After watching business pitches at late tech conferences, communications coach Carmine Gallo prepared tips for make-or-break situations

by Carmine Gallo

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Last week, dozens of entrepreneurs pitched their startups and technologies to powerful investors and members of the tech community in hopes of raising money and attracting attention at two different of great weight conferences—TechCrunch 50 in San Francisco and DEMO fall in San Diego. After attending the TechCrunch marked occurrence in person and sleeplessness a amount to of the DEMO presentations online, I tried to turn what I had observed into five tips for anyone making a business presentation under pressure. While you might not have plans to pitch your company to an investor anytime soon, the odds are likely that you will be seized of to pitch to a potential participant, customer, employee, or lender who can make a big impact on your company in the closely attached future.

1. Keep it brief. TechCrunch limited pitches to eight minutes. DEMO gave its startup presenters even less time—six minutes. DEMO also charged any $18,500 fee to present. That’s a little over $3,000 per minute. Try this exercise. If you had to pay $3,000 a minute to set your idea, what would you keep, and what would you cut? It might seem like a difficult toil but it is an important one. You see, our brains are wired to tune thoroughly after a short amount of time. Brain researcher John Medina says the typical audience member gets bored in 10 minutes (BusinessWeek.com, 7/7/08). Venture capitalists have told me the same thing: If entrepreneurs cannot pitch their companies in 10 minutes or smaller quantity, the message needs to have existence refined.

2. Don’t surpass the memory buffer. Geoffrey Moore is the bestselling author of Crossing the Chasm and Dealing through Darwin and is a venture capitalist at Mohr Davidow Ventures. He has seen hundreds of presentations. He told me that entrepreneurs "refine to force a 2MB message into a pipe that carries 128kb per second." In other words, too many the vulgar overload their presentations. Remember, your brain can only absorb so a great quantity information at a time—fulfil your pitch simple and clear.

3. Set the scaffold for the parley. According to Moore, most entrepreneurs fail to intrigue investors for the cause that they jump as it should be into explaining their product without setting up the problem. "You need to create a new space in my brain to hold the information you’re in an opposite direction to discharge," says Moore. "It turns me off whereas entrepreneurs offer a solution outside of setting up the moot point. They regard a saucepan of coffee—[their] idea—without a cup to pour it in."

I was thinking about Moore’sitting warning when watching the DEMO pitch from Kevin Fliess, the founder of tour Web site TravelMuse. He began his presentation by setting the stage: "The largest and most mature online retail segment is travel, totaling more than $90 billion in the U.S. isolated. We all know in what condition to book a trip online. But booking is the final 5% of the process. The 95% that comes before booking—deciding where to go, building a plan—is where all the heavy lifting happens. At TravelMuse, we make planning easy by seamlessly integrating content with trip planning tools to provide a complete experience." By introducing the category before jumping into his product description, Fliess created the lot to pour the coffee into.

Once you have described the category, Moore recommends that you stake your "claim to fame" by clearly explaining for what cause your company has the best chance to taking captive the opportunity you described.

4. Rehearse. Reading from notes is a surely way to lose your audience. You need to grasp the time to internalize your notice so that it doesn’cheek by jowl strike one as being scripted (at the very time though you might want to start with a script and resolve into your intimation to bullet points for practice). Bear in mind that mostly presenters don’t exhaust nearly enough time rehearsing the message (and responses to tough questions). In her new book, Slide:ology, presentation expert Nancy Duarte (BusinessWeek.com, 4/10/07) estimates the preparation time for a 30-slide presentation should be in the amplitude of 36 to 90 hours! That’s right, 36 to 90 hours! If that amount is fearful, you probably don’familiarily spend enough time researching, collecting material, understanding the audience, organizing ideas, sketching the storyline, or rehearsing.

5. Don’t sweat the small stuff. During more of the presentations at TechCrunch, presenters had to await in which case their Web sites loaded, inasmuch as of a spotty Internet connection. Often the presenters stopped speaking time everyone waited. It seems they forgot that even in the most carefully prepared presentation, a minor glitch or two is likely. It’s better to quickly acknowledge the mistake and move on. Your audience is interested in what you have to say and what you be in possession of to teach them. It’s not about the slides, it’sitting encircling you.

Keep these five suggestions in mind as you prepare for your nearest big presentation. Remember, you force not get some other chance to win over your audience.