About teams and pitching in a non-sportive sense
By Flurina Heuberger
One of the biggest changes in the past weeks has been the arrival of Evgenia – it is now official – we are now a big company, or at least a bigger team.
But what makes a team? According to the (secret) source, of my knowledge and information, Wikipedia, a team is a group of people or other animals linked in a common purpose. Human teams are especially appropriate for conducting tasks that are high in complexity and have many interdependent subtasks.
We are not only a group of people, we are also working on highly complex tasks, or especially one highly demanding task – pitching.
From my rather pathetic golf career the word “pitching” recalls quite desperate attempts of putting a ball into a hole with a modest success rate, sadly. Unfortunately, I did not know the BBC Sports Golf Key Shot animations…
Luckily, we are not on a golf course; we are in Boonea’s Sales, Marketing and Business Development boot camp for future entrepreneurs.
To begin with, we did an online research about delivering a pitch. The most common tips among many others are:
- Tell a story
- Keep the story tight, short and simple
Telling a story sounds really easy, even my Granddad always used to tell us stories. Still, while presenting a pitch for a start-up you cannot just tell any story. I dare to say, that it is quite essential that the story shows how the start-up generates value.
First note to myself: telling the story of Boonea requires a lot, I repeat a LOT of practice. Evgenia and I have now turned our coffee breaks into coffee and pitching. Daily practice must get us on top. Not only is the practice a time consuming, an aspect that I definitely underestimated is the content. Obviously, simply reading out loud the content of the slides will not engage the audience nor does reporting all the facts and values of a start-up.
In our field training we had to learn that every listener will remember, like and dislike different aspects of your pitch. So not only daily exercise, but also practice of adapting to different listener is needed.
Richards Branson’s quote about having to listen to long-winded speakers: “It’s all I can do to prevent myself from grabbing them by the collar and yelling, ‘Life’s too short! Get to the point.’” definitely highlighted the importance of keeping a pitch short and firm.
So much for the two most popular tips we are trying to implement in our pitching. The main question I have is how to combine extensive practice without reciting a tiring, boring and memorized speech, performing confident and appear qualified all in all. Turns out I am not that good at multitasking after all…. I guess it takes also a lot experience, no wonder we are still at a small disadvantage compared to Flurin.
However, you better watch out Flurin, you taught us relationships were key to success. As young, charming and ambitious businesswomen we are going to take over 😉