If you’re a business person, you need to know the skill to pitch your business. Even if you aren’t planning to go after funding, having a solid pitch ensures that you know your business far and wide. This comes at hand if or when you eventually decide to seek out investment.Â
How to make a pitch for investors?
Creating a successful pitch starts with an accurate business plan. From there, it’s up to you to identify what makes your business valuable and worth investing in. You may have records of proven financial history and a deep analysis of how you stack up against the competition across myriad industries, but you can’t disguise it all.Â
When you pitch to potential investors and venture capitalists for the first time, you will often only have around 10-minutes to make your case.Â
Your pitch is one unique thing that could either get your business off the ground or shove your idea into eternal stupefaction. The criterion and guidepost for investors are that only ten will go big for every hundred investments they make.
Here are few tips on how to deliver a pitch that investors can’t turn down.
-
The Time Rule
Timing is evaluative. The lesser time your pitch takes, the better impact it creates. An excellent idea means nothing unless you can refine it to a few moments of absolute power. The more concise your pitch is, the more effective it will stand. Here are a few timing pointers:
– If you tell that you’ll take “only 8 minutes,” then take at least one minute less, i.e., 7 minutes.
– If you are notified, “You only have 15 minutes to pitch,” then take at least five minutes less, i.e., make sure you finish in 10 minutes.
– If you say, “One last thing” or something similar, then make sure it’s genuinely the one last thing to be addressed.
– Move at a good pace. Don’t rush at the end. Hence, planning is necessary.
– If you’re using slides, don’t get stuck on one drop for more than three minutes.
Lastly, if the investors are interested, they will ask you questions. If they are not interested, then you will have saved them as well as yourself some time.
-
Pitch Your Idea As A Story
Storytelling is a scientifically-proven way to grab a listener’s attention and retain it. Additionally, it makes your pitch unforgettable. Investors are bored with spreadsheets, valuations, and aggregates. If they want to know this information, they can get it later on.
What you can present that no term sheet can convey is the story and sentiments supporting your startup. Everyone enjoys listening to a good story, even the most data-driven investor. So, tell your story with honesty. You are bound to gain attention, and the funding will accompany you.
-
Be Laser-focused
Investors’ time is their most valuable asset. If you show respect for their time, they will interpret that respect as your ability to treat their funding with respect. Because time is quintessential, you need to develop an absolute focus on your pitch’s core components. What are those core components? Read ahead in the following tips.
-
Explain Your Product Or Service
Show your potential investors a glimpse of, or give them, a sample of the actual product to handle. Be careful not to buzz endlessly about your product. In reality, investors don’t care about your product as much as they care about the money that your commodity will earn. The earlier you get to the money, the better for the investors.
-
Explain Why Your Product Or Service Stands Out
If you are not manufacturing or providing anything different from the ordinary widget, don’t even organize the meeting. Sit back to your drawing board, and design something better to hold the investors’ attention span.
-
Elaborate Upon Your Target Audience
Use demographic and psychographic features to point out your target customer groups. Show investors an accurate picture of a customer along with relevant data points.
-
Explain How You Strategies To Acquire Customers
Business success depends highly on marketing. If you have a marketing strategy, this is your chance to showcase it. Great products don’t sell themselves. You sell the product by marketing it.
To be carried away, investors have to see an irrefutable strategy for getting the product to market. Most Venture Capitalists are fully aware of digital marketing’s advantages and won’t take a second glance at a product that does not involve a tactical plan for digital marketing.
-
Elaborate On Your Revenue Model
Investors invest in making returns on that investment. An investor will consider your pitch if you can answer whether your company will make them rich? The answer – in investor-speak – is your revenue model. Precisely, identify which type of revenue model you are adopting and how you plan to apply it.
-
Be Zealous and Avid
You can’t fake zeal.” An excellent way to increase your energy level is to add about fifty percent more energy than you usually do. Businesspersons must step out of their comfort zone since enthusiasm will not provide their insight, realism, and integrity. It will only amplify it.
-
Dress Appropriately and Slay
Ideally, you should not judge a person by the way he or she looks. That may be unfair, and you may begrudge it, but you’re not going to overcome this natural human tendency. A thousand rupees expense that you incur on a new suit will pay for itself a thousand times when you secure the funding you need. So, don’t cut back.
To Summarize
Pitching your design to investors can be one of the most challenging things you ever do as an entrepreneur. For most companies, attracting investors becomes a requirement to either stay out of debt or difficulty or grow.
At times you might need mentorship more than bills. Investors can often be your most prominent instructors. They are looking for someone to believe. Use your zeal for your product to inspire them to take a chance on you.
The principal to a successful pitch is to be brief while sharing an engaging story about your company, keeping your slides focused on numbers, and using your presentation time to verbally explain your story and value proposition.
Have a strong marketing plan for your business to go along with your funding so that you’re ready to hit the ground running. Be prepared to answer questions from industry experts.
The people you’re pitching to have their own success stories. Customize your pitch to be about how you can help them expand their success, whether that’s financially or in a humanitarian way.
Most importantly, practice your pitch, have a plan, dress lovely and have fun.
