Lessons Learned in Pitching

Last night was my first foray into pitch giving. Our university hosts a competition called the New Venture Challenge (NVC), which provides an opportunity for student teams to compete for seed money for businesses or projects they’re trying to create. Teams choose a track to compete under, and the winners from each track move on to the championships to battle it out for the money. Last night was the semi finals for our track and the first time I gave an official pitch. The past two and a half months of preparing have given me a lot of insight into pitch-giving and storytelling. Below are just a few of the points that I’ve found most useful.

The Outside of your Presentation is as Important as the Inside
This is an area where we succeeded. We put a lot of effort into our branding and making sure our slide deck was clean, simple, and reflective of the brand’s personality. Additionally, we kept words to a minimum —when slides have more visuals and the presenter isn’t reading large blocks of text straight off, it creates a much more captivating presentation.

Tell a Story
A pitch is so much more intriguing if the presenter can find a way to draw the audience in and then keep them hooked. We spent a lot of time trying to find the best way to explain our project in a unique way that sounded very natural, and I think that’s where we were most successful.

Know your Audience
I believe this was our biggest downfall. Our project was in the Research & Development category so we assumed the judges would be interested in learning about the current state of our prototyping and developing and would ask questions about the research process. I was fully prepared to give a rundown of our research into the psychology behind loneliness and isolation and the impact of art on people’s happiness. What I wasn’t prepared for was a question after question about our business model and how we planned to pay ourselves. I did my best to bullshit my way through it and gave cheeky answers like “smiles are the only payment we need.” Later, at a bar, I ran into two guys who pitched and actually made it to the next round. We chatted a bit about the pitches and questions, and they let me know they had attended last year’s NVC as audience members just to get an idea of what the questioning was typically like. That certainly could have been a benefit for us, though none of us were in this program last year since it’s only twelve months long.

Practice, Practice, Practice
And revise, revise, revise. Since the semester began, we’ve been giving our pitch once a week and revising it based on classmates comments and questions. I feel like this made a world of difference in making me feel more comfortable with giving the pitch. It also helped us to create a dynamic and captivating presentation.

In the end, we didn’t make it to the next round of the competition. All in all though, I think we did the best we could have done. I’m proud of our project, and I’m excited to continue working on it during the next five months.