How To Improve Your Investor Pitching Strategy

Most entrepreneurs will pitch to multiple investors at the same time when they’re trying to raise funds. Time is at a premium and they’re not sure which investor will be interested, so they try to hedge their bets. They use a spray-and-pray approach when it comes to pitching strategy because they believe parallel processing is more efficient. After all, once you’ve prepared a deck, you can pitch it to many investors, so why stop at just one?

This approach does have advantages. You get varied opinions and perspectives from different investors and, hopefully, their insights will help you polish your business model – and your pitch as well, so that the next pitch you make to the next investor will be that much better.

However, the problem is that you may get confused, because you get conflicting advice. Also, your pitch starts getting stale and once investors can see it has been shopped around, they will back off, because they start wondering why other investors are not willing to fund you. This pitching strategy ends up actually reducing your chances of getting funded as compared to pitching to a single investor.

When you take a focussed rifle shot approach, your pitch is much better because you are able to tailor it to the investor’s special interests. Yes, this does require a lot more effort and you need to be much more diligent about doing your homework – you cannot use a mindless cut and paste approach. However, in the long run, this is what really pays off.

After all, the end point is not raising funds from any Tom, Dick or Harry – it’s to get funds from an investor who shares your philosophy, who understands your worldview, and who will be supportive during your rough patches (and I can promise you there will be lots of these!)

The trick is not to think of your pitching strategy as speed dating but like a marriage proposal. If you’re picky and choosy about which investor you’re going to pitch to, not only will your pitch be much better because you know a lot more about the investor, your chance of raising funds will be far better as well. Investors like exclusivity and the fact that you’ve selected them as their investor of choice will improve the chances of their being more kindly predisposed towards you – and trust me, founders need all the kindness they can get!

[This post by Dr. Aniruddha Malpani first appeared on LinkedIn and has been reproduced with permission.]

Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.