Pitching Skill Workshop: Tips to Win Investment & Sales
Experienced investors tell me that they back people with great ideas, not the other way around.
A short time ago, I received a request for help from a person referred to me by one of my previous clients.
First engagement:
We spoke, and he told me about his business idea briefly. We agreed that he would send on his draft pitch deck and I would have a look and provide some feedback.
We could explore, after reviewing the deck, how best we could work together.
The deck arrived and it ticked the boxes regarding the questions an investor would like to know the answers to:
Market size, Competitors, Ask, Team, Problem, Route to market, etc.
All the usual stuff.
It was a good box-ticking exercise, but you got no sense or the founder’s reason for looking to start this business, other than an opportunity to make money.
Your Passion:
The Lean Canvas and other similar documents are excellent methods of creating a business plan that an accountant, prospective partner or investor would find useful.
However, very few of these documents (in my experience) convey the passion of the entrepreneur.
Experienced investors tell me that they back people with great ideas, not the other way around.
The Problem:
A pitch, first and foremost, must engage the listener early and connect them in some way to the problem you solve, e.g. the “bread baking problem”.
Would they, or someone they know and care about, have this problem? If they mentally answer YES, they are engaged and likely to be interested in knowing how you can solve the problem.
Send me your Deck:
The deck I received the other day did not reveal the problem/opportunity until slide sixteen!
Your audience will have switched off and mentally gone home by then.
When you get a chance to talk to an investor, this conversation is usually bought to a close, when the investor says, send me your deck!
Do book publishers read all the novels aspiring authors send them?
Is an investor going to look at all the decks they receive?
In most good organizations they have a process that separates the wheat from the chaff.
A Current Problem:
Your pitch needs to tell them in the first few sentence or slides, how you solve the bread baking problem (a new source for strong flour, a recipe for making yeast).
Lots of pitches I see are like the myriad of movies and box sets I have watched over the preceding weeks. They have all the right ingredients, yet I am regularly unfulfilled, having wasted hours of my life, with very little to show for it!
The Secret:
Great movies, books, and pitches are successful because we care about the characters!
Whether it’s a book, a movie or pitch presentation to win sales or investment, you must engage emotionally with your audience.
The Action:
If you feel your story needs to be more impactful, please get in touch. You will never have a better time to do so.
