When talking to a potential investor, how can you use sales skills to figure out what they find valuable and tailor that to your pitch deck or your elevator pitch?

As usual, it'll be nice to understand the terms before we continue!

The pitch deck is your slide presentation or document that tells the investor about your business idea, how they can buy in, and what they'll be getting in return.

The elevator pitch serves a similar purpose, but it is delivered when you're face to face with one potential investor whom you don’t expect to make an investment just yet.

Sometimes the pitch deck is used when you’re in front of multiple investors you’re making a presentation to.

The aim of the elevator pitch on the other hand is to get them interested to take a meeting. Once you have secured the meeting, the pitch deck is to get them to give you money for the business idea.

Obviously the content of the pitch deck and the elevator pitch should contain the answer to the questions, "what's in it for me?" and "what will this business idea do for me?".

The reason why this is obvious is because we have established that if there's no value to the investor, then there'll be no cash or capital injection for you.

If the answer to the question is that you have to employ sound sales principles and tactics to get all the information you need... then the question becomes, "what are sound sales principles and tactics in the first place?"

The first sales practice that we should be looking at here is PROSPECTING.

This is the art of looking for the right people to talk to.

If don't do prospecting right, you'll never close a sale.

If you sell juicy, fattening, and obesity inducing cakes, you might not make money if you keep approaching health conscious weight watchers and ask them to buy from you.

You have to do some research and make sure that you are prospecting and talking to the right people.

First we have to do some research to be sure that we are speaking to the right kind of investor for the business idea that we have at hand.

Do some research by checking online or talking to people to figure out things like...

"what kind of investment portfolio does this investor have?"
"what kind of returns are they looking for?"
"how active or passive do they like being with their investment?"
"what kind of industries have they invested in before?"
"what's their overall investment thesis?"

Doing research like this will help you figure out if this investor who is famous for investing in tech ideas would be happy to invest in your snail farm.

It's not unlikely! Especially if your research shows that they have a soft spot for SMEs in the agriculture space.

So this is how prospecting principles and practice can help you raise capital from investors.

The sales theory here will help make sure you are targeting the right "market" to begin with.

What other sales principles and practice apply here?

We will examine that in another post!