The urge to overstuff your marketing deck can be irresistible.
The intention, of course, is to clarify, rather than overcomplicate. You want to provide enough detail for investors to properly understand your strategy. Your strategy is complicated. If it weren’t, anyone could do it, and you wouldn’t be worth your fees…
You need to communicate what makes you different from all the other fund managers.
That means going into a bit of detail, right?
And anyway, isn’t detail just another word for transparency?
Investors love transparency, right?
Transparency can obscure
The problem is that investors are busy people. Yours isn’t the only marketing deck they will be reading. Providing too much detail can result in none of the important messages being processed.
Think about any courtroom drama you have ever seen. The following scene is almost guaranteed to unfold at some point:
The plucky, underdog lawyers have been desperately trying to obtain the document that will make their case.
No matter what they try, their well-funded opponents find ways to deny them access.
Only now, on the day before the case, a friendly judge has finally been found who has ordered the opponents to hand over the information.
The heroes high five over half-empty pizza boxes in their cramped office.
But. Hours later, the evidence has still not been delivered.
Just as they begin to give up hope, there’s some noise in the parking lot.
Is that a truck reversing?
No. It’s four of them!
Each truck is full of document boxes, and each document box is bursting with files.
The one document they need is buried in reams of irrelevance.
There are only two lawyers to go through it all and the case starts tomorrow!
How will they find what they need in time?...
When you overstuff or overcomplicate your marketing deck, you are doing the same thing. It’s another case of too much information and too little time. The plucky movie lawyers are singularly focused on winning their case. They will put in an all-nighter to find what they need.
The investor looking at your deck has no such motivation. If your messages don’t grab their attention in the first few seconds, their brain remains in “skim mode”. They will drift through your deck (and the others in their “to review” pile) - and then they will go home.
A picture isn’t always worth a thousand words
Charts are perhaps the best example of how fund managers overcomplicate things. A picture is only worth a thousand words when it communicates information faster – with greater impact. Frequently, we are confronted by charts that, although “brilliant”, require a huge amount of thinking time for an investor to understand.
Including a chart like that in your deck will only accelerate the page-turning. A sensible rule is this: If it takes longer than five seconds to work out what a chart is saying, simplify it. Because five seconds is about how long someone will spend trying to figure a chart out. And if someone skips past anything in your deck without understanding it, you have probably lost them.
Successful marketing earns you the right to deliver the detail
Put yourself in the shoes of the investor. Set aside how great you think your deck is. To an investor, it is just another document in a very large pile, sitting between them and their lunchtime run. How are you going to ensure that, when they have all been looked at, yours is the one that sticks in their mind?
To do that, it must be easily intelligible and concise. The less content you provide, the better the chance that what you do include will get the attention it deserves.
That makes a simple chart better than a comprehensive or even a precise one.
And it makes two snappy lines better than two detailed paragraphs.
It makes 20 slides better than 40.
Think of it this way:
You can provide all the detail you want if you get to due diligence with an investor.
But if your advantages don’t connect with them, they’ll likely never get into due diligence with you…
The urge to go into detail can be irresistible – but you must resist if you want your message to hit home.
We have been crafting marketing deck narratives for over a decade. Reach out if you want to discuss how to get your messages across.
