Australian Anthill - Why do Australians suck at pitching?

The latest newsletter from Australian Anthill magazine poses a question I've been wrestling with for ages - why do Australians suck at pitching? I've been lucky enough to attend a few Austrade market tours and every one of the ANZA Tech Net Gateway sessions in the US, and it's something I've got to say is true - put an Aussie entrepreneur in front of a group of would-be investors or customers and arm them with PowerPoint, and they turn into everyone's nightmare - be your nightmare of a salesman from hell, a boring old relative or an over-caffeinated geek. We forget who is in the audience, why our ideas might be interesting to them, and what we actually want from them. I've blogged about it before, and whinged about it even more regularly in conversations. Anyway, I posted some answers to the Anthill site, and have reposted them here. Let me know if I'm wrong ...

A few reasons (buried within some massive generalisations ...:

We are not trained to present. Few Austalian highschools make a habit of putting their students out in front of a group to speak. Hence we are much more comfortable sitting in the audience.

We are shy. Be it fear of the tall poppy syndrome, or some cultural retardation, we are reticent to say that we are actually good at what we do, or prove it. It's something we need to get over quickly. If we aren't prepared to say and demonstrate that our products and services are the best in the world, no one else is going to do it for us.

We do not do enough research on the audience. A one-size-fits all presentation does not exist. Each presentation and pitch needs to be tailored to who is in the room, and getting across your message in such a way that it fits to their needs.

We forget what we are doing. I've witnessed many pitches where the point of the pitch has been totally buried under useless facts. People do not care who your founder was - they care about what you can do to make them more profitable or improve their lives. Everything else is fluff.

We do not understand brevity. Most Australian entrepreneurs baulk at the idea of a five minute presentation, but that's about all the attention most of us can really secure anyway. Then we kill that attention with a bunch of slides that only serve to reinforce the meaningless information we were serving up verbally. Brevity is the key - keep the audience intrigued, and let them form the questions that will keep them milling around afterwards.

We have no idea what we are doing anyway. When asked to sum up their company in a few words, most entrepreneurs struggle, and cannot articulate their value in a compelling way. Pare it all back and find the core reason for your existence, then move forward from there.

The value of every company can be summed up in one sentence. That one sentence can be used to generate a question, which in turn generates the next statement. It really is that simple.

Comments

[Seth Yates]

Spot on. Having been on the receiving end of several web entrepreneur pitches over the last 5 or so years, I can relate to all of your points.

One entrepreneur pretty much ticked every box above: He came in and insisted that we sit while he read *prepared notes* (no slides, no eye contact, no rapport), starting with a recounting of *our* company and where we were positioned in the market. At least he got most of his facts right ;-)

I let him get a good two minutes into his shpiel before asking him to please get to the point. Poor guy.