How to Perfectly Pitch Your Business Plan in Just 10 Minutes

Providing good publicity for your business is as much about conveying emotion as it is about messaging. The saying “They don’t care what you know until they know you care” is good advice to follow. Your pitch doesn’t need to be long, and your audience will appreciate it if you keep it as brief as possible.In the updated second edition of our best-selling book Write your business plan, Eric Butow, CEO of online marketing ROI improvement company Butow Communications Group, explains how to put together a pitch in ten minutes that is broken down into a topic each minute.

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10 minute promotion plan

• First minute: personal introduction. Let your audience know that you care personally about the people and issues you want to solve.
• Minute 2: State the problem. People with this problem are emotionally invested. They may struggle, be annoyed, angry, and/or disenfranchised. Keep human emotions real. Break the problem down into its component parts and attach a diagram.
• Minute 3: Come up with solutions. Show excitement and enthusiasm for your enterprise solutions. Educate your audience not only on how the solution works, but also on the huge benefits of the solution.
• Minute 4: Present your business model. Now it’s time to tell your audience how you will make money. Explain how you will charge people for the solution you provide.
• Minute 5: Talk about your competition. Don’t talk about how you are better than your competitors. Instead, focus on what makes you different. Your attitude towards the game lets the audience see your business soul. Do you dutifully respect their existence and power, or do you arrogantly assume that your small startup will defeat them without any problem? The wrong thing to do is to be modest.
• Minute 6: Talk about your market and how you will sell to them. Get excited when you talk about how many potential customers you have and how you’re going to get them. Take your audience through market data, your chosen entry points, and your sales and marketing strategies.
• Minute 7: Tell the audience how much money you will make. Talking about how selling to your market shows the unit economics for a single customer (price), and how market size shows how many potential transactions there are (volume).With this information, you can describe how revenue increases over time
• Minute 8: Introduce your team. It’s important to introduce your team in a business context so your audience understands why. If you introduce the team first, you’ll have to go back and describe their roles later, which wastes time.
• Minute 9: Prove your business is compelling. You need to show results to get buy-in from investors and clients. So answer these important questions: What did the team accomplish? Does the company have revenue? Are customers satisfied?
• Minute 10: Call for support. You need to beg people to buy into your business and your vision at the last minute, whether that’s asking investors for money or asking someone to work for you. At the last minute, clearly paint a picture of what you need from your audience and what it will look like to invest with you.

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extra tip

Use as many charts, tables, and other graphical elements as possible to make your points. But don’t expect flashy visuals to impress skeptical readers. In fact, some readers are tired of plans that seem to be trying to wow them with presentations.

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