How to Pitch?

Coming out with great ideas is hard, but evangelizing and convincing others about your idea is even harder. Pitching is an art, which takes time and effort to pick up. However, learning some tips and tricks on pitching will definitely help to put you on fast-track in mastering the art.

Being a 3-times award-winner of international business plan award and a 2-times recipient of government venture grant (sounds a bit arrogant, do i?:)), I hope to share some tips on pitching with my readers.

1. Refine your idea
Great ideas originates from crude ideas. Crude ideas are normally flawed and comes with plenty of rooms for improvement. Before pitching your idea, try asking yourself a few pragmatic questions. What problem does the idea solve? Does the idea have any adverse effect? Does your idea benefit the mass market, or just a handful of people? Will the idea bring huge benefit in relative to implementation cost? If you still can't think of enough questions to refine your idea, try going to Gallery SmartShop and check on all their creative products. Ask yourself what you products you will buy and why you buy it, if you are given an RM2000 voucher.

2. Focus your area
Having an idea or solution that solves a few problem at once is superb beyond any doubt. However, an idea which covers a wide range of problems will certainly involve more pitching. Pitching is about getting others to intoxicate with your idea. Therefore, it is important to define your pitching scope. Without setting some borders to your idea, you be pitching for 10 minutes just to get to the center of your idea. This rule will help you to ensure your audience does not *yawn* at your pitch.

3. Identify your audience
It is always a part and parcel for me to identify the audience or panel of decision makers before I pitch. Doing some quick research on your audiences will increase your chances in pushing the idea through. I was once faced with a panel of 15 joint decision makers which comes from different background. I actually did a quick research on 10 of them in order to capture their attention from various perspective. The effort was actually paid off.

4. Build your pitch
Pitching is like telling a story you can't wait to share to your friends. You will finally gain the satisfaction after telling the story by having responses such as "wow', "wah", "really?". Well, at times, they might find your story to be boring too. This is what exactly you want to avoid during a pitch. A good pitch requires proper structure, which builds up from a teaser to the climax. Think about your idea, can your audience grasp your idea it in a 5 seconds, 1 minute or 5 minutes pitch? Let me give you a real-life idea which I am currently working on in 5 seconds.

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Do you think you want to know more? Haha, find out how in a few more months time! (I am developing the solution now.) Restructure your pitch for 1 minute, 5 minutes and 10 minutes session. Try to get the gist out of your idea within the specified period. So , have you started working on your 5 seconds tagline now?

5. Practice it
I know a very senior executive(one of the "C"s) in Samsung Group who still practice his pitch repeatedly before facing the audience. It is normal that your confidence will build up after structuring your pitch, so as your egoisim. You might be over-confident with your idea. Believe me, things are very different when you are facing your audience especially when the phychological factor kicks in. Be it a job interview or business idea presentation, your balls tends to hide during the pitching session and you might be performing only partially as good as what you had expected. Therefore, practice and improve on your pitch for at least 15 times before the actual session. If you feel weird speaking to the mirror, try pitching to your best friend or partner, it helps.

6. Be confident while delivering your pitch
Before we dive into this step, ask yourself, are you confident with your idea? Having confidence in your idea holds the key to delivering a good pitch. Forget about pitching if you are not even confident with your idea. If you are still not convinced about your idea, go back to step 1. If you are convinced, the next step would be building your confidence. I still remember vividly how I defended my arguments in one of the venture funding approval session. I thought my chances were slim after the "cynical" approval session but I got the grant in the end. Moral of the story, be prepared and do not give up easily.

I hope to share more about pitching the my coming posts (especially on some tips during the actual pitching session). I hope you enjoy this post and do leave your personal tips/comments if you have any!