Your Pitch is NOT Contingent

I see so many pitches peppered with phrases like:

Following a successful Series A funding round...

Ideally...

The Company intends to...

We hope to...

Just say it’s going to happen. Visualize a world where the capital is raised and your plan is in action. It makes for a better read, and it immerses your investor in the world you intend to create.

Don’t be afraid to commit to your pitch. ‘We will’ is a better approach than ‘contingent on.’

Raise expectations with conservative optimism.

It’s also a great reality check for you. Now that it’s going to happen, is it still something you want to be involved in?

In the midst of building your pitch deck it’s easy to forget that raising capital is just the beginning of the story of your business.

Raising your expectations helps you confirm how dedicated you are to actually do what you say you're going to do.

Try out my revolutionary free investor pitch visualization exercise:

“Congratulations, you’re funded.”

Did you expect that to happen? Are you still confident that you've got everything you need to get those million paid subscribers in your first year?

Yes?

Great! You have a solid pitch.

Raised expectations = realistic expectations = better pitch.

It works even when you have regulatory constraints on what you can say.

One of my clients is developing a revolutionary treatment for a serious chronic disease. Preclinical trials have yielded incredibly promising results.

Drugs take a long time to come to market. A lot of things can go wrong along the way. So basically, it’s the same as any other business. The pharmaceutical industry is particularly prone to caution - and rightly so. You can’t bluster your way to empirical results.

The original document’s cautious pessimism was full of ‘ifs’ and ‘contingent upons’. It took a reader through Phase I and Phase II Clinical Trials to FDA approval to selling packets of pills. Ten to twenty years.

Once we applied some cautious optimism, it made for a better pitch in a surprisingly satisfying way.

It narrowed the scope.

Now, the company is offering investors the chance to back them through to the end of the Phase II Clinical Trials. 5-10 years.

Realistically, if the clinical trials are successful, the company will get bought up. The investors will be paid a fortune, and a bigger company will bring the drug to market.

Unless it doesn't, all of that is going to happen.

The moment the founder started realizing that, it became a lot easier to pitch.

Same goes for you.