6 Mistakes To Avoid During Your Investor Presentation
Investor presentations are tough, especially if you go in before your audience without a plan. People who have been in the market for too long tend to be cocky about their ability to woo an audience. Even if you think you’re as good as Steve Jobs, you won’t get very far just on confidence alone. Furthermore, you need to appeal to the hearts and minds of your potential investors to make them open their wallets for you. Here is a list of 6 Mistakes to Avoid During your Investor Presentation, followed by an infographic by Jazz Factory which says it all about what you should do when pitching to an investor.
1. Keep the Introduction Brief
I still remember being in a meeting where I was short-listing companies for a project proposal. One of the potential contractors came up with an unusually lengthy presentation about their company and how good it was. Interestingly, he seemed to lack answers regarding a few basic questions I asked and the long introduction of his company didn’t win him any favors. In other words, keep your introduction brief, if possible, use a good investor deck template and don’t brag too much about your achievements, as this might wear off the audience and they might be less focused by the time you start talking business.
2. Objectives Should be Crystal Clear
You can’t go in with a muddle mind and expect people to invest in your company or hand you a contract for their project. Your objectives should be crystal clear and well-defined. The best way to do that is to go through the TORs (Terms of Reference), advertisement or whatever important information you might have received or research about prior to the presentation about the requirement of your audience.
3. Brace Yourself for Tough Questions
Coming back to the guy who had a great company profile; he didn’t seem to have great answers for basic questions. This meant that he virtually had no answers for my tough questions. Don’t go in expecting to deal with amateurs. Take some time to think from the investor’s perspective and brace yourself for tough questions. You might even require doing a bit of digging using secondary data to come with up good answers. Be prepared, even if it might not seem necessary.
4. Know the Target Market
Knowing the target market is half of what you need to do to bag a contract or impress an investor. You must know the market like you own it. Whether you are selling a product, pitching to an investor or looking for a bank loan to expand your market, you should be able to adequately address the market and how you intend to make the most out of it.
5. Watch out for Competition
It might not hurt to perform a quick SWOT analysis for your company to identify the threats and weaknesses which might weigh you down. This of course also includes competition. Don’t underestimate smaller competitors, they are the ones who are usually the fiercest, not to mention the ones with the lowest bids. So, watch out for competition and try to focus on how to sell your ideas better than the rest.
6. Have a Heart
Try looking for things that might attract your audience towards your pitch. This might include ideas regarding how your venture can expand their market, increase their profits or get them customer goodwill which can be translated in monetary terms. Have a heart and try to hit a nerve to show your audience why you are worth their time and money.
Infographic – 6 Mistakes to Avoid in Your Investor Presentation
You can write these 6 rules in stone or simply refer to the infographic below to give yourself a quick reminder each time you need to pitch to an investor. Also see our post about Pitch Decks That Created Successful Companies to see the presentations which created a few of the world’s top companies.
Infographic source: JazzFactory.in
