It’s one of the most stressful parts of fundraising: creating and perfecting your SaaS pitch deck. Contrary to popular belief though, the days of the formal pitch deck presentation are largely over.
In a recent webinar, Maxio CEO Tim McCormick, Lessonly CFO Brian Montminy, and OpenView VP of Growth Kyle Poyar discussed what makes a modern pitch deck and how you can differentiate yours by crafting a compelling story supported by metrics.
SaaS Pitch Deck Basics: A CFO’s Perspective
According to Lessonly CFO Brian Montminy, your pitch deck’s focus largely depends on what stage your company is in. The focus of a company raising a Series A is finding and confirming their product/market fit. In contrast, the focus of a company raising a Series B is more so finding a scalable sales and marketing strategy.
As a result, the metrics you focus on in your Series B round will differ from what you presented in your Series A pitch deck.
Fine Tuning Your Pitch
According to Montminy, the things you should focus on in your pitch deck presentation (regardless of stage) are:
The problem you solve
The vision and product
Customer growth
Market and competitive landscape
Metrics
Your financial plan and working business model for ROI
To take it a step further, there are some specific things you’ll want to include in your pitch deck based on your growth stage.
Early Stage / Series A Pitch Deck Metrics
At this stage, you’re still finding your product-market fit. You’ll want to hit on things like:
Customer success stories and use cases that illustrate the product-market fit
Upcoming product features that will add value to your customers
MRR/ARR growth
Revenue and logo churn
Net revenue retention
Growth Stage / Series B Pitch Deck Metrics
At this point, you’ve identified your product-market fit and are focused on scaling your repeatable sales and marketing processes. You’ll want to talk about:
Pipeline growth
Conversion metrics
Win-rates
Average ARR per deal
Average sales cycle duration
Net revenue retention
CAC:CLV
CAC payback period
SaaS Pitch Deck Basics: A VC’s Perspective
Kyle Poyar is VP of Growth at OpenView, a venture capital firm that focuses on growth-stage companies. In a recent webinar, he largely echoed Lessonly CFO Brian Montminy’s overall sentiments that the pitch deck’s function is to support the company story.
In his view, entrepreneurs should always come to meetings prepared to discuss two things: what makes their business unique and how they are working to mitigate potential risk on the investor’s part.
At OpenView, Poyar’s team invests in Product-Led Growth or PLG companies. These companies rely primarily on their product, not their sales and marketing teams, to acquire and retain customers.
This can be done in multiple ways, but the most common is offering a free trial.
When asked what metrics OpenView tracks for their portfolio companies, Poyar shared that they break their key metrics into four categories:
Size and Growth Metrics
Employees
Funding
ARR
YoY growth rate
Financial Metrics
Sales and marketing spend
R&D spend
Gross margins
Monthly burn rate
SaaS Value Drivers
CAC payback (in months)
Gross dollar retention
Net dollar retention
Diversity
Women in leadership
Underrepresented minorities in leadership
Whether you’re a CFO or a VC, metrics are vital to understanding a company’s story. Key takeaway: tell an authentic story supported by metrics and don’t over-engineer the deck. The best pitch meetings are conversational and don’t rely too heavily on the deck itself.
To learn more about how Maxio provides financial data and SaaS metrics to help companies tell their stories to investors, get in touch today.