Another Inc Investor Pitch Piece

These recur with quite the frequency. Yet in this instance I was pleasantly surprised. For inc.com’s May ’19 print edition cover-trailed ‘what investors really want to hear’ (p94) offered something above the lazy rehash.

9 top venture capitalists shared what they felt made for a ‘success pitch’.

It’s worth the couple of minutes it takes to read.

Although geared towards VC eyes and ears, here’s a pieces o’ eight selection it contains for our solution sell presentations;

“Are you with me? Does this make sense to you?” ‘address whatever concern you sense’

if everyone nods about a slide, move on, even if there are other bullet points on that slide, else you’ll lose your audience to their phones (& “four bullet points per slide” max)

talk not about you, but your team

no-one reads a 40-slide deck, no matter how beautiful – do 15 at the most

don’t be afraid to open spreadsheets in the middle of a slide

avoiding answering a question by saying you’ll come to that in ‘n’ slides time – “treat the meeting like a conversation”

“[presenters] often spend way too long on their demo. Five minutes, tops.”

“you need to be able to explain your business in 10 words, in 10 seconds”