The Importance Of Managing Your Pitch Time

A pitch opportunity to an investor, any investor - VC, angel, friend, whoever, is like any other sales call. You have to manage your time. Your audience will have a tendency to drill down, ask questions, and generally try to gather data that will help them with their decision making process. It is your responsiblity as the person doing the pitch to manage the time you have with your audience, just as you would on any other sales call. This means:

1) Asking how much time your audience has
2) Monitoring the time during the presentation (this does not mean staring at your watch, but it does mean checking the time now and then)
3) Alerting your audience that time is moving quickly and you have some areas you would like to cover
4) Doing a time check at 10 or 15 minutes before the hour is up. This is easily accomplished by saying, "I'd like to do a time check here since we have about 10 minutes left in the hour."

Follow these simple rules and you make effective use not only of your audience's time, but of your own!