Strategic Communications Made
(Plano &) Simple

Transforming your innovations from great ideas to viable and growing business is an enormous challenge, with correspondingly enormous risk and reward. You need to have not only a thoroughly validated value proposition but also to be able to communicate it clearly.

The Perfect Pitch methodology used throughout the Plano & Simple courses will help you to pressure test every aspect of your value proposition. In the process, you will develop clear, concise and compelling ways to communicate it to your stakeholders, from investors to customers. 

Falling in love with your innovation is an occupational hazard for innovators everywhere. Your essential stakeholders - whether customers, investors, sponsors, partners, employees, etc. - are likely to have very different perspectives from yours.

Getting clarity on what matters to them will help you in developing successful strategies and tactics, as well as communicating them. "Know Your Stakeholders" focuses on understanding their motivations to help them get as excited by your vision as you are.

Your stakeholders - customers, investors, etc. - will only invest their money, time and resources in your innovation if they perceive that the problem you are solving is important and significant. Most innovators focus on what their innovation does. To engage stakeholders, you must focus on why they should care. 

This course helps you to answer Question 01: Who cares?, the first of the 10 Questions Every Pitch Should Answer.

In the previous course, you "Built Your Case" for strong demand for a new solution to a significant problem. Your stakeholders now need to know what your innovation does to impact that problem. The focus is on what it does, not how it works.

This course helps you to answer Question 02: What do you do? of the 10 Questions Every Pitch Should Answer.

Having an innovative solution that has the potential to "Show Your Impact" is a great start, but it is just the start. Your innovation also has to be better, faster and cheaper than the alternatives.

CAUTION! You can't be the best in every dimension. But you can deliver the best combination of benefits that your users need and want.

This course helps you to answer Question 03: Why will you win? of the 10 Questions Every Pitch Should Answer.

"Being the Best" today is one thing.

Sustaining that advantage over time is quite another! You need to protect your advantage over time by erecting legal, strategic, and tactical barriers to entry against your competitors.

This course helps you to answer Question 04: How will you stay ahead? of the 10 Questions Every Pitch Should Answer.

Stakeholders want solutions. Too often, the innovative solutions promised in pitches fail to materialize in the real world. This fact makes most stakeholders very skeptical.

So far, you have made exciting claims about the market opportunity, secret sauce, and sustainable competitive advantage. The next step is to Validate Your Claims with substantiated data, initial revenue, or both.

This course is designed to help you answer Question 05: Does it work? from the 10 Questions Every Pitch Should Answer.

No matter how big an impact your innovation can make, nor how much better it is at solving an important problem, people won't buy it unless they know about it.

Social media makes announcing your products and services to the world relatively easy... for everyone. You need a thoughtful strategy to get heard above the noise so that you can reach your high priority customers, efficiently and cost-effectively.

This course helps you to answer Question 06: How will you make money? from the 10 Questions Every Pitch Should Answer.

Your business model is the integration of the tactics and strategies of your business plan. The next step is to quantify its projected results, to tell the same story in numbers that you have just told in words. While it is impossible to be predict the future perfectly, you can reflect the best data you have available today in those projections, showing likely trends and outcomes. 

Financial statements are the language of business. Becoming fluent in them will serve you well in communicating with investors and in managing and growing your organization.

This course focuses on helping you to answer Question 07: How much will you make? from the 10 Questions Every Pitch Should Answer.

In the preceding courses, we have addressed functional aspects of your value proposition (marketing, secret sauce, competition, intellectual property, proof of concept, business model, and financial projections, primarily from the perspective of your many stakeholders. Before we finish up with your vision and "ask", we need to highlight the people who make it all work, your team.

Use this course to help answer Question 08: Why you? from the 10 Questions Every Pitch Should Answer.

You have identified the opportunity (Questions 01 through 03) and validated your capabilities (Questions 04 through 08). Now it's time to motivate your audience with your aggressive and smart plan for delivering the return on investment that they want. Our focus is on highlighting the value-added milestones you will deliver in order to achieve your vision. 

Never end a pitch without making a specific, clear ask. An answer - whether it is "yes", "no", or "I still have questions" - is infinitely more valuable to you than a "Nice job, best of luck!" and quick exit. The ask is the purpose of the pitch. Everything else you say up until this point is in service to making your ask an obvious and smart conclusion that your audience can only agree to support.