How to Craft a Winning Investor Deck

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What are the cash needs and the milestones? Investors will likely ignore the revenue forecasts (they are often widely off the mark anyway). Instead, they want to see a month-by-month time line for the cash needs and milestones—say for a term of two years.

This was the approach of Ben Wolin, the CEO and co-founder of Waterfront Media, for his Series A round in 2003. In his investor deck, he specified a variety of key milestones, such as user counts, contracts, and new features.

The most important milestones you'll need to include? Go-to-market dates. Determining them requires talking to potential customers and trying to get answers to the following questions:

• Who makes the purchasing decisions?

• Where are the budgets?

• What are the realistic sales cycles?

• Are partners the preferred distribution approach? Or is a direct sales force?

Furthermore, make sure you have a slide on the milestones you have already achieved. If you are making progress on a month-by-month basis, you will certainly get the attention of investors.

Who is on your team? Provide bios on the main team players and emphasize how the backgrounds will be critical for the success of the venture. For example, in the case of Berkeley, the firm emphasized that it had some of the brightest academics in the automation design field. Interestingly enough, they were not even employees; rather, they were part of Berkeley's advisory board (BusinessWeek.com, 2/1/07).

Back up everything: Don't guess. Your potential investors will probably have a strong understanding of your industry. So if they uncover an inaccuracy, you're credibility will evaporate—and so, unfortunately, may your chances of snagging funding.

As you can see, investor decks are not easy to piece together and can easily take months of work. But it's a critical step in the capital-raising process. Moreover, the document can be an extremely helpful guide for your business.

Tom Taulli is a noted finance author and blogger.