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Whether you are a consultant, a salesperson or an entrepreneur, learning how to make a good pitch is an essential exercise. Indeed, a good pitch is an amazing tool for any professional, it is a way to convince of the relevance of your subject, to open doors and to materialize opportunities. The key to a successful pitch is to take care of your message, the structure of the pitch, and its presentation. Besides, in the article we talk about some tips to make your pitch unforgettable.
Make Powerful Visuals
Good visuals are an essential part of a great pitch deck. If designing a Powerpoint presentation or the more advanced Adobe InDesign are tools that you immediately think of, there are also dedicated software programs designed specifically for pitches. The available templates allow you to save a lot of time and to obtain a professional pitch without being a design expert. Some of these programs even provide access to pitch deck templates of famous companies like Airbnb or Uber.
If you want to make high-level visuals, pitch deck consulting will help you make your pitch unforgettable.
Practice Your Presentation
How to present your pitch? One secret: practice!
“Practice, practice, PRACTICE speaking in front of an audience will tend to remove any fear of the audience, just as swimming practice leads to confidence and ease in the water. You must learn to speak by speaking.” – Dale Carnegie, writer and speaker.
You are now ready to pitch to your audience. The first challenge for you is to capture their attention. You may use a powerful catchphrase. Then you need to keep the audience’s attention. Humor, silences, modulations in the tone of your voice are some ways to refocus attention on your message.
However, all this will only be possible and effective if the presentation is mastered. It is, therefore, necessary to memorize the main points of your pitch and then practice, re-practice and practice again. To arouse and keep the interest of those listening, try to make your presentation lively and natural.
Use Non-Verbal Communication
Most of the time, an audience already has a first impression of a speaker before he or she has even said a word. Posture, smile, and body expression in general are essential aspects of a presentation. They can serve or hinder the speaker and should be taken into account and worked on in the same way as the text of the pitch. The idea is to think that you are presenting not only your solution but also yourself.
The goal is to be convincing, self-confident and to leave a mark on the minds of those who listen to you.
Start with the end
It is best to start with the conclusion to build a good pitch: it should be the heart of the message because it is the lasting impression for your audience once your pitch is over. This will help you avoid the pitfall of many speeches: the inability to conclude and to conclude well. When preparing your pitch, you should always keep your conclusion in mind and ultimately build it as a kind of thread that naturally leads your audience to it.
A powerful hook
The beginning of your pitch is what will (or will not) hook your audience. The goal is to capture the audience’s attention in the first few seconds. A very Anglo-Saxon technique is to start a pitch with a humorous note. You can also evoke a personal anecdote or a quote from a famous personality, taking care that this catchphrase illustrates the rest of your talk.
Find Inspiration
“What is the MacBook Air? Simply put, it’s the world’s thinnest laptop.”
Steve Jobs, entrepreneur and founder of Apple at the age of 20.
For inspiration, famous pitch examples are available on the internet. Steve Jobs’ pitches unveiling the iPhone in 2007 or the MacBook Air in 2008 are examples of this kind.
Far from the soporific Powerpoint presentations, the famous TED conferences are also examples to help you build a good pitch in less than 18 minutes.
