Regardless of how inventive, calculated, or beneficial your business idea is – if you can’t draw in investors to your startup, your business will have genuine issues in growth and success. With such major issues on the line, it is significant for founders to get their investor pitch right. You may have pages of demonstrated financial history and a top to bottom study of how you have ranked against your competition. However, these accolades have no value if you can’t present them correctly. Even if you are not currently looking for funding, understanding your own business pitch ensures that you know your business inside out. Generally, you get about 10 minutes to pitch to an investor. You cannot get all your company’s history in such a short time.

Here are 10 tips to help you can make a quick, successful business pitch:

Define a compelling story

Storytelling is captivating – Ensure that the pitch tells a story about your startup, the pain points, how you wish to solve them etc. People relate to stories more so than random strings of words and numbers. If your potential investor resonates with the story, that gives you a higher chance of getting an investment.

Everybody is not your demographics – One of the most common mistakes that a newbie entrepreneur makes is spitting out that everybody in the world is a customer. This can throw some investors off, and rightly so! Be realistic of who your target audience is and tell them exactly how you plan on capturing this market. This is more impressive than telling investors that everybody is a consumer and not having a solid plan on how to reach out to them.

Create a powerful presentation

Make a presentation – Quite naturally, the step to making a successful pitch is to create a presentation. The main intent is for it to be easy to develop while still having the potential to impress investors. That being said, you must have, both, a short version (the 10 min pitch) and an extended version (a detailed pitch) that you could give access to potential investors. There are several pitch deck templates online that can be used for reference to create your first presentation.

Practice the pitch – It’s one thing to have all the details of your business on paper, but you must also be able to fluently recite each element of the pitch on-demand to portray confidence in your knowledge of the business.

Many seasoned entrepreneurs simply rely on their memorized pitch and have the ability to deliver it in 10 minutes or under. The eye-popping visuals are just the add-on to intrigue the investors further. Conversely, many newbie entrepreneurs, go into a meeting asking investors for 10 minutes of their time end up taking much longer to deliver their pitch. This can cause investors to have an adverse impression of your business.

Introduce your team – Sometimes, an investor buys into the team rather than your product. Not to say that the product isn’t important, but having a dynamic, intelligent, and hardworking team may just be the reason you get an investment. Don’t be afraid to share what skills your team doesn’t possess either. Most start-ups lack some kind of key talent. Not only does this showcase transparency, but this also could provide an opportunity for an investor that specializes in these skills to jump into the offer.

Ensure you include the key elements

This should include Problem Statement, your solution, market size, competition landscape, differentiators. Talk about your strategy to grow your business, talk about growth plan, operations plan, technology plan. Do not shy away from talking about risks and challenges in the business.

Talk about Financial projections. This should include your past performance and projected performance. Share revenue projections, p&l projections. Talk about unit economics.

Revenue is king – This is by far, the most important slide for an investor. Make sure you spend the bulk of your time on this slide. Tell them how you are going to make money, how much money you’ve made, if you’re profitable or not, when you’ll break even, and how much money you expect to make in the foreseeable future. However, ensure to make these numbers realistic as some of these numbers are forecasts. Having outlandish numbers can jeopardize your chances of bagging that money.

Marketing strategy – This is one of the most ignored parts of a presentation. It is imperative for an investor to know how you plan to acquire your customers. How you will reach your customers. What is the customer acquisition cost, and how many customers until your break even. These are all questions that investors would want answers to. So do not skip this part of the pitch.

Focus on Differentiators

This is the real meat of your solution. This will tell why you will win in spite of the competition. Talk about it. Avoid giving generic points.

Be explicit about the Investment Ask and expected returns.

How much do you need? – Isn’t the pitch about funding? Therefore, do not forget to mention how much funding you require. Also, inform your investors how you will utilize these funds if you get them and how long it would take for the investors to earn back their money.

Also, share the amount already invested in your business if at all you’ve got prior investments, and how many more rounds of investment would be required. Additionally, tell the investors what they get in return.

What’s your exit strategy? – If you are out there looking to get large sums of money, investors will want to know what your exit strategy is going to be. Are you planning to go public, get acquired, or is there some other plan? Let the investors know you’ve done some research on the exit strategy.

Conclusion

Take feedback – Your business pitch is not going to get investors every single time. Sometimes, it is important to take feedback from the investors and refine your pitch. The more you refine your pitch, the higher the chances of a future investor investing in it. Also, it is important to ask your teammates to take notes and give you pointers on how to improve the pitch. If this is the first investor pitch you are creating, don’t stress it. Not all investors will be interested in it. So don’t be disheartened over rejections. However, this doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t take feedback and refine your presentation to make it the best possible business pitch you can develop. This article is intended to help you create a business pitch that has the potential to attract investors. Follow these tips and create that business pitch today.