Adapting to Your Audience: How to Tailor Your Pitch

Before you walk into any meeting with a potential investor, you must research exactly who you’ll be presenting to. It’s important that you know your audience in advance, so that you can tailor your pitch specifically to them.

By researching the backgrounds of who will be in the room during your pitch presentation, you’ll be able to put yourself in their shoes and better understand their worldview. What other companies or sectors have they invested in before? What’s their investing style? What are their goals?

Before each meeting, you should tweak your slide deck according to your research. You’ll likely want to expand upon certain sections and more quickly breeze through others. Your research may also uncover an opportunity to connect on a personal level.

The bottom line is that raising capital takes time and effort — using a cookie-cutter presentation at all of your meetings simply won’t work. Interested in learning more about this topic? Watch our live video lesson here:

• Transcript

  Every time you go and present, you have to research that investor and that audience, and you have to tailor your pitch to them. As your business changes over time, you have to change your pitch.

  So what we’re really trying to do is teach people how and the why, right? Then they still have to put in a ton of work. I don’t want anybody to think is… It’s going to be a lot of work. It’s really hard. It’s still hard! All we’re doing is giving you a framework to get going so you don’t waste a ton of time.

  I think of it as: This is the basic most, it’s the minimum thing you need. It’s the minimum investment summary, and it’s the minimum slide deck that you need. But every time you go in, every single time, you’ve got to research your audience, you’ve got to tweak those slides up or down. You got to learn to expand them, but at least if you have those, you’ve got a basis to start doing it.