Rehearsing makes perfect...

Dunno about perfect, but it sure helps.

During the past months I've been invited to pitch Hitlantis in numerous occasions, presentations and pitching competitions all over the world. I've been fortunate enough to actually win some of those competitions. The fact is that one must not attempt pitching his/her service/case unless he/she trains the pitch very carefully. Basically every word you say must be pre-thought and during the presentation there really must not be room for ad hoc thinking at all - there really is no time for that. One must know his sales pitch from word-2-word by heart. There really is no other way. Unfortunately I've seen many pitches and presentations with obviously too little rehearsals behind. It really is awfull - makes the presenter look and feel amateur and actually disrespects the audience.

One aspect of my own rehearsals is video taping as many of them as possible. By doing this it is easier to learn from silly mistakes and odd looking gaps etc. Here's one of my rehearsals taped infront of a very small audience: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7RG0L1Oq-Dg

This 10 mins session was quite ok but lacks some energy what I typically put into my presentations with bigger audiences. Also the length of the presentation is important factor as here I did not need to rush but if you are given just exact 2 mins or 5 mins time to do your pitch, the storyline must be different in order to get the message through. One must rehearse the different lengths carefully.

I'm going to attend couple of pitching events this fall too and hopefully they will be video taped so I can share them here.

later...tp