The Value in Knowing How To Pitch Your Business
In this article:
Why should you be pitching your business?
What are ways you can refine your pitch for investors?
How to know if you're ready to pitch!
You may be asking yourself, “what is a business pitch?” It’s essentially a presentation that successfully communicates the worth and potential of your business to a third party. It’s a skill you’ll often use to secure investment, talent, partners, develop marketing strategies, and more.
Understanding how to write an elevator pitch for your business will help you with this endeavor and encourage you to think about your business from an investor’s perspective.
The strategies outlined below will help you understand how to pitch your business and explore the building blocks of an effective pitch, so you can begin work on writing or refining your own.
What Is the Purpose of the Perfect Pitch?
When you pitch your business to potential investors, you present it to people who don’t know you, your story, or your vision. The ultimate purpose of the perfect pitch is to establish yourself and your business as worthy of the listener’s interest. If you’re pitching to investors, doing so will hopefully lead to another meeting and open up discussion for investment.
To generate interest, you’ll need to prove yourself as an entrepreneur by being well-informed, pragmatic, and passionate. You’ll need to pitch your business idea not only as an exciting concept but also as a viable business model.
How To Pitch Your Business or Business Idea To Potential Investors
By addressing the following six strategies, you’ll be able to construct a quality pitch for your business concept.
1. Invoke Emotion by Incorporating a Storytelling Method
The core of any business idea will address an existing problem and offer a new or improved solution. An effective method of introducing your business idea’s concept and value is to tell a prospective customer’s story.
To invoke emotion, focus on creating customers with believable and relatable problems, and show how your product or service combats these problems and improves their situation.
Introducing your idea with a practical example will help you use simpler, more engaging language, and draw in your listeners by promoting empathy and sympathy. This is an effective way to begin a pitch, as it helps create an emotional link between you and your listeners before you move on to the details of the business model.
2. Create a Visual Presentation or Pitch Deck
Investors are often knowledgeable and experienced individuals with a good understanding of business models. However, this doesn’t mean you should overload them with complex information during an initial pitch. Instead, a presentation or pitch deck will help you visualize important data and highlight its relevance to your points.
You can also use visual materials to showcase prototypes or mock-ups of your products, services, and branding. Adding graphics and other visual features to your pitch deck is a beneficial method for your storytelling. Keep relevant numbers and data on-screen while you explain your revenue model or marketing plans, such as product placement.
A well-designed pitch deck will keep your audience interested and engaged, aiding their understanding of your startup idea.
3. Showcase Knowledge of Market Size and the Problem You Solve
Business idea pitches are not lengthy presentations. For example, the popular term “elevator pitch” refers to a pitch short enough to take place during an elevator ride. However, a business idea is complex, so it can be difficult to determine what information you should include in an initial pitch and what you should save for a follow-up meeting.
Ideally, your pitch should explain your target market and the gap your product will fill. This is valuable information for an investor, as it will help them gauge the potential demand for your product.
Fine-tune your knowledge of the market by researching what else is out there, as you’ll want to show investors that your product doesn’t directly overlap with existing ones. Then, you can outline what your product offers that others don’t and why the target audience will want to buy your offering over the competition.
4. Focus on Emphasizing Proof of Concept
While the details of how you’ll make your product or service a reality can be saved for another time, a significant element of your effective pitch is the proof that your idea is possible and feasible. An investor can’t begin to consider your business for investment until they believe you can reach your goals.
Your proof of concept is always important, even if the feasibility of your product seems obvious to you. This is because:
Substantial proof provides clarity, helps prevent misunderstandings, and makes sure everyone is on the same page.
Investors may not be well informed about the industry or technology you’re pitching to them and may not be able to see the feasibility on their own.
It’s also important for investors to know whether you’re asking them to back a business idea or research a potential idea.
While it is acceptable to seek funding for research into a technology that could one day become a product, know that some investors will not be interested in such projects.
5. Present Actual Figures to Investors
During any business pitch, investors will likely look for the presentation of an extensive idea. When an idea is only partially developed, additional research may turn up a flaw or a factor that you overlooked, affecting the feasibility of your venture.
You can present the figures from your research to your audience, showing that you’ve done enough research and that your assessment of market gaps and target audiences is accurate. Use figures to substantiate most claims you make during your pitch, and if you keep it simple, you can use as many as you see fit.
While figuring out how to pitch your business plan, you’ll find that where your research comes from is as important as what it is. Although you won’t have time to cover it in much detail, you should confirm that all the information is available in case your listeners ask any questions.
6. Identify and Share Your Growth Strategy
Once the core concept of your business idea has been covered — the problem you solve, how it works, who it’s targeted at, and how your pricing structure works — you’ll need to outline your plans for rapid growth. This will help investors understand what their money would be used for and whether they think your idea is a good market opportunity. Knowing how to detail your growth strategy is an important part of learning how to pitch your business idea.
By defining a growth strategy, you’ll also be able to evaluate how much money you need from your investors, which you can include in the initial pitch.
Are You Ready to Pitch Your Business Idea to Investors?
Now that you know how to pitch your business to investors, are you ready to get started? If you’re feeling hesitant, it’s understandable — setting up meetings and navigating deals and conditions can be complicated. If you find yourself wishing you could focus on your clients while someone else handles the finances, look to an industry leader in fintech for help.
Noumena offers several services to alleviate the burden of making your financial decisions alone. With flexible financing solutions, Noumena has helped solopreneurs gain access to capital and grow their business without the need for traditional finance. To find out what Noumena can do for your business, join the freelancers and solopreneurs community now and connect with financial experts.
