A little chat with a potential investor could lead to the investment of your dreams. But how do you approach such a conversation? You are working day and night on your startup. You have a winning team and you are doing everything you can to develop a great product. Now all you need is to find investors. You know that what separates you from the dream of your life is a phone call. Well, there’s some good news and some bad news. Starting with the good, it is possible! The bad news is that it will apparently take a lot of time and effort to succeed. If it took Churchill an hour to write every minute of his speech, then writing yours, which introduces your startup, generates an impact and a desire to hear more, will be a much more difficult task. By combining multiple tools and a simple solution, you too can transform the most complex product or service into something exciting, simple, and valuable. Let us begin:
Set a goal for your pitch
Before you sit down to write your speech, give yourself a clear and defined objective. This goal should include a time frame, clarity, and quantity.
What is your ultimate goal? Get financing? Another meeting? Cooperation? Advice?
You need to be even more focused. For example, you would like to get funds: how much cash do you need? When will you need it? In stages or all at once? You need to know exactly what you are going to order. If you do not have a clear objective, the possibility of reaching it becomes a product of luck.
After you are clear about the objective of your pitch, you can sit down and write it down.
Teaser: stimulate the investor
So you have a great opportunity and you are sitting alone in a room with your potential investor. That doesn’t necessarily mean that his brain and attention are devoted solely to you. Your mission, from the beginning, would be to capture his full attention and have him completely focused on you.
There are several ways to generate attention in a very short time. One of them is to present a great fact that is relevant to your product or market. This will generate curiosity and the listener is likely to try to understand what it is about. The teaser could also be a personal story, an interesting newspaper article, groundbreaking research, anything that catches your eye. Your teaser will perform better if the value in it is “flooded”.
“Flood of value”: what’s in it for him?
As a way to make your product or service compelling, you need to make sure that the person sitting across from you understands the relevant value to them. Once we can connect between the teaser and the value, we are creating a “mental shortcut” and the level of attention increases significantly.
For example, when we walk down the street and see a scratch card ad that says “scratch now and win $1,000,000”, the ad grabs our immediate attention and floods the value: we want to win that $1,000,000.
So even if our chances of winning go against all statistical and logical calculations, our attention was already caught because we were immediately presented (“inundated”) with the value, even before the general idea or logic behind it was explained. the.
keep it simple
After we managed to get attention, it’s time to tell the story of our product or service. Here comes the really challenging part: can you really explain, sometimes in a single sentence, what your companyproductservice does? The true greatness of really good or complex products is the ability to make them simple and tangible.
Be sure not to use language that is too loud or too complex, which usually creates opacity and covers the inability to generate a clear definition. If you managed to do it, in a minimized way, it will leave you more time to invest in the other parts of your speech.
Because you?
Towards the end of its release, it’s time to explain why. Because it is you who can turn this vision into reality. This is a critical point when asking your potential investor for their trust (…and money).
This is the point to emphasize your unique experience on the course, the team’s winning combination, or past successes. It’s important to remember that most of the decisions we make are irrational, so it’s imperative to use your attitude and presentation methods to strengthen your message, no less than listing your titles or achievements.
Tip: we tend to associate self-confidence, and therefore confidence, when the shoulders are straight. So straighten up!
The combination of these ingredients, which creates a winning speech, will require your time and effort to improve your message. At some point, the use of external consultants and the use of new technologies could improve their performance.
Note: In addition to using the old PowerPoint, I highly recommend Prezi and Bunkr.
Hundreds of new companies are founded each year, and with them competition for investors grows. The first impression and effect that you project at the beginning could be that critical point that would separate you from the rest, and cause the investor to invest in you, above the other sea of startups.
Sometimes this little conversation can make your life’s dream come true, don’t let it slip away.
