Australian owned and operated. Supporting Australian small businesses for 10 years.

How to Pitch Your Business Plan to a New Lender

A great business pitch is a game-changer for getting the funds needed to launch your company. Here’s how to create the best presentation and get your business running.

Knowing how to make a good investor pitch is a necessary skill for every entrepreneur. Even those who aren’t in immediate need of funds will benefit from a solid pitch, as the process can help give you a thorough understanding of the business.

If you’re planning to pitch business to lender, it’s vital to get it right as early as possible. As the pitch depends on your business plan, it would be best to ensure your plan’s well-developed and thorough.

Once you’ve taken care of the basics, you can start making the best possible sales pitch for loans. Take a look at the essential methods to do just that.

Create a Quality Pitch Deck

A pitch deck is a presentation of your business plan meant to give potential investors a quick overview. It’s an essential tool when you have a meeting with lenders as it will help you showcase the main points of your plan in the short time available.

You can create a more extensive pitch deck covering every detail you’d like to present, but for the best sales pitch for loans, limit the presentation to 10 minutes or less.

There are plenty of pitch deck templates downloadable for free online, so you can find one that fits your plan and use it as a starting point. Please take notice that these require some knowledge of PowerPoint, as it’s the most common platform used for this.

A well-known example of a quality pitch deck is the presentation by Front, a company that provides shared inbox solutions. It has an easy-to-follow structure and presents the company’s customer data, growth, and financial plans in graphics and statistical charts. Front’s pitch deck helped them secure over $60 million in funding.

Practice Makes Perfect

Once you have a good presentation in place, you’ll need some practice to pitch business to lender in the most effective way. 

Speaking fluently and quickly is crucial when making the pitch, as your presentation success will entirely depend on it.

The common pitfall for many new entrepreneurs is thinking that it’s enough to understand their business and that they’ll easily present its core values when the time comes. Couple that with an impressive pitch deck, it’s almost a guarantee they won’t properly prepare for the pitch meeting.

But you’d be wise not to make that mistake. 

Pitch meetings aren’t easy to schedule, and once you manage to get some time with an investor, you’ll rarely have more than 10 minutes to make the point. That’s why working on your messaging and practising the pitch is very important. 

You need to make it simple and to the point. Consider everything that doesn’t speak of your core values a waste of time and practice until you achieve a flawless delivery.

Create an Engaging Narrative

The best way to start your pitch is with a story. As outlined before, it should be short and concise, yet it must be engaging and relatable.

The story should be based on a specific problem in the market and the way in which you can solve it. This is also an excellent time to include any data you might have from market testing. And when you address the problem, try to approach it from an investor’s perspective. Look into their pain points and how your solutions could alleviate them. 

Tailoring your pitch to every individual investor will take some research and additional preparation, but it could be an instant success if you get it right the first time.

Once you get to present your solution, focus on its unique aspects. Make sure to explain exactly how your company will deal with the problem and, of course, keep your points short and concise.

Present a Sound Strategy

There are several essential questions your pitch must cover if you want to present your business as a serious endeavour:

  • What’s your target market?
  • How will you attract and retain customers?
  • What does your business model look like?
  • What are your financial projections?

Address each of these questions in detail and ensure you approach them realistically.

When it comes to the target market, try to narrow it down to your ideal customers and pinpoint their demographics as precisely as possible. It would be beneficial if you have user personas to present, as those will make explaining your customer strategy more straightforward.

Presenting your business plan is most often the crucial point of your pitch. The investor will want to know exactly how your business plans to make money, which could be what makes or breaks the deal.

You can solidify the plan by showing the investor a detailed financial projection. However, you should ensure to back up every assumption with relevant data as your calculations must be as accurate as possible. Every investor will be very interested in the direction that your business will take financially and they’ll likely want to double-check your projections.

Since you need to keep all parts of your presentation short, it would be best to have an extended financial plan on hand if the investor wants to take a closer look.

Conclusion

If you want great results and are eager to get funding for your business as soon as possible, taking feedback and working to improve your pitch would be very useful. You shouldn’t expect to have a complete picture of your presentation’s quality until you try it out.

Remember that your first pitch meetings might not immediately bring you the results you want, but don’t stress over it. Rather, use every meeting as a chance to learn, gather feedback, and refine your skills.

Are you ready to take the next step? Unsecured Finance Australia can help you with your business loan. Click here for more information.

Share the Post:

Related Posts