For new businesses, devising an effective business pitch is harder than it sounds. Most entrepreneurs aren’t public speakers, or salesmen. They are courageous inventors and businesspersons, many of whom are not accustomed to that combination of charisma and content that results in investor dollars.
Despite the fact that the average entrepreneur doesn’t even like making such pitches, this is the only way to get the money you need to start your business, or to take it to the next level. And while you’ll have to find your own answer to the question of showmanship, here are some ways you can write a better business pitch, by getting into the head of the investor you are trying to impress.
Quickly Start Solving Problems.
If you sit down and think about it, you’ll realize that businesses come into the world to solve problems. Ideally, they relieve pain: the pain of inconvenience, the pain of waiting, the pain of enduring inefficient processes. Without getting too Buddhist on you, life has pain for everybody, including the investors sitting across the table from you. It’s your job to tap into their pain, and show how your business proposal would solve the problem and relieve that pain, for the investor and for everyone else on earth. That may sound dramatic, but it’s the best way to communicate the urgency necessary to convince someone to give you funding.
Don’t Exaggerate.
Just because you want to sell yourself, don’t start adding half-truths and exaggerations to your proposal. Also, stay away from common platitudes (“We’re going to make the world a better place”, “this is an truly unique opportunity you don’t want to pass up”). These are really just filler and will make you sound more like an infomercial shill than someone who actually needs money to create something great.
Explain How You’ll Make Money.
That might sound completely obvious, but you’d be surprised how many businesses step out into an investor’s office without a coherent go-to-market strategy. If you can’t explain what your thing is, how it works, how you’ll continue to improve and develop it, and how you’re going to sell it to a real customer base, you’re not going to catch the attention of the average investor. If you have a truly good idea, with evidence that work is underway to make it happen, then it will be easy to explain how the business will actually function in the real world, over the long term.
Don’t shoot from the hip when you go into your business pitch, but don’t sound like a robot either. It’s important to find the happy medium between memorization and improvisation. When you finally find that balance, you’ll be able to communicate your idea effectively, in the most natural manner possible. Follow these other techniques and you’ll develop a business pitch par excellence, one which will likely yield you all the funding you need and more. We hope that your pitch pans out and gives you a long financial runway to bring your business into the real world.
