8 Rules for Founders Who Pitch
This is a 6 part series on Effective Techniques in Pitching for BD & Sales. Read the other parts here:
1). I want to be a founder but:
2). 50,000 ft., 500 ft. rule
3). It’s not Product-Market fit, it’s PMT(e)
4). 8 Rules for Founders Who Pitch
5). 3 Effective Traits of All Good BD People
6). The Difference Between BD & Sales
Hi, I’ve been saying recently that pitching is easy. And that is true. But “easy” means there are simple techniques which will get you from 0 to 5. To get from 5 to 8 are more advanced techniques, and 8 to 10 is likely natural talent and ability.
Then, I started mentoring start-ups in Taiwan. :-)
Look:
#1. Founders have to pitch. Recently, I was asked to mentor some companies who were prepping to pitch investors and…ONE company sent their marketing person and ANOTHER company sent their salesperson + a marketing intern to take notes.
We spent 20 minutes before I finally realized this was the marketing person since he/she couldn’t answer basic questions about their technology.
WTF? If you’re not going to take fundraising seriously, you’ll never get funding. Founders have to pitch. This isn’t a KPI or homework. Take it seriously.
#2. You have to prepare. That means, if you’re a novice presenter, you can’t expect to show up and “wing it”. You need a script, the script needs to cover everything you’ll say, and you need to memorize your script. Only AFTER those three steps are complete is when you are ready to receive notes.
#3. Your slides cannot take more than 5 seconds to read. So basic. In fact, Guy Kawasaki has this great blog about “The 10/20/30 Rule of PowerPoint”. Pay attention to the 30 rule.
#4. You need a powerful ending. This is more of an advanced technique, but you’ve got to end with a hook, an emotion, or a mic drop. BTW, movies do this all the time; they have really bad Act 1 & Act 2, but end with a cliff-hanger and everyone’s like “Wow…didn’t see that coming, how awesome was that movie!”. You need a powerful ending.
#5. The language thing is a big deal if pitching in English. We (a couple other mentors and I) were working with an early stage founder, and his first pass English pitch was abysmal. We helped him rework the English pitch to a decent point; but then, just as an exercise, he asked if he could do it in Mandarin. Suddenly, his pitch in Mandarin was very good (he combined the reworking of the pitch with delivering it in Mandarin). So now, his problem isn’t that his pitch is bad. It’s his English skills are poor so the delivery comes across bad. But an easy way for him to solve this: perfect the pitch in Mandarin, translate it, and then memorize the English. Don’t try and start from scratch in English.
SOME OTHER BASIC TECHNIQUES:
6). Every pitch, story, talk, presentation has a title (or theme, if you’re going without titles). At every point in your talk, you should be able to “connect” back to your title/theme. If you can’t, it often means you’re wandering off topic.
7). Describe your talk using only your title and three sentences. I.E. Today, I’m going to tell you how physics can solve hunger. Number one, recent studies have shown (problem statement)…number two, a specific case out of India was a girl who (user story)…number three, from these learnings (solution statement), we developed a new IoT device that leverages a huge market (recent studies) and a common use case (girl) to solve this problem.
ADVANCED TECHNIQUE:
8). Be yourself. Everyone has a personality, and it’s generally *easiest* to be yourself up on stage. There are some who can “mimic” another delivery method or presentation method, but that’s hard. Just be yourself, it’s one less thing to remember up on stage.
Special thanks to @techstars, @TEDxNeihu, JustCo for giving me the opportunity to coach your founders/speakers/teams.
