Pitching is top sport.

Pitching is even more serious than top sport. Because a second place has no value. How do you convince an investor? How do you get a jury on your side? Why does the committee choose your idea or research plan?

When pitching, you have to convince your audience in a short time frame. Usually about something invisible. A good idea, an expensive research project, an investment or a new product. Passion and inspiration are important, but certainly not enough. Because successful investors don’t just go along with a catchy story. They have the vigilance of a top model against a player. Holding their attention requires an extremely promising strategy.

It all starts with putting yourself in the mindset of your audience. And predict all their interests and their doubts in advance. But also building up your arguments in that precious time requires a flawless strategy. How to create a killer pitch and make it promising, is a profession that I love to share with you.

The difficulty about pitching is that you don’t learn anything from rejections, because you don’t hear much about your mistakes, afterwards. Apparently you have underestimated the challenge and they decided not to continue with you, although there is a lot at stake.

I support pitch presentations from scratch to success. And I show the pitcher how we achieve our goal step by step. Such processes require strategy and communication skills. In recent years I have supported pitches for start-ups, science, requests for Dutch Veni, Vidi or Vici committees, applications for higher positions and various other pitch challenges.

intelligence

In addition, I am one of the founders behind Smart Capital Network, a group of Dutch investors that reviews a lot of pitch presentations. So, for many years I feel at home on both sides of the table.

Pitching is fun because it runs on adrenaline and intelligence. But also on empathy, attentiveness, business intuition and a sense of timing. You need inspiring skills in such presentations. What I can promise, is that I will teach you to pitch for the first prize. And once you master that game, you can do it yourself in the future.