Pitching season is in full swing with Jefferies, London Life Science Week and BIO-Europe in November, and JPM looming in January. Our founder and Chief Creative Officer Kat Arney explains why a mismatch between what you say and what you show can subconsciously derail your biotech pitch deck, and how to fix it.
A little while back I was working with an early-stage biotech founder on their pitch deck. As they talked me through their slides, we got to one that stopped me in my tracks.
Without going into the details, they essentially explained “Our solution is like an apple”, paired with a picture of an orange. And in that moment, I stopped listening.
I was interested in trying to understand their science. But my brain had been completely hijacked by the mismatch between what they were saying and what I was seeing.
Over the next few months, a lot of biotech founders will be standing up in front of investors and potential partners to sell their vision, ideas and team.
I’m willing to bet that plenty of these pitches will contain an apples-and-oranges moment. And many of them won’t even realise it’s there.
Where do you want investors to focus?
Over the years I’ve run a lot of workshops teaching presentation skills to scientists, ranging from academic researchers to life science leaders.
One of the most important things I try to get across is that the role of a presenter is to direct and hold the audience’s attention.
When an investor listens to your biotech pitch or even just looks through your deck, you want them to be focusing on figuring out whether it matches what they’re looking for.
Does this fit our investment thesis? Is the science plausible? Does this team look credible? Is it different enough from the rest of our portfolio?
Asking them to expend additional mental effort trying to decode whether the answers are actually there in the first place is an unnecessary and self-inflicted distraction.
And there isn’t much attention to go round.
We’ve all sat through events where there are more eyes looking at phone screens than the stage. At a busy partnering event, the investor across the table has probably heard a dozen other pitches that day.
This matters even more when you’re not in the room. According to one study, investors spend just under three minutes on average looking at a pitch deck (even less for decks that don’t result in a raise).
Why a mismatch hijacks attention
Something happens inside a human brain when the things you’re seeing and hearing don’t line up.
A presenter says something different to what’s on the slide. Two numbers that should match don’t. Data that doesn’t seem to show the point being made in the slide title.
People are pattern-finding, problem-solving machines. Show us a mismatch and you’ve accidentally set us a puzzle. Which one is right? Have I misunderstood? Is this a mistake?
Solving it suddenly matters more than following your story. And while an investor is working on it, consciously or not, they’re no longer really focusing on you.
This isn’t just my personal experience. Educational psychologist Richard Mayer has spent decades studying how people learn from combinations of words and pictures, and the toll of additional mental work spent on irrelevant material or confusing layouts.
When this so-called extraneous processing piles on top of the effort needed to understand the underlying content – which is not insignificant when you’re dealing with complex life science innovations – people’s attention hits the buffers.
This goes further than whether or not your pitch lands. A lack of clarity and coherence in your communications reflects badly on you too.
Psychologist Daniel Oppenheimer found that people judged writers as less intelligent when their text was harder to process, whether that came from needlessly long words or a hard-to-read font.
For a founder, that’s a terrible outcome. A story that’s hard to follow, raises distracting inconsistencies or ambiguities, or doesn’t quite hang together suggests either that you don’t fully understand what you’re doing, or that you’re trying to hide something.
Neither makes you look like a good bet for investment.
Where cognitive mismatches show up in biotech pitches
Here are some of the issues I’ve seen, both in in-person and send-ahead biotech pitch decks, that can lead to cognitive mismatches and attention glitches.
Visual confusion
This is the classic apples-and-oranges problem, and it often creeps in through poorly chosen imagery or analogies.
A metaphor that doesn’t quite land. Multiple graphs or data images that make different points all crammed onto the same slide. A stock image of a DNA double helix when your platform is all about RNA (subtract extra points if the twist is going the wrong way…)
If an image doesn’t match what you’re saying, or adds clutter and confusion rather than clarity, it’s actively working against you at a subconscious level.
Inconsistent wording
When the words on a slide don’t match what the speaker is saying, this can trigger additional mental work as your listener tries to figure out whether the difference is important.
This could be subtle, for example writing “first-in-class” on the slide while you say “best-in-class”. Maybe it’s both, but the distinction matters.
Or it could be more overt, such as referring to your lead asset by a development code on one slide, its mechanism on another and a nickname in your script.
Don’t leave it to your audience to reconcile what they’re seeing with what they’re hearing. Be consistent with terminology and language in what you say as well as on your slides.
Numbers that don’t add up
When it comes to getting investors interested in your idea, it’s not just about the story: the numbers matter just as much (or more, depending on how cynical you are).
Similar to verbal and visual mismatches, numerical inconsistencies trigger the puzzle-solving response in our brains. If the market size on your ‘scale of the problem’ slide doesn’t match the number on the ‘commercial opportunity’ slide later on, or your raise doesn’t add up to your proposed runway, someone will notice.
Even something as simple as using global disease incidence figures in one place and US numbers in another can cause confusion.
In the best-case scenario investors will think you’re sloppy or didn’t check your sums properly. In the worst, they’ll decide you’re not credible and have something to hide.
Check all numbers carefully across your whole deck – especially figures that change regularly – and explain any discrepancies clearly.
Pick’n’mix graphics
Wherever you’re at in your company journey – from a small startup to a global organisation – your brand matters. Inconsistent visual branding and graphics can come across as amateurish and disorganised, rather than charming and authentic.
This doesn’t mean you need to spend thousands of pounds on a fancy branding agency at pre-seed stage, but it does mean paying attention to visual consistency.
Whenever a colour, symbol or word changes its meaning partway through your presentation, your audience has to subconsciously work out the new rules, taking their focus away from where it should be.
If you’ve got brand colours, fonts and slide templates, use them consistently and cleanly. Choose a visual style and colour palette for your images – for example, cartoons, photos, line drawings – and stick with it.
The same goes for how you use colour and symbols to represent concepts and direct attention.
Give each colour one job and stick to it. If blue means up or good and orange means down or bad, keep it that way on every chart. Pick one way of saying “look here!”, whether that’s an arrow, a circle or a star, and use it the same way every time.
Slides as script
Most people read faster than you can speak. Put a bunch of bullets up on screen at the same time and they’ll finish them before you’re halfway through, then wait for you to catch up (or stop listening).
It’s tempting to use the same deck for an in-person pitch as a leave-behind/send-ahead document, especially if you’re tight on time, but they are two very different beasts.
In a presentation setting, your slides should be an aide-memoire for your storytelling, not a script to mindlessly read out. I’d recommend having no more than 50 words per slide for a presenter deck, and using animation to unfold information and direct attention as you go.
A more detailed document deck has to do all the storytelling work itself, so you can have more words per slide (I suggest a maximum of 150 to 200). You also need to think about how to direct your reader’s attention through the information in the right order – take a look at the Gestalt principles of design if you’re curious to learn more about how to do this.
Whether it’s in person or a pdf, every slide in your deck should be legible (minimum 18 point font for presentations, 12 point for screen-readable pdfs) and make one key point that is reflected in the slide title. Taken together, they should create a coherent narrative for anyone flicking through the whole thing.
And please, please, please never put up a slide and say something like “you don’t need to know all of this” while wobbling a laser pointer at one particular element on the screen.
If your audience doesn’t need to know about it to make sense of your story, you shouldn’t be showing it.
The solution? Make everything agree
The fix is simple, although not always easy. Your words, visuals, numbers and narrative should be consistent and coherent – think apples or oranges, all the way down.
A few practical checks before you hit the fundraising road:
- Look for the key terms in your biotech pitch deck (asset names, indications, platform, mechanism etc) and check each one is used the same way every time, including what you say.
- Reconcile every number that appears more than once, including in the appendix and any one-pager you leave behind.
- Practise your pitch so what you’re saying works with your slides, not against it.
- Strip out any image or graphic that doesn’t support the point being made, and check for visual consistency and brand coherence.
- Get fresh eyes. Ask someone you trust to listen to your pitch and give you feedback on where their attention glitches.
Give investors the right things to think about
Investors are innately sceptical. You want that scepticism pointed at your science, your team and your market, where you can win the argument. Every apples-and-oranges moment hijacks their attention, however briefly, and distracts them from that task.
Getting ready to pitch this season? We can help you work through your story and deck to make sure everything matches up and makes an impact. Drop us a line at info@firstcreatethemedia.com for a chat.