Frequently Asked Questions.

General

We’ve all been there. You’re sitting through a meeting, counting down the seconds with a presentation deck gone wrong: Endless bullet points, lengthy text, confusing jargon, irrelevant stock photos, passive voice and distracting inconsistencies. These all lead to the same missed opportunity: an unengaged and unmoved audience.

VERBED was founded with a simple objective: Create engaging and action-oriented presentation and pitch decks.

The most successful presentation and pitch decks are those that include three elements: an engaging story that draws the audience in, striking design (including relevant visuals that support the narrative), and thoughtful strategy around framing the story to the audience. VERBED combines all three of these elements to set our clients up for success.

We’re passionate about creating persuasive and memorable decks that generate results (to sell, educate and delight). VERBED’s investor pitch decks and venture fund decks, in particular, have been used by clients to raise millions of dollars. To learn more about how our decks have been leveraged for client success, click here.

“VERBED” describes the process of going from a noun to a verb; from a passive stance to an active one. (E.g., “Let’s Google it”). Our presentation and pitch decks are designed to engage your audience and move them to action.

All of our presentation and pitch decks incorporate visual storytelling. We know that storytelling, combined with the right visuals, has a solid track record for success, including: 55% increase in focus with a great story1 43% more persuasive with visual aids2 100% increased retention with visual aids3 To be impactful, decks must tell a well-crafted story that is both easy to understand and remember, while visually engaging the audience. Design must serve the narrative (not the other way around). We use visual storytelling in our decks to enhance the impact on your audience and objective(s) by making sure the aesthetics support your core messages in a way that is cohesive and compelling. We have developed a comprehensive course on Visual Storytelling via PowerPoint. Click here to learn more.

1 https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-finds-attention-spans-arent-shrinking–theyre-evolving-300702833.html 2 http://thinktwicelegal.com/olio/articles/persuasion_article.pdf 3 https://24slides.com/presentbetter/how-important-is-the-design-of-a-presentation

Projects

Services

We work on presentation and pitch decks of all types. We have extensive experience creating effective presentation and pitch decks for a wide range of marketing and business development objectives, including, but not limited to:

    • Investor Pitch Decks (for startup founders and entrepreneurs)
    • Venture Fund Decks (for venture capital firms)
    • Sales Decks (for sales teams)
    • Product / Service Overview Decks (for B2B marketing teams)
    • Sponsorship & Fundraising Decks (for conferences)
    • Live Presentations (for professional speakers, consultants and events)
    • External Decks (including company overview decks and annual reports)
    • Internal Decks (including board meetings, onboarding, training, townhall presentations, and lunch and learn presentations)
    • Role / Promotion Justification Decks 
    • Webinar Decks
    • Template Decks

If your project can be done in PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides, we can help.

We have extensive experience in working with diverse clients across every vertical. We have supported both B2C and B2B clients across industries, including those in: Technology, SaaS, Consumer Product Goods, Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, Space, Energy, Mining, Agriculture, Logistics, Cannabis, Film, Financial Services and Cryptocurrency.

Yes, we offer limited number of deck audits. As part of this service offering, we review your presentation deck and provide feedback during a virtual consultation with our CEO. Contact us for more information.
For Design projects, we use your provided text as-is and enhance your narrative with design. For Storytelling & Design projects, we refine your story flow and provided text and enhance your narrative with design.

This means a document or website that outlines your company’s specified font(s), color palette (hex colors) and logos (high resolution), that we can use for your project.

We’re always happy to help. We support existing clients with additional design needs. These have included: logos, websites, social media graphics, infographics, posters and even socks! If you have additional design work of interest, please include more details in the “More Information” section of the Get Started Form.
Getting Started
The first step is to fill out the Get Started form. This is a quick form for new clients that will ask you questions about your project scope: Service TypeAre you looking for support on design, or storytelling and design? Brand Guide:  Do you need a brand guide (colors and fonts) developed for this project, or do you already have one we can use? Number of Slides:  How many slides does your project have? Upload a Draft:  We need to see the draft before we can provide you with a proposal. This enables us to see the starting point to determine the level of effort required to transform your document. If you prefer to walk us through the deck during the intro call, that works too. Have more questions? Want to schedule an intro call? At the end of this form, you’ll have the option to book a 15 minute intro call with us.
Draft slides – even in a very rough state – are required to get started, so we have a starting point and clarity on what you want to tell your audience.
    • If you need more help getting your ideas into slides take a look at these examples or check out our Investor Pitch Deck Fundamentals and Visual Storytelling via Powerpoint courses here.

Yes. We take client confidentiality very seriously. Everyone on our team is under a strict VERBED NDA. We are always happy to review a company specific NDA, if required. Send NDAs to hello@verbed.io.

Yes! Our projects require a brand guide. By this we mean a document, website and/or assets folder that outlines your company’s specified font(s), color palette and high-resolution logos. If you do not have a brand guide – or if you have one but would like to get a fresh take on it – our Add-on Branding service is here to help. We’ll create a brand guide for your project that’s bespoke to your business, industry, audience and objectives. Bonus: This brand guide can be leveraged for future design projects.

After we do our first project together, we have a really good sense of your story and design preferences. This allows us to bypass a couple of the beginning steps.

Existing clients get priority booking and an exclusive internal form to submit any future work (either on a new project or additional work on an existing project).

Process & Timing
Our clients come to us for support in telling their stories in a more powerful, and visual, way. We deliver on that promise (while also making the deck look fantastic). To do this, we have a proven process with a collaborative approach that incorporates client feedback early and often. Read more about our process here.

We build our decks on Apple macOS. As part of our process, we ensure that your presentation will work seamlessly across both Windows PC and Apple Mac computers. 

Project turnaround is dependent on scope and scheduling. On average, assuming quick feedback cycles with clients, projects are turned around within 1-2 weeks of project start.

Yes, subject to availability. We do our best to accommodate last-minute and quick-turnaround project requests. Our ability to do so depends on project scope and existing client commitments. Providing our team with as much advance notice is always appreciated so we can plan appropriately for your project. Projects with less than 3 business days notice are subject to an additional fee.
Deliverables
Absolutely. You’ll be provided with an editable final file along with a PDF version of your project. We keep as many elements (text, graphs, icons and other visuals) of your project editable as possible, depending on the project scope. We recommend using PowerPoint, Keynote or Google Slides if you intend on making changes in the future, since most people have access to these tools and are reasonably familiar with how they work.
Pricing & Billing

Pricing depends on the project scope and deliverables. The three main factors that influence pricing are Service Type, Brand Guide and Number of Slides. Once you complete the Getting Started form with your project specifics, our team will send you a proposal which will include a quote, timeline and next steps.

To learn more about the factors that most influence your project and its investment, click here.

We take a 50% deposit of the project total before we kickoff a project (using Stripe). The remaining 50% of the project is invoiced upon project completion.

We can also use Upwork, the leading global work marketplace, to facilitate client projects. They make project management seamless for both clients and freelancers. If you haven’t used Upwork before, as part of our onboarding process, we’ll send you next steps to get set up.

Yes, Upwork charges a small processing fee. To learn more, click here.

Courses

The live course is delivered in real-time, providing participants with the opportunity to ask questions and get feedback along the way. 

Our on-demand course is a series of prerecorded video lessons, available to watch at your own pace. 

Both options provide an excellent introduction to using PowerPoint to wow your audience. 

The live course is designed to condense the fundamentals of PowerPoint down into a handful of impactful lessons.  Participants should anticipate 2.5 hours per week for lessons and another hour to review and implement those learnings.

The on-demand course is available to participants at their own leisure.  The most successful attendees set aside 2 – 4 hours per week to review the lessons and implement their learnings. 

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