The Perfect Pitch Contest - Do You Have A Winning One?
Let's have a contest to see who can create the most compelling Perfect Pitch using the method below. The perfect pitch can open doors to hundreds of thousands if not millions in funding.
Here is how the contest works. You do your pitch using the method below and the top three winners get a one-hour session with me to refine their pitch. That means you go out in the world with a fresh pitch that greatly increased chance of getting your foot in the doors that matter. Remember, just by doing this exercise and submitting it, you ARE pitching an investor. I normally receive $500 for this work.
Everyone that enters will get a Kindle copy of my book Born to Star - Secrets of Business Funding Success.
So let's start with how to create yours. And if you already have one, tweak it to this format. Remember, I AM an investor and it works on me even though I know it's a formula!
Now you also know from recent posts on this subject that a killer pitch has the qualities:
a. Simple, not confusing
b. Exciting, not boring
c. An unexpected conclusion
A winning elevator pitch closes strongly. Remember the original A-B-C of sales: "Always Be Closing." This applies to elevator pitches except that what you are closing is another meeting. In summary:
- An elevator pitch's first purpose is to get you a full meeting; to tell the full story.
- Its second purpose is to get the investor to talk about you accurately to colleagues and other investors BEHIND YOUR BACK.
If your elevator pitch is memorable, it goes viral, so that investors talk about you behind your back. Then you get the full hearing and then you get the money.
That's how it's done.
So your killer pitch needs a killer closing line. That makes it viral -- the type of close that listeners want to share with others. When you have that great final line to your elevator pitch you'll be able to "always be closing" while you're pitching.
When an investor is excited by your elevator pitch AND they know they can repeat it accurately BEHIND YOUR BACK, they will arrange a follow-up meeting. There you go; that's how it works.
Your measure of success is to leave them wanting to know more. Rarely will you ever close an investor with just an elevator pitch. But your success measure isn't getting a check immediately; it's getting a full meeting, a chance to pitch the full story. It's easy to see how you're doing. Just ask how many meetings and follow-ups are you getting? If you're getting plenty, your pitch is working. If not, back to the drawing board.
Earlier, I mentioned that we're doing a contest this week. I hope you'll all choose to participate, have some fun and see how well you've mastered the information from our recent posts about powerful elevator pitches.
So, here's the contest: You, our readers, get to compete for the three-step pitch and generate a killer closing line for your business. I'll provide the steps below. Your assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to craft the pitch, especially the final line using the information we've provided over the past few posts and your own creative vision. The Intelliversity Advisory Board will review all submissions in the next two weeks and announce the winner.
The winner will receive a one-on-one conference call with me to discuss, analyze and tweak your own elevator pitch. This is fun work for me and gets results. So, I'm excited to work with three of you to develop a pitch that enables you to "always be closing" and thus increasing your likelihood of getting funded.
In order to help you, I'm now going to create an elevator pitch for our own Entrepreneur'$ Boot Camp as an illustration and a shameless plug that you can't resist reading:
Now, I'm assuming that those of you who regularly read this blog have become familiar with what we do at the Entrepreneur'$ Boot Camp, but let me review that a bit so you'll have the right context and can see how our three stages come together. Her goes ...
Entrepreneur'$ Boot Camp is a demanding one-on-one program, delivered over six weeks of in-depth conversations with two investors and an MBA grad student intern, supplemented with reading materials and assignments. It is practice-oriented and demands that participants be coachable. Participants go through a rigorous review of their business plans and pitches. Using our proprietary "Deal Scrubber" expert system, participants also start thinking like the investor on the other side of the table. Altogether, you get a "mini-MBA" in scaling your own company and in pitching that plan to investors memorably. The goal is to emerge with a far higher likelihood of getting funded and that has been our track record with graduates from the beginning.
Now, let's look at the other side of the equation. What does Boot Camp look like to the investor community?
Boot Camp is a huge "Trojan Horse." Yes, you get a huge gift from Boot Camp, AND so do we. Why? Why should we and the investors we know care about Boot Camp?
It's because Boot Camp is actually the most thorough vetting process in the VC and angel communities. It's more than vetting. It's certifying. Graduates of Boot Camp are certified. You will be certified as capable of scaling your company under stress. In short, those CEO's who get through Boot Camp successfully and get certified CAN BE TRUSTED by investors. Graduating Boot Camp means you can be trusted by investors.
This is important because other investors trust US to reduce their investment risks. Other investors recognize our graduates as great investment targets. Other investors accept Boot Camp certified grads as good candidates for investment. This makes it easy for us to refer our grads to other investors and to syndicate deals involving a group of investors. This also makes it easy for us to highly recommend our grads to investors that YOU may find. No matter how the investors are discovered, they trust the Boot Camp certification. This is why most of our grads get the money they're seeking.
See the connection now between what we do for entrepreneurs at Boot Camp and why it should matter to you that we communicate this effectively to the investment community?
Hence we have a need for a killer pitch that gets investors excited about Boot Camp itself. So here is our pitch:
- Billions of dollars are wasted on loser CEOs.
- We need a way to identify CEO's who can truly scale a company.
- Entreprenur'$ Boot Camp molds and certifies CEO's as winners.
We're open to improvements on that. More important, we want to hear YOUR elevator pitch for your business.
So . . . without further ado, here's a template for your elevator pitch, intended for investors:
- Huge mission or problem: ___________________________________________________
- Your strategy or solution: ____________________________________________________
- An unexpected secret sauce: __________________________________________________
OK, you're up to bat. Here is the link to easily fill in the blanks on Survey Monkey.
The winners get a free one-hour consultation with an investor to refine their elevator pitch. Remember, this is a $500 value! We'll announce the winners on a new blog installment in mid-June.
Key Takeaway: Your pitch is intended to get you the appointment to give your long version. Too many entrepreneurs try to sell the whole package right away. THAT DOES NOT WORK. So fill in the blanks and send yours at the link above.