How You Can Win A Deal In Seven Seconds Or Less
“You didn’t have me at hello,” the investor said to us. “But I like what you’re doing. Let me think about this and get back to you.”
We had just finished presenting to a well known VC in our space. The VC was telegraphing that he was going to pass on investing in our company.
Don’t worry. I’ll give you the slide format I suggest using later in this post. Yes, it’s less than 10 slides. That’s the easy part.
However, there’s something a lot more important that you have to learn if you’re going to get investors to invest in your company. That’s why I brought up what happened to us.
This one thing is so important to learn that your chances of getting an investment or closing the deal will go down by 100X without it. I’ll bet I have your attention now. It’s what we didn’t do in our pitch.
You need to make an emotional connection with potential investors or customers fast or your chances of closing the deal go way, way down.
In our case, the investor was really impressed with what we were doing. But that’s not enough.
We had a great business model, but our original pitch was almost comically designed to say to investors, “This company is boring.” No matter how much money you’re going to potentially make someone, it’s hard to defend something that’s boring.
You’ve literally got maybe 7 seconds to make that emotional connection.
Your investors and customers need conviction if they are going to support your company. And conviction means quickly establishing an emotional bond between you and your investors.
You need to make it so easy for investors and customers to see the game changing nature of your company. So how do you do this?
You need to simplify your company’s success down to one easy to remember concept that blows your audience away!
You only have a short amount of time, 7 seconds, to blow people away. You can’t wait until you’re four slides into your pitch.
When we finally got this right, the reaction was like night and day. We had our potential investors hooked right from the start. All we had to after that was support our first slide with data. That’s what the bulk of your pitch is about.
As promised, here’s the format I suggest using for your deck:
- Cover Slide
- Introduction Slide/Executive Summary
- Team Slide
- Market Slide
- Technology/How It Works
- Product Roadmap
- Competitive Analysis
- Go To Market Strategy/Business Model
- Financials
BTW, this format is great for customer meeting too. All you need to do is remove the financial information.
For more, read: How To Successfully Pitch Your Business In One Slide