A lot of what they tell you in school is, “Take the emotion out of it. Nobody cares about the emotion. They want to know the business facts. They want to know the statistics. They want to know what you think you’re going to make in order to invest in your company.”
The thing about that is that people can’t take the emotion out of a decision, but you’re taking it out of your pitch. So there’s emotion in the decision, but none in the pitch. You end up missing out.
So a lot of what I talk about is the idea of putting that personal voice back into it. Because that’s what people associate with.
I’m not saying that your pitch to an investor to get $10 million for your idea should have “dude,” as every other word. I’m not saying that you should totally be casual. What I am saying is that there’s a way of writing in normal human language that people get and people respond to, and it doesn’t have to be the stayed corporate voice.
Let me give you an example. You raised an important point in your question earlier. The idea that you want to appear bigger than you are.
Scott Jordan, who founded SCOTTEVEST, had a similar situation. He was growing his company, and there was basically him and his wife and one other person in a warehouse shipping these clothes out. If you knew that, you might not believe that they could actually execute on a large order. So they had to appear to be a certain size.
If you look at their corporate team bios, their Director of Marketing is Kelly Adoggi. And basically, the description didn’t have a picture when they were smaller [note: it does now], but there are a couple of paragraphs talking about Kelly’s experience. And as you read to the end, you slowly realize that Kelly is actually their dog. And Adoggi stands for “a doggy.”
They made their dog into an employee and wrote the bio so as though the dog was the Director of Marketing to appear slightly larger and have more team members than they actually did.
So here’s an example of a company having a little bit of fun with it. So much fun that, now that they have a lot of more employees the Adoggi’s bio is still online.
The full program includes:
- How to communicate your business’s uniqueness.
- How to create your company’s backstory.
- Why you should admit you’re marketing.
Give your feedback:
What do you think of the ideas in this program. Tell me in the comments.