Your glorious business plan is thoroughly made with all the awesome details on your business and your product. In other words your homework is done, and now you wonder what to do with the pitch you’re about to do. You’ve got so many nuggets of information in the business plan, and how will you fit everything into a little pitch?
Short answer: you’re not fitting everything in there. You have to choose, and this article focuses on the shorter pitches fit for something like a networking event or bumping into someone important by chance. We’ll look at the pitches with a little longer timeframe next week, don’t worry. If you follow us on Twitter, you’ll get every article from us as soon as we post it.
We’ll help you find the essentials to put into your pitch, but before we go too far into that, there’s a few things to consider. We’ve already explained in this article so give it a read before doing the pitch-from-business-plan routine.
Need to know or nice to know?
The governing thought when you look through your business plan should be ‘is this something the audience absolutely needs to know or is it nice to know?’. If it’s nice to know, throw it away. A pitch is short, so keep only the essentials in your pitch or you risk losing the audience with information, that’s not necessary.
We’d like to remind you that opening and ending in a good way is key to a succesful pitch, but that’s not really about the content of the pitch. The essential elements from your business plan you should consider bringing in is:
The problem you are solving
Your idea for your business is based on solving some kind of problem for someone. This problem should be very clear when you pitch, so everyone gets, what your business is doing to bring value into their lives. It doesn’t have to be a huge problem, but there is an inconvenience you relieve – make that clear. Also tell the audience who you’re solving a problem for, in other words who your target group is.
Your solution to the problem
How you solve the aforementioned problem is what makes you special, and it’s the reason you’re pitching. If you don’t do anything cheaper, faster, easier, better or whatever benefit the customer gets from choosing you over the competition, you really don’t have a viable business, so it’s a core part of your business. And when you pitch your business, your solution takes centre stage.
What makes you special
You’ve got the problem, you’ve got a solution, but why should you be the solution? Hopefully your solution has obvious advantages, but it doesn’t hurt to hammer down your point. Are you cheaper, faster, easier, better or something else than the competition? Make sure the audience knows, why they should pick your business over the others.
Those are the essentials when you pitch your business, but as mentioned above, look at the circumstances. If you’ve got more time you can include more elements, but in essence you just want to tell what you do (how you solve a problem) and why you’re the man/woman for the job (what makes you special).
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