Small studios and the deck problem

Most pitching is done in decks. Most decks make the pitching worse. A short note on what to do instead.

The deck pattern is familiar. The studio is invited to pitch. The studio prepares a thirty-to-fifty-slide deck. The deck contains a slide on the studio’s history, a slide on the studio’s process, four slides of case studies, a slide on the team, a slide on the proposed approach, a slide on the timeline, a slide on the budget, and a slide on next steps. The pitch meeting is sixty minutes. The studio walks the client through the deck. The client asks two clarifying questions. The studio leaves. The decision is made by people who were not in the room, based on the deck file the studio has emailed over.

The problem is that the deck is the wrong format for the work it is being asked to do. Decks are designed for in-person presentation, with the slides as visual prompts and the speaker filling in the substance. The decks studios actually email are read silently, by people who were not in the room, with no speaker. The visual prompt is doing the work the speaker was meant to do, and it is doing it badly.

The studios I see winning most of their pitches in 2024 have moved away from decks. The replacements vary. The pattern is the same: the deliverable is something that reads well silently, by someone who was not in the room.

A few alternatives the studio has used.

A written proposal. Five to ten pages. Treats the project as an essay rather than a presentation. Reads like a piece of writing, with sections, headings, and prose paragraphs. Includes the same information a deck would, organised differently. The reader can re-read it without a speaker. The reader can forward it to a colleague who was not at the meeting and have them get the same information. The proposal does not need to be read in a sequence the studio controls.

A short site, hosted at a URL the studio sends. Same content as the proposal. Better for projects where the studio wants to show interactive examples or scrollable case studies. Costs the studio a day to set up. Looks substantially more considered than a Google Slides file.

A Loom-style video walkthrough. Five to ten minutes. The studio walks through their thinking on the project, recorded once, sent to the client. The client can watch it at their own pace. The decision-makers who were not in the kick-off meeting can also watch it. The studios that handle this well do not over-produce; the loom looks like an honest walkthrough, not a sales reel.

The thing all three have in common: they assume the client is going to make the decision asynchronously, after the meeting, with people who were not at the meeting. The deck assumes the opposite, which is no longer true on most projects.

A practical recommendation. The next pitch, write it as a written proposal first. Then, only if the client has explicitly asked for a deck, port it to a deck for the in-person meeting. The thinking that goes into the written proposal is more rigorous, and the deliverable that lands in the client’s inbox afterward is substantially more useful than a slide file with no speaker.

For the rigorous treatment of the underlying argument, Blair Enns at Win Without Pitching has been making this case for years. The studios I admire most on the proposal-as-essay format include Bibliothèque and Studio Dumbar, both of whom publish their thinking publicly enough that you can see how they handle it.

The studios still leading with decks are losing pitches they should have won. The studios that have moved on are winning pitches they would have lost. The format is doing more of the work than most studios realise.