One Perfect Pitch: How to Sell Your Idea, Your Product, Your Business--or Yourself

4......................................KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE

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Spending hours practicing your elevator pitch is key to connecting with a potential investor, winning the opportunity to present a more detailed business plan, and receiving the holy grail: funding. If you don’t succeed, you have to keep pitching. This often means going back to the drawing board. What parts of your pitch worked? What parts could be improved?

Your audience, which is often made up of venture capitalists, also finds the pitching process frustrating because only a tiny fraction of pitches lead to the financial due diligence analysis of a company. And even fewer lead to a deal that will have a chance of scaling to a multibillion-dollar ...