Can you communicate the core of your business plan in just a couple of minutes? How about in a single 140-character tweet? Our new Bplans Business Pitch tool can help you develop and refine your core message.
Add your pitch now and you can even get a FREE copy of our best-selling Business Plan Pro software. See below for details.
Elevator pitches made easy
It is increasingly important to be able to distill your startup or business idea down to its essence. Our new pitch tool makes it easy, walking you through each of the elements that potential investors and partners expect to hear. These are simple high-level questions like:
- What problem do your customers need help with?
- What’s your solution?
- What’s your business model?
- What’s your competitive advantage?
- And so on…
Each step includes expert advice and handy tips. You can even dress up your pitch with your company logo or head shot and a link to a video version of your pitch on YouTube. And you can save a copy of your pitch as a PDF to share internally or email to your advisors.
Once your pitch is published on our gallery, you will get ratings and comments from our community of entrepreneurs and small-business owners with ideas on how to improve your pitch.
FREE software for the first five pitches!
Be one of the first five people to get your pitch published, and you’ll get a FREE copy of our best-selling Business Plan Pro Premier software (a $199.95 value).
Create and share your pitch now!
Consider yourself one of the first to know about the new Bplans.com pitch site at pitch.bplans.com. That means you can be one of the first to pitch and one of the first to get posted.
No, it’s not about putting your business in front of investors, although maybe it could be partly related to that. Instead, it’s about the art of the pitch. Free publicity perhaps, too, and tips or comments. What it is about is the art of the pitch. Doing it right, doing it well and getting yourself and your business up and showing up. (And let’s pause here to note that The Art of the Pitch is a chapter in Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start book. Click here for his reading of that chapter.)
Take your browser to pitch.bplans.com and you’ll see the “Add pitch” button you can use to upload your pitch. What follows is a page of basic information (name, address, logo, etc.) and then a second page where you can add a YouTube video URL if you want, or short texts to deal with 10 key topics.
This is all free to the users. What do you get out of it? A dedicated URL you can use to refer people to your business summary, plus the possibility of comments; this is free publicity, and publicity is assumed to be good. What do we get out of it? Bplans.com is about starting, growing and planning a business, so we get more interesting stuff on our site.
And me? I like business pitches. That goes from the 60-second so-called elevator pitch to the 10- to 20-minute business pitch with slides. To me, business pitches, when well done, are fascinating. I see a lot of them. I see them in my role as a member of the Willamette Angel Conference, and I get to see them as a judge at venture competitions, including Forbes’ and several business school contests. And I’ll be watching them on this site, too.
Like they say in the commercials: Do it today. Do it now. Click here.
I’ve been listening to a series of investment pitches lately, most as parts of local contest events related to angel investment. As a reaction to several of these, I have a plea: Please, start by telling me a story.
Seriously.
Start with the story of a person who has a problem, and how your company solves it. Even if you’re selling to businesses and not consumers, even then you can tell a story.
“This farmer has to fertilize her crops every two months, and when she does . . . ”
“Mabel has to package snacks for her kids for after school . . . ”
“This big company spends tens of millions every year on compiling data about . . . ”
Then, after personalizing, so that I know what you’re selling, to whom, and how it solves their problem (or, in cases of non-necessity luxury items, why they want it), then you can tell me about your secret sauce, special offering, technology innovation and knowledge of the field.
I heard 10-minute pitches where even halfway through, fully five minutes after the start, I still didn’t know what the company was selling.
Everybody likes stories. Personalize. Start with a story. If you have only 60 seconds, then cut it down to 10 or 15 of them. Make the problem and solution come alive.
Palo Alto Software Ltd is delighted to announce that we will be running a number of business planning workshops in London, U.K., commencing on 27 January 2009. These business planning workshops will be run in conjunction with Company Partners, a Wokingham-England based business matching service, and will be held at the British Library in Central London. These workshops will be the perfect complement to our best selling Business Plan Pro product and will cover everything from pitching your business to understanding key elements of your business plan such as sales forecasting.
There are a small number of early bird tickets still available for this inaugural business planning workshop.
Alan Gleeson
Palo Alto Software U.K.
Business pitches are growing in popularity here in the UK as well as in the US. However, as this article, The Business Pitch by Alan Gleeson illustrates, business pitches are no substitute for the real thing – a thorough business plan!
This short article describes the concept of pitching in detail, and argues why pitches are not substitutes for business plans, before recommending some tips to ensure that your pitch hits all the right spots. Finally for some further information on what an elevator pitch is, visit Tim Berry’s article series on the Elevator Pitch at BPlans.com.
Alan Gleeson
Palo Alto Software UK
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