Delivering a good pitch for your business is as much about conveying emotion as conveying information. The saying “They don’t care what you know until they know that you care” is good advice to follow. A pitch doesn’t need to be long, and your audience will appreciate it if you keep the pitch as brief as possible. In the updated second edition of our best-selling book Write Your Business Plan, Eric Butow, CEO of online marketing ROI improvement firm Butow Communications Group, explains how you can put together a pitch in ten minutes that’s broken down into one topic every minute.
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10-Minute Pitch Planner
- Minute 1: Personal introduction. Let the audience know that you personally care about the people and the problem you are trying to solve.
- Minute 2: State the problem. People with this problem have emotions invested. They may be struggling, irritated, angry, and/ or disenfranchised. Keep human emotions real. Break down the problem into its component parts accompanied by a diagram.
- Minute 3: Present the solution. Show excitement and passion for your business’s solution. Walk the audience not only through how the solution works but also through the great benefits of the solution.
- Minute 4: Show your business model. Now is the time to tell the audience how you will make money. Explain how you are going to charge people for the solution you are offering.
- Minute 5: Talk about your competition. Do not talk about how you’re better than the competition. Instead, focus on how you’re different. Your attitude toward the competition gives the audience a peek into your business soul. Are you dutifully respectful of their presence and power or are you arrogant enough to think your little startup will have no problem beating them? Err on the side of humility.
- Minute 6: Talk about your market and how you’ll sell to them. Get excited as you talk about how many potential customers are out there and how you’re going to get them. Take the audience through the market data, your chosen point of entry, and your sales and marketing strategy.
- Minute 7: Tell the audience about how much money you’ll make. Talk about how selling to your market shows the unit economics of a single customer (price), and the size of the market shows how many potential deals are out there (quantity). Armed with this information, you can describe how revenue builds over time
- Minute 8: Introduce your team. It’s important to introduce your team in the context of the business so the audience understands why it is what it is. If you introduce the team up front, you will have to circle back to describe their roles later, which wastes time.
- Minute 9: Prove your business has traction. You need to show results to get investors and customers to buy in. So, answer important questions such as: What has the team accomplished? Does the company have revenue? Are the customers happy?
- Minute 10: Ask for the buy-in. You need to spend the last minute asking for people to buy into your business and your vision, no matter if that’s asking investors for money or asking someone to work for you. In this last minute, paint a clear picture of what you need from the audience and what investing with you will look like.
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Bonus tip
Use as many charts, tables, and other graphic elements as it takes to get your point across. But don’t count on lavish visuals to sway a skeptical reader. Some readers actually are put off by plans that seem to be trying to wow them through the presentation.
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