All fledgling entrepreneurs struggle with collecting money and gaining potential investors’ trust, to finally kick off with their project and start their dream business. Very often, they fail to get money and make investors interested in what they want to say and launch on the market. Getting people involved in the presentation of your project may be a hard nut to crack and having a bright idea by itself seems to be insufficient. As an aspiring leader, you need to work exceptionally hard to inspire and educate investors, in order to gain access to growth-fueling funding, and you need to know how to pitch.
To achieve success, you need to devote much of your spare time preparing the presentation. Doing this isn’t always a child’s play. There’s a lot to be done to delight and fascinate your potential investors and make them ready to go forward with your idea. To make it work and help yourself to get funding, carefully follow all the rules below – this will make your project much more likely to get funding like Donald Trump.
Know the Floor
Your presentation should be matched to your audience. Try to research the audience, get to know who they are, what their history is and how they work – this information will help you to present ideas that will speak directly to them. How do you do this? Try to personalize the presentation with their branding, show relevant statistics and other engaging materials. It is incredibly important how you’re going to tailor your exposure because, in terms of fundraising and pitching investors, it’s your ‘to be or not to be’ moment on the market – it’s a matter of life or death.
If you don’t devote some time to tailoring your presentation, making it personalized and engaging for your audience, you won’t be prepared for success. It’s never easy to collect money, so you have to be prepared and conduct in-depth research to know your potential investors better.
Get to The Point Fast
It isn’t a mystery that cognitive resources are getting smaller and smaller due to the efforts made by focusing on the topic. People’s attention spans also are getting shorter and shorter and this rule isn’t only connected to your presentation in front of the investors – whether it is a long book, blog or an article in the newspaper, it still applies. When it’s getting longer and longer – and we hardly see the sense of going further – it is entirely reasonable to get bored. Don’t let your unique audience get bored with what you want to say, quickly get to the point and then develop it in a personalized way, ensuring your exposure is engaging and worth an investor’s time.
Don’t Use Too Many Slides
Usually, it is worth listening to what specialists think about an idea or a concept. So, according to this rule, we should listen to venture capital experts who recommend minimizing the number of slides. Build each slide so that it is easily understood at a glance and help advance your story from slide to slide. Avoid too much written text in your presentation, because it increases the likeability of investors losing their interest and engagement as soon as they see a slide full of words. You can also help make your slides more attractive to the audience by creating titles correctly. Make your titles the main takeaways and ensure they’re appropriately built with a moving call-to-action. Devote some time to thinking up a catchy sound bite – the short, catchy phrase which is easier to remember than presented data – and you can be sure that, if it is good enough, your audience will have it in their minds for days! It’s true that it takes time to think up a catchy slogan, but it’s worth it.
Show as Much as Possible
Visualize as much of your content as possible. To tell your story effectively, you need to do more than just create a perfect speech and commit it onto slides. Telling your story effectively requires you to paint a story of what you want to present – this picture helps your audience visualize how you and your project can make them more successful. It’s true that slides should illustrate a story but, if you match it with illustrations and supporting anecdotes, you’ll make it more memorable and it will be more likely that investors will be interested and more eager to invest their money.
Tell a Well-Remembered Story
Create your presentation with just enough text, illustrated by the visuals which tell your story. Even if you’re not in the room, this way of creating your pitch will guide your audience directly to the point, even without your presence. It will help to stick with your audience both during and after the presentation. How can you do this? Remember about the graphics and slides structure, but also try to create a memorable moment. When the audience reviews the materials you leave behind, they’ll remember why the message had such an impact.
Convince Them That You’re Better Than Your Competitors
This is a crucial point in your presentation. Think about your competitive advantage and show the investors how the project you’re pitching is better than what your competitors offer, or just how it differs from them. You have to be better than the rest, so offer something they’re lacking or have an idea on how to make people choose your project instead of theirs. You have to show what your shield against your competitors is, as well as how you’re going to make good use of it when it comes to brand development.
Introduce the Team
Your audience wants to have confidence that you’re not all alone with your idea and that you have a solid team to back you up. Being all alone with the project may be hard regarding the massive amount of work that has to be done, but it can also lead to distress and a fast burnout at the end. Your team is a kind of guard against derailing yourself. It is crucial to show who is responsible for every part of your project and, furthermore, a key part of this involves giving examples of the team’s accomplishments. Don’t forget to illustrate what you’re talking about in this part, as it will help potential investors to know you all better and remember this part for longer.
Know What Your Next Step Is
Prepare your presentation with all of the examples of the successes you’ve gained in the past but, also, be prepared for questions about your visions for the future. People often enter the pitching situation without being aware of what they’re going to do after they get funding and what they actually want the audience to do. Simply answering that you’re going to develop your team and the whole brand doesn’t seem sufficient in this case. You need to prepare a plan, or even a few plans, detailing what you’re going to do regarding all these circumstances. Whether you get funding in the short-term future or not, think about your competitors on the market, how their activity can influence your position what you’re going to do if they grow rapidly. To be even more reliable, think about all the dangers and positive outcomes, and ultimately decide which step will you take next.
Learn from Others
The best way to bring your pitching skills to perfection is to watch how others do it. There are plenty of opportunities to do this online – people who succeed or specialize in this matter often give lectures about how to create a perfect pitch and get funding. Watch them, take all the best lessons from them and try to think which aspects could be applied to your pitching plan. It might help you to be more convinced about whether you’ve chosen a good path or not, how to behave during the presentation and what to be prepared to. Sometimes, it is better to learn from the best examples than to read hundreds of books (which also won’t hurt!)
Whatever Happens, Don’t Beg
There is a fine line between showing intense passion for your idea and showing nervous fear of losing out. The situation isn’t simple; you’re presenting in front of the people who hold sway over whether your project will get a chance to develop and thrive, or not. A little anxiety is understandable, but letting it take hold of you will work against you and your brilliant idea – it can make you adopt an attitude of begging, which never sells well. Try to get to know your reactions and emotions, to be able to handle it properly intense situations. If you are able to do this, you’ll make your presentation more professional and you’ll look like a pro!
Creating a perfect pitch isn’t easy. It needs plenty of preparation to make it clear and to the point, to create it in a way that the audience will remember and make them ready to follow. Don’t hesitate to spend your free time on preparing for every question that may appear during the presentation, learn how to combine valuable text with adequate graphics and moments to remember, as well as learning how to control your emotions and be self-confident once you’ve started to pitch to potential investors. Use all these tips, learn from all the sources and it’ll pay you back. Good luck!
