Entrepreneurial

Stuck in an elevator with a well-known investor, but not sure how to make the most of your two minute ride?

Becky Reuber, a professor of strategic management at Toronto’s Rotman School of Management, has a few tips on how to craft an effective elevator pitch.

Here are Reuber’s four main points you need to get across to get investor attention:

1. What is your product/service?

Don’t launch into a technical explanation of how your product works, said Reuber. Keep it concise and to the point. For example: I make a tool that allows carpenters to hammer nails in hard to reach places.

2. Why are buyers going to buy it?

“The number one concern that people are going to be interested in is, do you have a compelling value proposition for a target market that you understand,” said Reuber.

– Jeff Bussgang is a General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, an early-stage venture capital firm in Boston. This post originally appeared on Bussgang’s blog www.seeingbothsides.com. The views expressed are his own. –

I’ll never forget my first marketing class at business school. Our professor peered at us with an intense glare as he pushed back on our standard “chip shot” comments. At one point in the class he asked the guy next to me to opine on the case we were discussing, which involved launching a new consumer product. “Well,” my neighbor answered confidently, “I think it will be a hit because I can see my mother-in-law buying it.”

“I see,” replied my professor dryly and then turned to the class with a withering look on his face, “Steve appears to have fallen into that fatal trap of ‘Mother-In-Law Market Research’; believing this new product will be a hit just because his mother-in-law likes it. Instead, let’s look at the data, shall we?”