Love it or hate it, sometimes the success of your startup depends on the amount of money you raise. Additionally, demonstrating your traction is one way to get every investor to love your business.

You demonstrate to investors that your company will succeed with your traction slide. They will become more convinced of the concept with each encouraging sign. The majority of the traction slides in the best pitch decks will display a graph of rising sales or users, ideally shaped like a hockey stick and supported by other metrics. All of this evidence demonstrates that your company is headed in the right direction and that the time is right for the investor to join you.

To demonstrate what you are measuring and why to use the traction slide. Always ask yourself what numbers need to rise to advance your business. When your business is just getting started, you want to identify these vital growth drivers. Investors will see this as proof that you can execute while also managing to save a significant amount of cash and time. This may be the number of leads or the cost of acquiring a new customer for some businesses, while it may be churn or the value of a customer’s live time for other businesses.

However, you can get creative with your traction slide in terms of what you want to include and what you don’t. Many of the pitch decks we saw highlighted the company’s SEO positions, press mentions, or lead customers’ reviews. These are some more ideas from us:

• Net Promoter Rating
• Ratings on the App Store
• Revenue
• CAC
• CLV
• Average Sales Cycle
• Leads / Requests
• Monthly Recurring Revenue / Annual Recurring Revenue
• Average Order
• Conversion Rate
• Total Visitors

You can use the slide to present test user or advisor feedback if you don’t yet have any traction metrics.

Last but not least, remember that you shouldn’t jam too much information onto one slide. A good pitch deck slide, as always, differs from a poor one in that it only highlights crucial information.