QuickBooks Pitch / Mocha Club Customer Story

During my first stint at Kindful, I wrote a handful of customer stories and case studies. But this work with Mocha Club was a major stepping stone in terms of our level of content production, and fit really well into a larger campaign around QuickBooks.

Challenge

For an upcoming QuickBooks conference, Kindful had qualified as one of 10 finalists for their “Small Business App Showdown,” a running between smaller apps that all integrated with QuickBooks.

Part of the competition included a pitch of our software to a small panel of judges and other conference attendees. I spearheaded the entire project.

Here were the goals of the competition:

1. The pitch was only allowed to be two and a half minutes. This meant every aspect of the pitch, including the demo, intro, and any other promotional pieces, and to be extremely tight.

2. The pitch needed to include an explanation and a test drive. In a conference room setting, this was going to be challenging. First, any value prop explanation needed to be very short and effective, since we had such limited time. Second, we didn’t want any loading or lagging to take up our presentation time, which was very likely due to an overcrowded conference center and limited wifi.

3. We needed to tie in our customers. As we drafted the pitch, we found it to be a little stuffy. Kindful’s customers are capable of imparting real change to the world every single day, and yet our pitch didn’t really portray that story. We needed to appeal to the emotions and showcase how Kindful was able to help these organizations achieve more for the world.

Process

We started with the pitch and demo. Nailing this piece was going to be essential. I had to distill an entire CRM platform down into 150 seconds, including an introduction to the company and a primer of our mission and values.

I also needed to make the script in a way that would be familiar to the CEO and the account executive, so they could each memorize their parts easily. I worked with both of them to make sure everything was approachable and had a flow that came easily to them.

Presentation

To design the presentation, I created it natively in Apple Keynote. This is where all the animation would take place to smooth out the visuals of the pitch.

I had to create a Kindful account to show the precise elements I was aiming for. Working with the product team, I created a sample Kindful account with a baseline of fake data. From there, I had to manually add data for it to show a compelling visual that played into the story.

Since this pitch was for QuickBooks, I also wanted to show how Kindful integrated seamlessly. This meant setting up a demo QuickBooks account and manually entering data to make it look authentic.

I did all of this in the two platforms before taking screenshots for use in the final presentation. Once I had the screenshots, I used Keynote’s animations to zoom in or out on specific elements as well as animate the mouse movements.

Customer story video

Working as a producer for the video, I set up and conducted the interview, while also providing direction on framing and final edits.

We received a drive with original media from Mocha Club’s marketing team to include as b-roll in the video. I partnered with a designer on the team to choose which video elements we’d choose, directed the flow of the cuts, and guided the final color.

For the music, I worked in Logic Pro to create a backing track that would fit the tone of the video without distracting from the speaker.

Product

Customer Story Video: Mocha Club

My contributions:

• Produced and directed filming and cut of the video

• Conducted interview and directed talent

• Wrote, recorded, and mixed the backing track

Small Business App Showdown – Pitch Script

My contributions:

• Created pitch outline based on contest requirements

• Outlined interview for the customer video

• Orchestrated table read for first script and directed talent (CEO and account exec)

• Revised and rewrote script version two

Did you know there are more than 2 million nonprofit organizations in the United States alone? They were all started by visionaries that simply wanted to see their mission come to life. But most nonprofits are - just like small businesses - understaffed, underfunded, and behind the tech learning curve.

Read the entire script and outline online.

Small Business App Showdown – Presentation

My contributions:

• Outlined flow of the presentation based off the script

• Collected screenshots and recordings from Kindful and QuickBooks

• Animated transitions and mouse movements to simulate the demo

• Adjusted timing based on run-through

Watch a recording of the demo pitch slides.