Five Storytelling Tricks to Make Your Pitch Unforgettable

From Shakespearean times to the era of Shark Tank, at least one thing hasn’t changed: humans are wired for drama. Our brains crave tension, contrast, and stories with stakes.

While we like to think of ourselves as intelligent people who make decisions based solely on logic, heuristic biases affect us all, spilling through our mental sieves into our investment decisions. 

Instead of bemoaning this fact, the most strategic founders use it to their advantage. In this article, we’ll go over five techniques you can use to add more zest to your pitch deck and make it unforgettable. 

1. Always Ask and Answer “So What?”

Too often, pitch decks regurgitate what a company does without telling the investor why they should care. This is an easy mistake, since founders usually spend over twelve hours each day living, breathing, and sleeping in the stakes. Talking about them might feel like a fish trying to explain water. However, even if they’ve contracted with Palantir, investors can’t read your mind. You need to explicitly bridge the gap between what your product or service does and why it matters on the very first slide. 

Talking about why your work matters before getting into the meat of the text transcends investment. It’s also a necessary foundation for literature and media. When Frodo, Aragorn, and their merry band of heroes and hobbits went on the quest to purge the ring, readers were invested because they knew what was at risk; the entire world would fall to Sauron’s evil reign if Frodo failed! As humans, we want to see good triumph and the better angels of our nature conquer the day. Tolkien painted a vivid picture of why the ring mattered before he wrote about the journey across Middle-earth, which contributed heavily to the book’s success. 

To get really clear on why your company’s work matters (a.k.a., the “so what”), use what I like to call the Zoom-In-and-Zoom-Out Method. 

To zoom in, ask yourself: “What individual or company-wide results does my product or service produce?” For example, if you’re creating SaaS for restaurants that helps reduce turnover, don’t just say “We help restaurants reduce turnover through our proprietary software.” Show what happens when a restaurant stays with the status quo. You could say: “Turnover costs the average full-service restaurant around $146,000 per year. Our software cuts turnover by 20%, saving each restaurant almost $30,000 annually.” 

To zoom out, ask yourself, “What societal or industry-wide problem does my product or service address?” Using the same restaurant SaaS example, you could say: “The restaurant industry has one of the highest turnover rates of any sector, costing over $22B annually. Cutting turnover by 20% translates to $4.4B in direct savings, while stabilizing a critical workforce.” Suddenly, the problem you’re tackling feels a lot bigger.

2. Trigger Curiosity and Desire 

Our brain is hardwired to remember information that will help us survive. We are constantly subconsciously assessing where we stand in our peer groups, whether we have access to resources, and what threats might be lurking on the horizon. So what does this mean for your pitch? If you write something that controversially challenges previously held assumptions, reveals unexpected outcomes, or taps into universal human desires (e.g., security, health, belonging, or meaning), you’ll make the investor want to keep reading because they’ll feel, subconsciously, that doing so could give them new information that helps them survive and thrive.

Using the restaurant SaaS example again, you could write something like: “We’ve been lied to – restaurant margins don’t have to be razor thin. Operational intelligence can unlock 5-10 extra percentage points of profitability to transform a restaurant’s entire business model, and we’ve figured out how.” Spicy! Doesn’t this make you want to read more to see what this company is doing differently and why conventional intelligence is wrong? Peaking interest is the first step to securing a meeting with an investor, which in turn is the first step for investment. 

If you go the universal human desires route, you could write: “In a high-failure industry, our platform stabilizes margins and protects restaurants against unpredictable costs. This increases profits and – perhaps most critically – helps restaurant owners sleep at night.” Including this tidbit at the end creates an image in the investor's mind; they can almost feel the deep exhale as they picture the high-charged restaurant entrepreneur drifting off to sleep. They can probably relate to feeling out of control and, conversely, how good it feels when those worries are finally put at bay. Invoking primal desires – in this case, security – with your words taps into a primordial well, drawing forth the emotional waters shared at all times by all people. 

3. Harness the Power of a Story Arc

Some pitch decks have achieved great success by framing their service or product through the lens of one avatar. This isn’t the best fit for all cases, but if you take this route, you should write the avatar’s story like a hero’s journey arc. 

The typical pitch deck hero’s journey goes something like this: The hero (the customer avatar) encounters an inciting incident that makes him or her realize the status quo is untenable. The hero seeks counsel from a mentor/guide (your company), which gives him or her the tools to conquer the monster of chaos/inefficiency and come out the other side renewed and positively transformed. 

In practice, it could look along the lines of the following: 

“Meet Maria, who owns a bustling Italian restaurant in Brooklyn, NY. She loves her staff and customers, but she’s overwhelmed. Staff turnover is constant, food waste eats into her margins, and customer loyalty is shaky. 

One Friday night, her sous chef quits mid-shift. By Monday, she’s down to two servers, and for the first time, Maria wonders if she can keep the doors open.

That’s when she discovers Restaurant SaaS Company. Our product gives Maria concrete tools: predictive scheduling to keep shifts covered, smart inventory that slashes waste, and a loyalty engine that keeps diners coming back.

Within weeks, staff schedules are balanced, turnover drops, and food costs shrink. Six months later, profits are higher, her staff is stable, and she’s getting rave reviews. 

We help restaurant owners like Maria get their profits up and their sleep back.”

Ironically, specificity can help the reader generalize and extrapolate, as it reduces the amount of mental effort they need to expend to understand your offer.

Of course, the story alone won’t carry the deck, but using it can frame subsequent market analysis and revenue projections as metrics of consequence instead of just words and symbols on a page. 

4. Make Numbers Come Alive

Numbers by themselves rarely stick. Investors hear “billions” and “millions” in every pitch, so what matters is making those large sums feel real. The trick is to anchor data points to something tangible, relatable, or surprising. 

Building off our very first example, we could add onto the “Turnover costs U.S. restaurants $22B annually” line and say, “That’s like burning almost all of McDonald’s annual revenue just to rehire and train staff.” This adds scale and significance through comparison.

Or you could write something like: “The restaurant industry has ~80% turnover. That means 4 out of 5 people you see serving food this month will be gone by next year. For a $1.1T industry in the U.S. alone, that’s billions lit on fire in training costs.” Instead of just thinking of a bland “80%”, investors begin to conceptualize what that actually means in real life to real people. 

Framing numbers with context helps investors understand how big the problem you’re solving really is. 

5. Leverage Contrast and Tension 

Drama and excitement live in the gap between what is and what could be. In a pitch deck, showing contrast between the status quo and what your product or service helps achieve can make the promise of your solution irresistible. As I’ve hinted earlier, it works best when you show the before picture (e.g., chaos, waste, thin margins) and then the after picture (e.g., stability, efficiency, growth). The contrast between those two worlds keeps investors leaning forward, which means both need to be vividly expressed. 

You could do this directly through a before-and-after “results” slide, or simply as part of the problem statement on your first or second page. 

**To note, and this almost goes without saying, please only use real, verifiable facts in your decks. My encouragement of drama here is only for the ethical kind.

All of this writing about restaurants is making me hungry, so I’m going to end it here. If you want to read more about exactly how to structure a pitch, you can check out my article, “The 17 Slides You Need in Your Pitch Deck.” If you want to learn more about why humans love a good story, you can read it here. And if you want hands-on support with any of the above, DM me on LinkedIn or reach out via Élever Partners. Best of luck!