes difficult to match in MS PowerPoint. However, I am a great advocate and lover of PowerPoint simply because there is a lot more to it than what meets the eye. Let me start off by telling exactly what the corporate presentations are made for.

Although there are no stringent rules laid down for the usage of presentations, according to me the ideal use of a corporate presentation would be during a one to one meeting with a prospective client. This meeting would generally be the first interaction with that client and the first impression may not necessarily be the last impression, but it is definitely a lasting impression. So you need to get this absolutely right!

There are a few ground rules I have set for myself before I start off with making a corporate presentation.

Rule # 1

Get your content absolutely right:

A corporate presentation is not a brochure which you would be attaching through e-mail to someone. So it doesn’t need to be self-explanatory. I am not a big fan putting in a lot of text content in the presentation because of a couple of reasons – a) You are going to explain it so you do not want the written and the spoken content to be either redundant or diverse b) No one reads it.

So ‘minimalism’ is the way to go as far as the content on the slides is concerned.

Long sentences are absolute taboo. A couple of slides with bullet points should be more than enough. All the other slides should either have graphics or have important words. These important words need to be explained through your speech. Use arrows, tables, flowcharts and graphics at all places possible.

Every slide needs to have a heading and this rule needs to be followed without exception. But, you can always play around and be creative with the headings. Finish off all your content about one topic on one slide in order to avoid using the same heading for consecutive slides.

Rule # 2

Go with the flow

The flow with which your corporate presentation goes is extremely important. After you are done with the brief introduction about your company, be quick to tell the person in front of him, what is in it for him. So long as the presentation is not related to the person sitting in front of you, it is very difficult to grab their attention. The flow of the presentation could be as follows:

Slide 1 – Cover: full name and logo and tagline
Slide 2 – Introduction: Year of founding, Vision, Mission, Beliefs, Values
Slide 3 – Company facts, Leadership team profiles
Slide 4 – Snap shot of all the services/products
Slide 5 to slide 9 – Details of the services/products
Slide 10 – Key differentiator
Slide 11 – Revenue model, Engagement model
Slide 12 – Success stories, clients
Slide 13 – Contact information
My ideal corporate presentation would contain anywhere between 12 to 15 slides. I often find presentations too much beyond 15 slides to be boring.

Rule # 3

Manage the time lines

For how long do you ideally present it largely depends on the interest of the person sitting in front of you. To an ideal audience, I prefer to give the presentation for around 10 to 12 minutes for a half an hour meeting time slot. If one of your slides lasts only for a few seconds, it does not have any business to be a part of the presentation at all. Try to dedicate equal time for each slide and take your own sweet time to explain things.

Rule # 4

Graphics, visuals and animations

Use the slide design and colour which is aligned with your brand colours. Do not use the most common slide designs which every other person from you B-school used for all of their presentations. It is appreciated if you can put your corporate logo on each slide, however, this is not a hard and fast rule which has to be followed. If you think that the logo ruins your slides, do not out your logo on any of the slides at all.

Animations have the potential to make even the dullest of presentations interesting. Learning animations in PowerPoint is not an overnight job. You first need to understand all the animations, and then think how you can use the animations to make your presentations more creative. Even if an expert is charged you thousands of rupees and delivers a corporate presentation with fantastic animations, it is worth spending. For some of the animated I have prepared, people hit the Escape key to check whether it is really a PowerPoint presentation. I consider this as my victory.

There has to be one ‘wow-factor’ in a PowerPoint presentation which people remember for a long time. It may be in the form of some creative entrance/exit effect or some interesting animation, if your presentation does not have it, you are just another potential vendor blabbering about the greatness of your company. An animation is the only difference between a PDF and a PPT, make the best of it.

Rule # 5

Engage the audience

The success and failure of a meeting often depend upon how successful you have been in engaging with your audience. There are some people who you just cannot engage. They are least interested in your services and if you had the guts to ask them to repeat your last line, they would be dumbstruck. They appear to have such a straight face that even if you threaten them with their life, their facial expressions would not change. Your corporate presentation is not made to impress those who cannot be impressed. You will end up meeting such people more often than you would like.

However, some people are interested are more interested in your services than knowing about your company. The presenters need to be on their toes to identify such an audience quickly and to make a few changes in their presentations.

Explain in details to those who have time. Spend time on each and every point and give as many examples as possible. Sharing your own experiences is always a good an idea and a quick and certain way to strike an immediate connection with your audience.

Always carry a.PPT as well as a.PPS file with you and as soon as you notice that some of the slides would be inappropriate in a situation, feel free to delete these slides. A .PPT file gives you the luxury to edit your presentations at the last moment, whereas a.PPS hides all the unwanted animations and unfilled text boxes and looks more professional.

Under any case, do not forget to turn slide show off while presenting.

Rule # 6

Know the objective of the presentation

To know the objective, you need to know what a presentation is. A corporate presentation is not a.PPT file made by the best designing company in the world; a corporate presentation is that performance where a presenter is as important as the.PPT file itself. As a presenter, you need to be thorough with your home work about the company you are visiting in order to avoid last moment slipups. The presentation needs to be practised really well since I do not consider it to be too different than a 12 minutes stage performance. With the backdrop, lights and sound well set in the form of the.PPT file, the artist needs to get into the act and convey a strong message across. The presentation gives directions to the presenter, supports him with the flow and brings in the ‘wow-factor’ into the presentation but the basic function of the corporate presentation is to break the ice and initiate a dialogue. In some situations, the presenters may find the audiences easily connecting with them and even sharing their business requirements. No matter how beautiful presentations you have, it is always advisable to keep yours.PPT file closed and connect on a personal level.

Need a good Corporate Presentation? Get in touch! 🙂

To quit your job and start a company of your own is a big decision. The only thing the drives an entrepreneur is his belief that his business idea has the potential to change the world. A lot of entrepreneurs and small business owners I meet believe that there is enough room in the industry to create and sustain another Infosys or Wipro. True that without having a strong belief in yourself, an idea cannot transform into something which you could call truly great. However, these entrepreneurs often feel that investing in branding is a luxury which only established companies can afford. A few exceptions who believe in the importance of branding feel that a brand cannot be established in the kind of budgets they have. With only a logo designed by a free lancing graphic designer, companies register themselves and go into the market with initial projects they bag through their references. A logo can barely be enough of a branding material and you wouldn’t be able to survive for too long securing projects only through references. Yes, brands take a long time and dedicated efforts to be established well in the market but here is a list of 6 things (apart from a logo) which all entrepreneurs should seriously consider as a starting point to establish a strong brand.

1. Website –Most entrepreneurs recognize the importance of a website and in the India market, creating a website has become dirt cheap. People would be queuing to create your website even if you had just Rs. 10,000 to spend on a website, and this would include buying a domain name, hosting, website designing and development. Even the entrepreneur is aware that the quality is going to be sub-standard, yet he compromises on the look and feels of the website thinking that he will change it once he settles down a bit, which seldom happens. Clients, employees, potential clients, potential employees, investors and competitors are just a few people who visit your company website and immediately know what kind of a company you are. So, get rid of your narrow template website, and make use of the whole page. Find a team who know the importance of a good looking website. Put graphics and visuals into your website and reduce text content as much as possible. If you think a person is overqualified for any position, you are downgrading the job, similarly, if you think your website is too good for the market in which you operate, you are downgrading your own company.
2. Corporate presentation –What websites do in your absence, corporate presentations do in your presence. A corporate presentation is a fantastic way of initiating a conversation with a company which you want to do business with. It has to be well thought of document. I prefer presentations where the viewer understands nothing if there is no presenter. That is why I cut down sentences and insert just a few relevant words instead. A good corporate presentation looks impressive and makes the presenter look intelligent. A classic tool to leave a lasting first impression.
3. Corporate brochure –The primary objective is to send it across when someone demands more information about your company over e-mail. This may be perhaps the only branding content where I can allow you to be as descriptive as possible. This has classically been a PDF file in which you can start right from your vision, mission statement, offerings, a key differentiator, core competencies, management team and so on. It should be a booklet which better explains your website. Virtually no one reads your corporate brochure thoroughly, even if most of your viewers browse through it right till the end, you have been successful in creating a good corporate brochure. This wouldn’t be possible without having a fantastic design and graphics.
4. Business cards –The international market is more or less free of business cards, in India, you cannot be a company and not have a business card. The way in which business cards are exchanged has evolved but the importance of business cards stays put. Indians still attach a sense of prestige to the kind of business cards they carry. But it is better not carrying any cards instead of carrying these thin, unattractive, dull white business cards. An attractive business card is preserved years by the recipient simply because it is too good to be thrown away.
5. Case studies / Product demo –Congratulations if you have reached a stage where you need to send across your case studies or give product demonstration. Reaching this stage is a lot of hard work for many companies, thus losing business from this stage hurts them even more. However, sending your case studies or giving product demo is only half the job done. That too if the case studies have been well compiled and the product demo is well explained. These can be in the form of presentations, PDFs, pictorial representations or in video format. Whichever format they may be used in, it is important to compile your thoughts well and create an interesting story. The lesser the viewer reads to understand the story, the more chances you have.
6. Social Media Setup –These are some of the free online platforms, which give you some of the greatest SEO in the world. However, merely creating a presence on these platforms is not sufficient. You have to maintain it and sustain your efforts over a period of time. You need to believe in the power of social media, interlink all the platforms post at least a couple of updates in a day. Network, interact and express don’t just broadcast unintelligently. Most of the people I meet run their social media platforms enthusiastically for a few months, get busy with operational issues and never return to social media. There are only a few things which turn me off faster than seeing an ill-managed Facebook fan page. If you cannot do something well, ask, learn or outsource, don’t keep on struggling with it heading anywhere in the process.

There is not a fixed strategy with which you can guarantee winning deals. So you have to eliminate those factors which may result in loss of business, either knowingly or unknowingly. Creating high-quality branding content not only ensures that you do not lose deals but in fact, it plays an important role in winning them. No matter how ugly we are, we always fantasize about beautiful looking partners. Similarly, people always want to be associated with good looking companies.

If I have to give you a number, I would ask a start up to allocate a budget of around Rs. 1,00,000 for creating the above branding content and take pains find an agency which will deliver amazing quality in that budget. Remember, by investing in quality branding content, you are creating assets for your company which your business development team will need a day in and day out.