The pitches and presentations you make to investors are hugely important, the growth and future of your business will depend on how well it goes, so you have to make the most of the opportunity.
However, investors can be a difficult audience to present to and you’ll only have a short amount of time to convince them you deserve their support and funding. It’s vital you get your pitch right and our training team have put together these top tips to help make your investor presentations a success.
What you say:
- Put yourself in the shoes of the fund managers, analysts and other investors – assess what they want to hear from you (ideally get feedback from previous roadshows)
- Slow down – almost every presenter rushes when they speak
- Use pauses – these will give you thinking time and allow the audience to catch-up
- Emphasise – make sure you stress the key words and phrases you want to get across
- Repeat your main theme – if you have an important idea to communicate, say it again
- Connect – use ‘you’ when speaking to the audience and make eye-contact with each person
- Stories and imagery – you will need hard facts and figures but adding some colour, with examples and even anecdotes, will help to win over your audience
The visuals:
- Less is more – don’t overwhelm your audience with too many slides
- Positives – ensure you highlight positives and the opportunities for investors
- Keep the slides clear – other detail can be put into a takeaway document if necessary
- Use colours, images and graphics to support the story and engage the viewer
- Don’t restrict yourself to PowerPoint, use hand-outs or actual examples of your widgets and products
- Don’t read from the slides – refer to them if you need to, but speak to the audience not the slides
- Edit – be strict with each slide, if it doesn’t help get across the main message, can you cut it?
The Q&As:
- Prep the questions – ask colleagues or advisors to list the range of questions you could be asked
- Work with relevant members of your team to design positive responses to each enquiry
- Ensure you know the numbers – investors will expect you to be able to answer detailed questions on the current and projected finances
- If you can’t answer a question, explain why and make sure you respond afterwards
- Refer back to your main pitch, as well as your co-presenters and keep stressing the positive messages
Practice:
All of this needs to be brought together in practice sessions, preferably in formal training to maximise the time and get feedback, but running through your pitch a few times will give you a lot of confidence and help it to flow better for the audience.
It’s so important that you and your team are able to pitch to investors effectively – if you need training to ensure you are successful with this audience, we can help. Please get in touch to find out more about the Bluewood Presenting To Investors training course.