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5 Top Tips to Prepare for an Investor Meeting

By Bernardo Barbosa

Published on 31 January 2024

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You're about to walk into an investor meeting. You're trying to nail that crucial first investment to launch your business. Your palms are sweaty, your heart racing. Memories of some poor wannabe entrepreneur getting torn to shreds on Dragons Den or Shark Tank come flooding back...

Take a breath. Don’t panic. After all, there is a secret weapon that can help you ace any meeting: being prepared and knowing what to expect! With our 5 top tips to prepare for investor meetings, there's no reason to be afraid of presentations events anymore:

1. Know Your Investor

Knowing your investors and their portfolios before pitching is crucial for improving your future performance in presentations events.

To do so, start by selecting the most suitable investors to approach based on their interests, default values, financial condition, and investment history. All details matter: Do they prefer to invest in entrepreneurs with a passion for solving social issues? Are they inclined towards larger teams? Or do they typically steer clear of pre-seed rounds?

Investor relations are also important because each person has a preferred investment style. Some pursue value investing, aiming to buy shares at a good price, while others prefer active investing, which suggests they may have something to say about management. Knowing this information beforehand is like a safe harbor for investor meetings.

Finally, research the investors' relationships with their portfolio companies. Are they hands-on with their investments? Or do they actively promote them? This can give you a sense of the working style, level of involvement, and value they might bring you. Economic conditions aren't everything: mentorship and guidance can also bring actual results to your business.

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2. Craft a Powerful Pitch for Upcoming Events

Your recent annual report isn't everything. Businesses are more than just numbers and data, and understanding this is key to delivering a knockout pitch for your business plan.

Crafting a powerful pitch for upcoming events is crucial because it allows you to sell your vision and appeal to the emotions of the people you're trying to convince. To excel in your presentations, keep these basic pitch delivery techniques in mind during your next investor meeting:

  • Talk with clarity and brevity.
  • Communicate clearly.
  • Maintain eye contact.
  • Be confident in every word.

Other Investor Meeting Musts:

Use real-life examples or scenarios to illustrate your points, explain why your brand addresses actual events and problems, and use forward looking statements and similar expressions to describe the bright future of your company.

Humanize your business by intertwining your backstory with your brand, and you'll create an emotional connection that will affect every single one of your listeners.

3. Compile Essential Financial Documents

Can you feel the executives getting excited? Not trying to be the Securities and Exchange Commission here but, after such an emotional take on pitch-crafting, it's time to roll up your sleeves and compile some essential financial documentation for your next presentation.

Even the most emotive of presentations will look thin unless you have some proper documentation to show for it. Having a proper business plan is a must, as do core financial statements describing the costs, fund access, and revenue form of your enterprise. For this purpose, a profit and loss statement can often be enough.

Present your documents in a professional and organized manner to convey the seriousness of your proposal. Your visual aids should demonstrate efficiency, highlighting key points with clarity and precision. Remember: an engaging design strategy isn't just about looking good, but also about effectively conveying information.

Use clean lines, plenty of white space, and well-placed graphics that allow the eye to move freely across the page. This not only makes your content more digestible but also allows the people in the presentation to listen to what you're saying while they're crunching the numbers.

4. Showcase Your Value Proposition

A value proposition is a clear statement that explains the benefit or value a company's products and services provide to customers while outlining the unique advantage or solution they offer to address the needs of a target market. In plainer English, it's basically the answer to the question:

Why should a customer choose these products or services over others?

To showcase your value proposition in upcoming events, you need to have a complete understanding of what it's all about. There's a lot to say about writing the perfect mission statement, but you should get some pretty good results by knowing your company's...
  • Vision: What is it trying to achieve?
  • Values: How does it guide its decision-making?
  • Goals: What small steps are necessary for it to achieve its vision?
  • Culture: What is it like?

We know that answering these questions isn't easy. But who said nailing presentations was easy? Even if it looks hard, your intended goal should be to have your brand's unique value proposition down before every presentation.

5. Prove Business Scalability and Growth Potential in Presentations Events

In the end, all that business-minded people are interested in is the future. By investing, can they turn their money into more money, a positive social outcome, or anything they see as an improvement to their current condition?

To truly resonate with investors, your presentations should consider scalability and growth potential. Prepare some exciting forward looking statements for your next investor meeting and ensure you have some proper data to back its projections. Forward looking statements rely on future events, but they should nonetheless be rooted in fact.

Highlighting your company's potential for market expansion is also crucial. So, start with a robust competitor analysis, highlight the efficiency of your operations, and how your services differ materially. A meeting isn't the place to be vague, so set up a date for your next expansion so people know you're being serious.

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Written by Bernardo Barbosa

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