Pitching to Investors

Pitching to Investors

 
Pitching is the art of articulating your brand (value proposition) in 15 seconds, so that your audiences — customers, investors, and media — will find it unique, compelling, memorable, and repeatable. View: Polishing Your Pitch.

Many argue that a pitch to each of these three audiences should be different. I disagree.

Your brand is your brand is your brand: you have one value proposition, period. Consistency and uniformity are crucial to success.

Let’s focus on investors. When investors hear a pitch, they want to know how much money you’re going to make them and how you’re going to do it — logistically and viscerally.

In essence, you make money for investors (IRR) by creating a sales machine, driven by a strong brand (value proposition) — validated only when a growing base of customers can’t get your product/service fast enough, and often enough, at a net profit greater than your cost of capital.
 

 
So, in the pitch, you must explain to investors the unique appeal of your brand. That’s your focus — what they must absorb, along with understanding and accepting the operations required to deliver your brand.

As technology evolves, operational infrastructure must change to support the brand. Let me repeat: Technology is subservient to the brand, not the converse. Becoming dependent on a specific technology or technological trend, therefore, is a huge mistake.
 

Jargon — SaaS, cloud, Web 2.0, 4G — is not a value proposition!
 
If your capital-raising pitch doesn’t mirror your sales pitch, investors won’t grasp why your company should exist.

Even if you miraculously receive funding from jargon-oriented, trend-obsessed investors, they’ll be ineffective secondary salesmen. Why? A gaping inability to explain, in 15 seconds, the value you convey to customers — the reason you’re in business.

Sending your investors out into the world with a jargon-laced value proposition, therefore, is tantamount to branding failure.

Be Unique or Be Ignored™