Elevator pitches are a key part of business, both for raising investment and winning customer approvals that 90 second explanation of your proposition can make a huge difference. The elevator pitch was coined, originally, in the USA to describe the opportunity arising from the chance encounter in an elevator (Lift for UK readers) with a [...]

Apologies to PCW as I’m sure they could sell Pizzas if they really put their minds to it! This point is related to the importance of choosing the right sales channel for your product based on skills and customer recognition. Two main problems with selecting the wrong sales channel, firstly the channel may not be [...]

On reading a Harvard Business Review article by Mankins & Steele in 2005 I found it very useful to study the causes for failure in strategy development and implementation. The word strategy has become an overused and misused term in modern business. We attempt to make something more important by attaching the word strategic to [...]

As I regularly prepare companies for investment readiness I’m asked many times what investors are looking for. This is a tricky question especially in these credit squeeze times. However many significant investment funds were financed before the current crisis and may be in a position to invest if the proposition is right. So what is the [...]

I review many business plans in my high tech business mentoring roles and often I see entrepreneurs believing that if they are prudent, conservative or cautious about their business goals investors will look favourably on their propositions. They believe this caution will reflect positively on them and their business. In many cases the opposite is true. [...]

Tendency for High Tech entrepreneurs to stress the technology in their products can harm the success in selling the product. In some cases a weaker technical solution can win the day with better marketing. You must assume some types of customer do not understand or even care about the technology. If you are selling to a [...]

When you start out in business, as an entrepreneur, you have to perform multiple roles. At the same time you need to be management, director and shareholder. This multi-role, maybe even multi-personality, can become ingrained in a way of working which leads to problems when the company expands and involves others in the operation of [...]

If you are starting a small business with a new product or service which adds in to existing supply chain and you plan to sell it to some pretty large customers in an existing market you should carefully analyse the supply chain. Entering into this pipeline of companies, making up the various suppliers to that [...]

Key messaging is a technique that can be used to extract the main points of your proposition and enable you to deliver them in a presentation, speech, sales pitch, elevator pitch or marketing tool. Often when people make speech or presentation they often forget to make all of the important points and even waste time on [...]

Live demonstrations to customers, or potential investors, is a vital step in any selling process. A lot can go wrong and consequences of failure can have serious repercussions that are hard to overcome. The first rule of demonstrations is rehearse beforehand, check the demo is working, structure your demo script so that you cover the [...]