subject: How To Get In Touch With An Investor [print this page] If you are an entrepreneur and need financing, you will need to contact an investor who likes your idea and this can be a rather tricky thing to do. You probably have tried to get into touch with investors with no avail. Thats more than likely because you do not know how to approach an investor properly and commute your idea to him in a way that would capture his interest.
Contacting an Investor
Contacting a prospective investor is more like an art. There is a way to contact an investor and get him interested in your idea. The first thing that you should try to do to get an investors attention is to have a high concept pitch. High concept pitch? Whats that? Well, a high concept pitch is a small three to four word pitch that compares your company or service to something that is already out there and is doing quite well. This can be a great tool, not only in winning an investors interest in your idea, but this high concept pitch can also be used in your marketing efforts. It can be turned into a commercial jingle for television or radio ads, and it can also be a good one-liner for ads in print or on the internet. Furthermore, the high concept pitch can be used by the press for interviews for your company. The key to the high concept pitch of being effective is that it has to be short and catchy.
The high concept pitch, on the other hand, is not the only thing that you need to have in order to get the investor interested enough to actually meet you. When contacting an investor, you should also compose a teaser email. A teaser email is an email that could include your high concept pitch plus a series of bullets that can lightly break down the key reasons why your investor should be interested in your venture and why he should invest in your company. The teaser email should not be any longer than one page and should be designed to impress the investor.
Meeting the Investor
Ok, you have successfully completed the above mentioned tasks and an investor or several investors have been impressed enough to want to meet with you, now what? Now, this can be the test of your business savviness. Meeting with the investor and having a serious dialogue with him can be even more difficult than contacting him. Your meeting with an investor is very important and this is where the meat of the matter is discussed. You need to be very well prepared for this meeting, because your preparations and your impressions can mean whether you get funding or not.
Your business plan is very important, but unlike in the past, you need to have more than just your business plan to show your investors. Along with your business plan, you need to have an executive summary, which is basically a summary of your business plan that the investor can review during your meeting. Before we get to your business plan, however, lets discuss another pitch that you can have to communicate to your investor.
Think of conjuring up an elevator pitch before you meet your investor. What is an elevator pitch? Well, an elevator pitch is a small pitch where you can tell the investor why he should like your plan and it should not be any longer that the elevator ride up to his office, about two or three minutes; hence the term elevator pitch.
The business plan is, however, the most important part of the meeting with your investors. When it comes to your business plan and executive summary, you should have it set as a slide show that can be made in the two common presentation programs available, such as Microsoft Powerpoint or Apples Keynote. This presentation should consist of about ten slides which can be displayed for about ten to twenty minutes each. You need to cover the important parts of your business plan to convince the prospective investor that your venture is worth their investment. Things that investors will want to look for in making their final decision are the following. First, you need to show them their business model, product or service prototype, where your relevant market is, what your market analysis is, and more. You need to really research your business plan very well before you contact an investor. Investors will ask you some very tough questions about your business plan. You need to be prepared to come up with some convincing answers to get them on board.
You do not need to worry about going at this alone. There are many resources online that are dedicated to entrepreneurs, just like you. The one thing that I thought to be a very big help to me when I was starting my company out was the VCgate Venture Capital Database. This is an awesome resource which allowed me to contact investors directly without having to get the run around. Furthermore, VCgate has very powerful affiliates, such as Growthlink, which has some of the top of the line information about winning venture capital and other investments. I highly recommend both of them.
