Investment Banking Slide Examples of a Sales Pitch -

Tl;dr: Part of a collection of real examples of M&A investment banking slides. This blog shows examples of what sales pitches can look like for getting investment banking deals.

This is part of a collection of 67 free M&A presentations from the top 20 banks (based on ranking, and also the quality of presentation for you to learn from). In this, I have 4 examples of investment banking presentations with a sales element. Investment banking presentations are never just sales- they are always “here is why we are great” and then a bunch of free work for the client.

Collection of M&A slide examples

The main page for all the M&A resources is here.

I have broken out 827 examples of slides across 32 sections. You can click through to the section you want to learn about next here:

Company Overview

Corporate Structure

Management Projections

Research Analyst

Comparison Financial Projections

Analysis At Various Prices

Share Price Analysis

Volume Weighted Average Price

Regression Analysis

Discounted Cash Flow

Weighted Average Cost Of Capital

Comparable Companies

Comparable Transactions

Dividend Discount Model

Exchange Ratio And Contribution Analysis

Transaction Case Study

Is this blog for you?

Why the heck should you care? Investment banks (historically) attracted the best and the brightest.

Slide structure/design: Learn how complicated concepts are structured and designed in PowerPoint
Analysis approach: See exactly how complex financial methods are presented
Strategy and communication: M&A deals are not (normally, other than many Duff and Phelps decks) cookie cutter. There’s a host of topics that need to be dealt with
Morbid interest: I used to do this for a living, but it’s still interesting to see how PPT are made… but then maybe it’s just me and so FML 😉

Who this will help:

You want to work in banking: There’s a lot of applicants. Knowing the job helps you answer questions
You work in banking: Even if you’re an MD, you need to know how the best are structuring their thoughts/analysis
You write presentations: You can’t buy learnings like this. You can learn from the slides
You have a curious mind: Good for you

In investment banking, there is no “sales pitch” explicitly. There is a fecking long as balls sales cycle where you do a tonne of free analysis and try be best buddies with a decision-maker who then picks you like at high school to be on the team. It’s pretty brutal. I mean, I did maybe 2 years of free work for a big Italian Asset Manager and they fecking went with UBS.

When you are in soft pitch land hoping to be the preferred service provider you will make a big presentation with maybe a week of analysis for a potential client. At the start, you will have some slides about the bank showing off how fancy you are, but your MD will sort of skip over it at the start and leave the evidence as reading material so you mull in their mind.

Of course, sometimes there is a formal beauty parade, but most of the time it’s just turning your legs towards a guy at the bar, flicking you hair and hoping they want to take you home for $4m after you do a bunch more free work.

As I went through a thousand or so presentations to make this huge free collection for you, I noticed a couple of decks that had the salesy bit in them. I thought why not share so you can see how bankers show themselves off.

You will see that it starts with about us and then there are the usual financial analysis slides.

If you are Goldman, then you are an order taker. You don’t have to show off that much because you’re typically number one.

For everyone else, well, you’ll spend hours fecking about with league tables to show you are at least top 3 by some kind of metric.

No one exactly teaches you to do this, you’re just expected to figure it out and make the team look amazing and the best. You’ll find some way of doing it. Reflecting, no one ever gave me revisions for these slides. It’s not because I was amazing, I think it was just because they only cared about good enough as the client won’t really read it anyway. They just care how good the MD is and how much free work they get out of you.