Entrepreneurs are often faced with pitching their ideas to potential investors and customers. Marty Zwilling, CEO of startup professionals, shares tips on making sure your story is one to remember.
The story is very important, and it has to tell about you as a person. An investor invests in you as a person, not in the product. Your story is very interesting. When you tell your story, the first thing is you have to do it with some passion, some conviction.
Infusing humor as well as personal struggles and mistakes can make you more memorable to an investor.
We all want to be entertained. Even the most serious investor likes to be entertained. He likes to hear something that's a little different, maybe a little personal, a little funny. If you can infuse some humor, that's an important kind of thing as well.
The opposite of that is that if you've had struggles, highlight the struggles, that you've overcome obstacles. We all know that you actually learn more from your mistakes than you do from the positive things. It's not bad to talk about the negatives that you've had in your life as long as you don’t do it negatively. Say this is what I learned from this experience not this is how sad because of all those kind of problems.
Zwilling mentions that facts and emotions are equally important when telling your story.
Both of these are critical. Just remember that emotion sets the day as opposed to facts. People remember an emotional story, a funny story, conviction kind of story. Be positive. Present yourself as positive, be confident, present yourself as being confident, and I think you'll get a lot further along in the business world.
The Business Review is a production of KWBU, Livingston & McKay, and the Hankamer School of Business at Baylor University.