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How to Present an Engaging and Successful Pitch
By Thabiso Nkone
Presenting a good pitch is as important as the technology or the solution underlying your business. This statement might seem like an exaggeration, but considering the ever increasing use of pitching sessions, where an investment seeker is given a few minutes to pitch their concept, by public and private investors, one better not ignore this crucial activity in securing an investment. The growth in the use of pitching sessions for pre—screening and in some cases for making of a final investment decision is largely due to the relatively low investment of resources — human or capital.
“Pitching sessions are great in that you can quickly do a preliminary assessment of the merits of any proposal without going through lengthy documents. A fifteen minutes pitch followed by another fifteen minutes of questions and answers is in most cases all you need”, says Ela Romanowska — Innovation Fund's Seed Fund Manager — who will be running Seed Fund Pitching Sessions in March 2009. The advantage of pitching sessions for applicants is that they can get immediate feedback on the weaknesses of their proposal and even suggestions on how they can improve them, from the panel.
People pitching an idea often focus on how stressful it is to prepare and pitch and forget that listening to pitches is also strenuous. Guy Kawasaki — former chief evangelist for Apple Inc and venture capitalist— says he suffers from a disease he has called Meniere's and Tinnitus. The symptoms of this disease are hearing loss, constant ringing ears and vertigo. The cause of this disease is according to Guy Kawasaki “listening to thousands of lousy pitches”. To save the investment community, Kawasaki has embarked on a campaign to improve pitches delivered. For him the “gist of pitching is to get off to a fast start, explain the relevance of what you do, stay at a high level, listen to audience reaction”. To improve the quality of “lousy pitches” Kawasaki advocates for a ten slides rule which he says is based on the fact that a normal human being cannot comprehend more than ten concepts per meeting. The ten slides must cover these topics:
- Problem
- Solution
- Underlying technology
- Business model
- Market
- Competition
- Team
- Projections and Milestones
- Status and timeline
- Summary and call to action
Agreeing with Kawasaki's ten topics, Ela says “most investors, be they private or public institutions, would want a clear yet succinct articulation of these topics in a 10 — 15 minute pitch. I would also strongly recommend that an applicant does careful homework to find out the institution's specific mandate and standard investment terms. In the case of the Innovation Fund I would add intellectual property position in relation to the underlying technology and market strategy as topics which possibly deserve their own slide. Depending on the nature of the opportunity, some slides could be consolidated. The principle is to err towards simplicity”.
Garr Reynolds — Associate Professor of Management at Japan's Kansai Gaida University and author of Presentation Zen — believes that the cause of these “lousy presentations” lies in our approach to, primarily, design and delivery of presentations. He insists that “ it's long past time that we realised that putting the same information on a slide in text form that is coming out of our mouths usually does not help — in fact, it hurts our message”. Reynolds cites research conducted at the University of South Wales which found that it is more difficult to process information if it is coming at you verbally and in written form at the same time. Reynolds concludes that “A good presentation is different to a well written document, and attempts to merge them results in poor presentations and poor documents”.
For Nancy Duarte — author of Slide:ology and principal of Duarte Design, the firm that created the presentation for Al Gore's Oscar winning film, An Inconvenient Truth— the answer to improving presentations lies in the delicate balance between three elements of the presentation ecosystem — the message, visual story and delivery. To develop a message that has a 'stickiness factor' Duarte advises that the most important step is to understand your audience. Below are some questions adapted from Duarte's seven questions to knowing your audience:
- Who are they and why are they here?
- How does your project/presentation address the reason they are here?
- What could stop them from adopting your message?
- How can you best reach them?
Answering these questions will make it easier for you to align your message with the audience's needs. This is important as “most investments, especially in the venture capital stage, will require a strong relationship between entrepreneur and investor and taking the trouble to clearly understand the investor before a first interaction will start such a working relationship off on the right foot” says Ela.