Nod-Along Strategy

One of the most basic strategies I always follow when building client decks is the Nod-Along Strategy.

Specifically, I use this when building attention decks, which are designed to be used when you are not pitching alongside them. The most common use is emailing these to investors when trying to get a meeting.

So what is the nod-along strategy, and why do I use it religiously?

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The Nod-Along Strategy is a way of building the first 2-4 slides in your deck so that when reading through it an investors will naturally nod along. The way you do this is by starting on slide 1 with a statement, fact or question that will get the investor to agree with you or bite on your hook. Subsequently over the next 1-3 slights you logically follow on from that initial hook with more statements or questions with the goal being that at the end of the 2-4 slides the investors has nodded along to the point where they either:

This is different from a traditional deck where you spend the first slide telling investors about a problem and the second slide getting investors to buy into your solution to that problem. Instead, we abandon that strategy completely and try to work from the common ground that you feel all investors will have towards the specific point of view that an investor needs to have to back your company. If you can do that without making significant jumps in logic and instead slowly moving them from where they are now to where you need them just by nodding along you can get them to naturally believe in your company without needing to convince them. It’s like a gotcha moment without them needing to feel like you’ve tricked them.

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