Preparing your pitch: Identify potential chinks in your armour and stay on course
Giving your idea the best chance of success with investors
I recently came across two posts that made me stop and think about ways to identify potential chinks in your armour and stay on course when it comes to preparing a pitch for investors.
One of the blogs was, “The real reasons why a VC passed on your startup”, written by Sarah A. Downey at #Accomplice and reposted on OrthoStreams by Tiger Buford. This is a highly informative article from an experienced VC who knows what she is talking about. All of the reasons Sarah describes are also applicable to the reasons why an Angel, Super Angel, Family Office as well as a VC will passon an investment.
The list Sarah has created is a great list to use in a workshop with your startup team, to identify potential chinks in your armour. Once identified, the faults can be discussed and resolved. Even weak points in the team makeup, using the eye of an investor, can be discussed and resolved. Depending on the strength and depth of the team, any issue can be overcome. The trick in the first instance is identifying the chink in the armour and agreeing that it needs to be discussed and resolved.
The other piece was a post by Julissa Shrewsbury bringing to our attention a revealing new TED Talk by Dana Kanze discussing the bias of promotion v prevention questions asked by investors, and how this negatively affects rates of investment for female entrepreneurs. A revealing talk, and Dana is an experienced entrepreneur who has pitched to a lot of VCs. It highlights that you need to be aware of promotion-focused questions and prevention-focused questions during question time.
The classification of investor questions Dana has described is also a great technique to use in a workshop with your startup team, to create positive promotion responses to promotion- or prevention-focused questions and stay on course. As a team you can develop a list of promotion or prevention focus questions and a corresponding list of positive promotion responses to all of the questions. This can prove invaluable when you want to make sure the Q&A session at the end of your pitch stays on the track, maintains momentum and finishes on a positive note.
Ian is a successful entrepreneur with global commercial experience across industries. He has taken various early stage science and technology projects and new business model projects and created successful businesses. Ian is an Entrepreneur-in-Residence at INSEAD and a leading facilitator of the CSIRO ON Accelerate program. Ian is also a professional non-executive director. In his private consultancy, Ian Brown Group, he specialises in entrepreneurship mentoring and coaching for individuals as well as delivering corporate entrepreneurship programs.