Mistakes are a commodity: You usually cannot afford too many and you want to know where they come from. Analysing your mistakes is the best way to learn from them, reading about those made by others is still second best. With this in mind I thought I’d share the mistakes from my last pitch.
I took part in a pitching competition for small development grants and I presented a kid’s series that I had prepared with a partner. As the title of this post suggests, the pitch wasn’t successful and I spent some time analysing what went wrong, as well as talking to a few jury members afterwards to get their side of the story.
The main mistakes I found were:
1.) The project was visually underdeveloped. We should have brought some visual materials with us, even though the competition guidelines discouraged that. It would have helped establish our vision of the project quickly and easily. As we obeyed the guidelines blindly we neglected to develop one important side of the idea.
2.) The pitch had two main points. We had a technological as well as a content angle on the project. This was partly due to the fact that the competition emphasised “new contents, multimedia projects, etc”. Still, it would have been our task to focus the pitch on one or the other to avoid fence-sitting and an air of ambiguity.
3.) The pitch was too fragmented. One jury member said that she found the pitch hard to follow because the pieces didn’t fit together smoothly. This was true and due to the fact that the idea was very new even for us. We didn’t yet “breathe” the project, as you do when you’re really familiar with it.
The lessons I learned from the pitch are:
1.) Develop further. A project doesn’t (usually) have to be production ready when you’re still pitching it. But it does need to be fleshed out enough so people who don’t know anything about it can get a grasp on your idea. The level of detail required varies greatly by whom you are pitching to.
2.) Focus your pitch on one sharp point. Even when you have two intertwined angles as we had, there’s always a way of presenting your idea in a streamlined way. Use colleagues or friends as a test audience and gather their feedback. Build on it.
3.) Always practice your pitch until you know your project inside out. This is what I usually do and having limited time available is a lousy excuse, so this one bugs me the most. But the annoyance will also translate into working more rigorously next time.
Do you have any hard earned pitching lessons you’d like to share? Please post in the comments or on Twitter!
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