Communicating Your Big Idea

Grit & Growth

Meet Martin Stimela, CEO of Botswana-based Brastorne Enterprises, and Matt Abrahams, Stanford Graduate School of Business lecturer and communications expert. As Martin prepares to pitch his business expansion plan, hear Matt’s tips on how to grab attention, harness emotions, and create a lasting connection with your audience. Then listen in on Martin’s actual pitch...and Matt’s feedback.

Almost every entrepreneur eventually needs to make a pitch to capture attention...and dollars. Martin Stimela is no exception. As CEO of Brastorne Enterprises, he’s looking to raise capital to scale his growing technology company to 19 more countries, starting with Cameroon, Ethiopia, Guinea, and Mali. His vision: to connect the unconnected by enabling Internet access without the need for expensive data plans or smartphones. Matt Abrahams shares some tips and then listens in on Martin’s pitch.

Matt Abrahams is a Stanford lecturer and host of the podcast "Think Fast, Talk Smart," and he has plenty of strategic communications advice and techniques for both Martin and fellow entrepreneurs. Before you even write the first word of your pitch, Matt suggests you need to think first about who your audience is and what they need from you.

“A fundamental mistake people make is they start by saying, here are the things I want to say. Rather, you need to focus on What do I want them to know? How do I want them to feel? And what do I want them to do?”

Here are a few pitch-worthy pieces of advice:

Create a good hook to capture people’s attention

“You know, 99% of people start with: Hi, my name is_______. Today, I'm going to talk about______. If you do something different, you automatically stand out as different.”

Introduce a character

“Think about leveraging testimonials, examples of how people are benefiting from your particular set of offerings. If we become familiar with a particular person and their situation, it makes it much more real for us than simply talking in generality.”

Be conversational

“Avoid reading word for word from a script or slides. Instead, focus on the structure of your message and the key ideas you want to get across.”

Practice by teaching

Like most things in business and life, practice makes perfect. And Matt encourages practicing by teaching.

“Something that I find very useful for entrepreneurs to do is when they're working on pitches, I invite them to actually think about how would they teach somebody else to pitch their business. So bringing on a co-founder or a colleague, how would you teach them to pitch the business by putting themselves in the role of teacher, it helps them see things that we don't typically see.”

Listen to Matt’s advice and Martin’s pitch to learn new strategies and techniques to improve your own pitch.

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