Fund pitchbooks are a critical tool in the sales and marketing efforts of fund managers and CTAs. The design of a pitchbook is meant to arouse a prospect’s curiosity without overloading them with too much information. Therefore, pitchbooks and all marketing materials must be designed meticulously and executed to convey a firm’s professionalism.
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Here is the general formula we’ve found for a successful fund pitchbook:
Less is More You can think of a pitchbook as a visual representation of your natural sales process. Its function is to take the essential elements of your sales pitch and represent those concepts visually. A fund pitchbook should highlight a fund’s inner workings rather than offer a detailed account. It is an easy-to-follow, abbreviated selling tool designed to aid the sales pitch process and ignite meaningful next-step conversations between prospects and the fund manager.
It outlines a strategy that highlights a fund’s key differentiation and tells its story, including components of the strategy, characteristics of the investment opportunity discovery process, and management information. Pitchbooks are formatted to present critical concepts at a certain speed and pace. Therefore, each slide should contain just the right amount of content to impact the intended audience for the time that slide is shown during the presentation pitch.
Keep it Simple In his famous work, “ Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man,” author Marshall McLuhan asserted, “the medium is the message,” meaning that the form of a message (print, visual, audio) determines how that message will be perceived. This is true for fund pitchbooks as well.
The pitchbook should be concise, clear, and informative . Mistakes such as poor grammar, typos, mixed tenses, or outdated information will be off-putting to discerning investors. Crafting the right message is essential to holding your intended audience’s attention.
Correct Story Order Every chronological story has a narrative flow, and every pitchbook needs its own ordered flow to tell a fund’s story properly. Introduce the elements that make your fund unique in logical order. When Gate 39 Media collaborates with funds to develop their pitchbooks, story order is integral to the initial conversation.
Visuals Lead the Sales Process A successful pitchbook will have the correct balance of textual information and supporting visual elements. Visual learners make up 65 percent of the population . Many people need help retaining text, spoken word, and personal experiences to learn new things. Visual learners need to see what they are learning and often have difficulty processing the information otherwise.
Poorly conceived graphics and other defects in a pitchbook are often enough to alienate potential clients, so having clear supporting visual elements is critical. Supporting visuals can include:
Line graphs, Icons, Pie charts, Process flows, Directional cues, Photos
Even how a page is visually divided can help make a fund’s value easier to understand, highlight a fund’s uniqueness, and illustrate the expert’s trustworthiness.
Why Investors Buy with their Eyes While investors make financial choices intellectually, the process of decision making begins visually. Therefore, the clever use of design elements in a fund pitchbook is essential as the pitchbook is purpose-made to instill investor confidence in the strategy and reflect a fund manager’s competence.
Details matter – from the selection of fonts, font faces, sizes, and colors to spatial relationships and hierarchy of the information, all eyes are on these elements, so it’s necessary to sweat the details when compiling a successful fund pitchbook. Gate 39 Media’s design team has built a reputation for elevating custom pitchbook designs that get noticed .
Creating a Living Document Typically structured as branded PowerPoint presentations to complement fund websites, professional fund pitchbooks should be delivered as editable document files. This way, firms can easily augment the pitchbook as the business grows and changes.
From updating monthly performance numbers, adding new content to showcase new team members, adding additional slides, or reorganizing the slide deck based on the next audience pitch – the pitchbook is a living document. Additionally, the format should allow for physical printable versions and the creation of PDF versions that can be emailed to potential investors.
The Right Time to Get Started Great fund pitchbooks take time to construct and should be meticulously crafted since they are the essential marketing tools for raising AUM. No small feat. When working with Gate 39 Media, fund managers should allot 4-6 weeks for the thoughtful development of their customized professional pitchbook. After all, good things take time, and the quality of the Gate, 39 Media pitchbooks, reflects this.
Don’t wait until that next conference or meeting. Start planning your pitchbook well in advance for a professional presentation with long-lasting impact: