The make it or break it moment for many businesses, the pitch. Who are you, what do you do, how do you do it better than anyone else? These are the questions your pitch should aim to answer and the way you say it matters as well. Are you confident, unsure, nervous, too rehearsed? Keep in mind that the spoken component of the pitch is only half the task. The other half is your preparation. Are you dressed for success, have all the material you need, informed on your potential client? These are all determinants of whether or not someone chooses to work with you.

In the last five months, Cobalt & Sapphire has had 13 pitch presentations. Note that these pitch presentations take place after the initial meeting; in other words, these potential clients had already expressed interest and set up a specified time for us to pitch our services. Out of those 13 pitches, all signed on board with us, giving Cobalt & Sapphire a 100% successful pitch rate (hooray!). We put a lot of time and attention into our preparation, and in this blog post, we want to share our pitch perfect recipe with you!

When we have a pitch arranged, our first step is to research everything we can about our potential client. We take a look at their website, review sites, social media, news articles, anything we can get our hands on. With this information, we inform ourselves on their style, what they lack, what they do well, which in turn gives us the knowledge to react and ask questions on certain topics when meeting in person.

After researching, we write out what we want to say based on what we learned from this information search. We highlight certain services we think will be the most beneficial to them and write about our company values and work quality.

After writing what we want to say, we move onto practicing out loud. We say it over and over and don’t focus so much on memorizing, but rather on grabbing the gist of what we’re trying to communicate. It’s also crucial to pay attention to the tone you speak in and the emphasis you place on certain words. This is helpful because it avoids making you sound like a robot who memorized everything word for word, and more like a passionate person who is an expert. It is also important to note that some clients may ask questions or for clarification along the way. If you are too rehearsed it may be difficult to find your place again in the presentation. There is no magic number for how many times you should rehearse your presentation. Our rule of thumb is to practice until it’s engraved into our brain and is second nature. We practice several times leading up to the pitch (sometimes even on the train!).

In the beginning, we would email important documents to our potential clients and quickly realized that our emails were getting lost in the world of overflowing inboxes. If you want your document to be seen, we highly recommend printing it out and bringing it to the meeting. Two pieces we never forget to bring is our About Us powerpoint and Pricing Guide.

The night before the pitch, we pack a bag with everything we need: laptops, phone chargers, pens, notebooks, business cards, printed handouts, wallet, etc. This way we avoid forgetting something the morning of and have more time to enjoy breakfast without running around. We are also fans of picking outfits out the night before and coordinating them so that they are complementary with one another. We practice our pitch one last time before going to bed and wake up ready to go!

Our Pitch Perfect recipe works incredibly well for us and we hope that you could take away a piece of advice to help you in your business pitch. If you have any questions about creating your pitch or want to hear our pitch in action, contact us and let’s talk!