Fundraising Like a Pro: Pitching Secrets from the Sales World

Hello and welcome to the show. Apologies, before we begin, because today is one of those out and about episodes, so expect some interruptions in the background today. We're still on the whole fundraising thing and I would like to examine some secrets. OK, well, not secrets anyway. Tips and tricks that you can use from the sales world to improve your fundraising efforts. Assuming you're one of those people who is looking at starting a start up in this year and you want to get some of that fast, sexy and attractive money to fund your enterprise.

So when trying to raise funds, the first thing I'd recommend is to stop thinking about an investor pitch and start thinking of it. Start thinking more in terms of your making a sales presentation. Now when you're thinking investor pitch, especially if you are Nigerian in the UK or America, you know there are these tropes that we see on TV and in the movies and things like that. So investor pitch means it means, you know, being slick,

talking technical jargon, looking and sounding the right way. But if you're thinking sales presentation, rather, you'll be thinking more in terms of there's a value proposition, there's a story, there's a narrative that I have to pass across today to people on the other end to make sure they understand because I'm trying to get something from them. I'm trying to achieve a certain level of buying. So let's forget all the sexy stuff that we see on the media.

Let's get out of the mindset of investor pitch and start thinking that this is just a sales presentation like any other presentation that we have done in the past. I'm assuming that you've done some sort of presentation, even if it's not in the sales. Sales were business context. At the very least, you know you went to university and at some point you had to stand before the panel stand before your professor to defend ideas that went into your thesis.

And you know those sorts of things. Sorry, excuse me. So fundraising is not just about data and looking fancy and things like that. We're also trying to sell the vision for our business division that we're trying the vision about the problem that we're trying to solve with our product, with our service, with our app, with our website, with our whatever it is. So if you're thinking about it from a sales perspective, what you're trying to do here is to connect with your audience.

In this case, your audience are the potential investors. You're trying to figure out the concerns that they have, because everybody has concerns. When they hear about your app or your new idea about how you're going to solve the world or how you're going to raise a trillion IRA and make billions in profits, everybody has concerns. The thing is whether everybody is going to be upfront with you and bring out those concerns at this current meeting.

So the goal at whatever stage when you're having these conversations, whether it is the PREACH proper and you're sitting in front of this investor and his or her associates or whether you know you're with them in the elevator or you guys are having a charge or walking out of their office or you know, you want to go and visit them in the house. The goal is to try and not just establish a connection, but to try and tease out what the connections, sorry, what the concerns are and that way you're going to be able to address them.

So the sales skills that you need are, well, they're varied, but let me just tease on a few this morning. So one of them is going to be communication mastery. And let's be clear and concise with the language that we use because like I said, if you check what happens, you know, you watch all those movies on Netflix or, you know, stuff on TV, things like that. And then usually it's a young man, you know, the young man is talking slick, trying to raise funds and everything is a point.

And so there's lots of technical jargon. OK, well, on the jargon thing, First off, we have to realize that it is what's that word? It's relative. So if you are standing, if you're a doctor, standing in front of doctors and you're talking about going through the subliminal Ventra cover and bypassing the Luna medulla oblongata and blah, blah, blah, I didn't study medicine, so that's just me making stuff up. But the point I'm trying to make is this.

If you're standing in front of a room of doctors and using a high highfalutin jargon, then it's not really obtrusive language per SE because, you know, now Una, all of you are in the field so you understand exactly what it is that you are trying to say. But that is not always the case. When you're standing in front of a room with potential investors. It is not, it's not necessary that they may understand all the technical jungle they would like to throw around.

These days, for instance, you have lots of people trying to raise their money and they're talking about all the time is 1 billion. So yeah, you know that, you know, time is total addressable market and maybe who are in people who are in that space, You know, that's the kind of lingo that you throw around these days when you're trying to raise funds. But if you're talking to your rich uncle or deaconess Akubero Akubero in your church who has lots of money, you're trying to raise investments for her.

You know, you might only you might be impressing yourself if you go there and say, oh that the time is 100 billion, but you might not be impressing Deaconess, Akubero or your rich uncle or whoever it is. So let's not assume that everybody is in that space and everybody knows what time means total addressable market or what ICP means ideal customer profile or or everybody knows what a churn rate is or burn rate is. Churn rate, that's the number of customers that you're going to lose over time.

And then burn rate, the amount of money that you have to burn in quotes every week, every month, every year or whatever until you get this thing going. So yeah, there's lots of all that sexy language there and you want to stand up, you know, look, fly your Dang, your suit. And this is a term of 1 billion. And to achieve this, we have a burn rate of blah, blah, blah. And you know, the, you know, the Icps this and that and that.

Yeah. So it looks, it looks cool on camera and looks cool on TV, but you might lose. You might lose half the audience when you're standing before a panel and you want to get investment from them. Now of course, if you're talking to seasoned investors, you know, people in venture capital and that sort of thing, then of course they understand for, excuse me, the the sore throat is not entirely gone. So yeah, they understand all that lingo and I guess it won't be a problem.

So that's why I started off this, this part of the conversation by saying that it's all relative. So if you're standing before lawyers and you're talking about racial dissident I, you don't have to explain because anybody who went to law school whether in Nigeria, Canada, India or whatever knows exactly what racial dissident I means. But if you stand in front of my mom or my dad, or you stand in front of your uncle in the village and you're talking about racial dissidenting and steroid diseases and stuff like that,

you're just going to lose them. You're just talking over everybody's head. So communication mastery, let's keep things clear, let's keep things concise, avoid the jargon as much as possible. But then again, remember, jargon and technical terms are relative, so it depends on who you are standing in front of. And we also have to think about objections, as, like I said, everybody has objections. OK, maybe I didn't. OK, I don't think I defined objections.

So let me just go ahead. So in the sales context, when you say objections, an objection is just a reason that somebody has today for not taking action on the next step now or for not taking action tomorrow. Because whenever you're trying to make a sale, you're trying to get by and you're trying to convince somebody on something, people have some objections. Some people might be thinking, this idea sounds right, but this young man, this young girl standing in front of me is a good idea.

But can she actually pull it off? Can he pull it off? That is a concern. Most people will have that concern and will keep it to themselves. And that's not going to help you. If you want to get the investment, you have to be able to tease out the objections from them. You have to be able to get them to the point where they say young man, young girl, this idea sounds laudable. And I think he can. Yeah, he can make a billionaire.

But I don't think you have the balls to pull this off or I don't think you have the know how to pull this off. So you need to be able to get somebody to that point where they're able to say what the objection is. There are some people who think I'm not convinced this is not a good idea. You need to be able to know and tease out the objection from those people during the current meeting that you're having right now. So, yeah, So you need to be able to tease out the reasons that people have for not moving forward.

Now let's see what else. OK. So those are objections. You'll be able to anticipate what their concerns are and then address them head on. Because if people have concerns and you haven't addressed it, then you're not going to get that money. So people think that, yes, this is a billion dollar or a billion naira idea, but they think that you Tavi Shima or you Kelechi or you Alice or you Eunice, you don't have what it takes to pull it off.

You're not getting that money. You have to be able to tease out the concerns. And those are things that you're going to be able to get with sales training or if you start paying attention to the out of sales then in the pitch or in the process of talking about people, I'm sorry, not talking about talking with possible investors. After you realize that we have to build trust also to be able to get by and also to get the investment.

And trust is something that is built brick by brick. It's built, you know, small, small, step by step. You know, you, you move things forward today, you move things forward tomorrow, you move things forward next tomorrow. So that whole thing that you see in the movies and in TV and Netflix series and stuff where you show up, you know, correct suit, your hair slick shoes looking on point. And then you start talking about time, churn rates, this, that,

that, that you know, that whole sexy spiel, that whole thing of showing up and then just worrying everybody, getting everybody's trust one sitting. That's that's not how it works. In fact, even Dragons then, if you listen to podcasts about Dragon's Den and people that were interviewed, apparently what we watch on Dragon's Den is just 5 minutes or 10 minutes. But there are some of those people that the grilling and the conversations that took place over 4 hours, 3 hours, four hours, you know, but therefore the purpose of TV.

It's condensed into a 5 minute thing, a 10 minute thing, and it gives some of you the impression that it's possible for you to walk into your room, stand in front of five people that you've never met before. And then in 10 minutes you're walking away and each of them has given you like 500 K each, you know, because you just wowed them and all that. So some of that is just for the cameras. It's it's just for the TV. So there's a podcast, I think it's called Is it.

I think it's called Behind the Tank or something like that. So it's for people that have been interviewed on Shark Tank. So Shark Tank is sort of like the American version of Dragon's Den. That's for those of you who watch BBC, you don't watch American TV. So on BBC it's Dragons, then you're there, you're facing the investment panel, you're trying to get money for your business at a certain valuation. So they're only showing you 5

minutes, 10 minutes. But in reality, that's a conversation that may have stress as much as three hours, four hours at least on Shark Tank. And I've heard of a couple of people who their own session lasted 4 hours. You know, you talk for an hour and then people stop. You want to take a break and then you come back, you continue again. So it looks all nice, neat, sexy on TV. But real life, there's a little more messy. It's more big by brick.

It's small, small, small, building the trust. So you have to be able to build rapport with these people, have a genuine connection in them, because people aren't going to drop money unless they trust you. And yeah, you have to build up the trust. But I guess the overall advice or sexy advice, changing framework or changing perspective that I'd like to pull forward today for those of us who've been watching all those sexy TV shows and we think we can just go down wild people,

you know, just dazzle them and collect their money. Let's remember that when you're looking for investors, investors are going to end up being your partners. They're not just going to be a means to an end. So it's not just, you know, collect one M from this guy and you know move on to sexier, greater and better things once you secure investment, once you collect one M from somebody 500K30K, whatever. So I think of this person as a partner and a stakeholder and try to leverage your sales skills to you're trying to inspire them to to join you on a journey.

So it's not that this, it's a necessary evil dealing with investors. Go collect money and then go on to greater and better things. But try and inspire them to be on the journey with you. In fact, that's the chief benefit that you're going to get if you start looking at things from a sales perspective. Because from a sales perspective, we try to craft our presentations, our pitches, whatever it is you want to call it, around the customer's perspective.

In this case, the customer is the investor. Well, in the second case, of course, your ultimate customer is the person whose business problem you're trying to solve. But in this case, you're trying to collect one from someone. You're trying to beg your auntie for 200 K So in this case, the investor, your rich auntie, that is the customer. So we should be crafting the presentations around their perspective. We're trying to see how if my business, my app, my my website,

my whatever idea, if these things work, then this is how it's going to translate into your own benefit. This is the financial benefit you're going to get out of it by investing with me. Or this is the psychological benefits that you're going to get out of investing with me. And yes, there's some people who invest for psychological reasons. For those of you who've had to raise money from maybe a church committee or something, you know, that's part of it.

You know, they're doing charity or they're trying to help young people out. It's not necessarily because, you know, they think that if they invest in this, your thing that is going to make a give them huge benefit at the end of the day. So yeah, this is the benefit whether physical or whether financial or whether psychological. So that's it for today folks. So remember to connect with me on WhatsApp. The number is 08064662140.

The country code is +234. And I'd love for you guys to connect with me on LinkedIn. That's the socials where I spend most of my time. I'm on other socials. But if you want to direct, you know a quick response, you know, connect with me today, send me a question today. I want a response within a couple of hours. Then LinkedIn is the place. My name is Tavish Ma Ayudi. I'm the host of the show. Don't worry about the spelling of my name because you can.

Sorry, Excuse me? This sore throat. Yeah, so you can. Where was that? Yeah, so don't worry about the spelling of my name. I know it sounds strange, but you can get it from the link where you're currently listening to this episode. So thanks for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next recording. And don't worry, the sore throat will definitely be over soon and I'll try to avoid my children coughing in my face at least Wilder Hammer time last.

So thanks for your time and attention. I'll catch you guys at the next episode.