Pitching for Perfection

Every business needs investors or shareholders who are willing to invest. This is especially the case with the fast turnover of today’s start-ups. The most common procedure for finding investors is to pitch them with your idea. This means you’re going to need a really good one to capture their imagination. One of the first steps in launching a business, therefore, is knowing how to pitch.

Understanding what is entailed in a pitch is a very necessary skill and one which you should acquire pronto. The ability to sell your idea to a random passer-by is just as important as being able to hold forth in a boardroom and comes from an intimate knowledge of your business and its selling points.

As a business consultancy, we’ve seen all kinds of pitchers, from the smooth-tongued spin doctors to the finicky fusspots. There are those with the capacity to charm the birds out of the trees and think they can wing it with their charisma. Then there are the finicky fusspot pitchers who plan every syllable of every speech and include everything but the kitchen sink in their pitch. Obviously, these are both extremes, and such radical approaches are always plagued with problems.

One important maxim to remember is that “less is more”. Time is precious in our fast-paced business world and people want to keep meetings short and effective. Therefore you need to devote some time to determine what matters are of critical value to your audience. Focus on those points to develop a punchy, informative and convincing argument.

Imagine you have only the time it takes to go up to your office in the lift, and then fine-tune your pitch to fit that interval. It will pay you considerable dividends, in the long run, to invest time on this. You will have a useful tool to hand in your everyday business toolbox, and you never know when you might have an opportunity to use it.

Here are a few top tips for creating a really good pitch:

• Refine your message until it’s short and incisive.
• Put yourself in the place of the person who’ll be receiving your pitch. This could be either a potential customer or supplier, as well as an investor. What’s the most important aspect of the pitch for you? What’s this business offering that you’re not being offered by its competitors?
• Make it clear to the customer or investor what problems you can solve for them.
• People don’t generally care about the nuts and bolts of your business. They just want to know how it will benefit them, so confine your pitch to what advantages your business can offer its clients.

Investors want to see some return on their money, so decide what aspect of the business is most important for sales purposes. This could be the speed, efficiency or quality of your services, the price of your product or your business values. When you’ve determined what makes your business special, make that the central focus of your pitch.

For more information or advice on how to come up with a powerful business pitch, meet us for a virtual coffee.

 

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