Thinking about raising some funding for your "small" business?

In Oren Klaff’s excellent book on capital raising called “Pitch Anything” he uses the acronym STRONG to simplify his process.

He has used this process year after year in deal after deal with executives from Bear Stearns, Boeing, Disney, Honda, LinkedIn, Texas Instruments and Yamaha.

The book also has a generous serving of neuroscience and it’s relevance to the croc brain but ... back to STRONG!

   Setting the frame

   Telling the story

   Revealing the intrigue

   Offering the prize

   Nailing the hotpoint

   Getting the decision

It was the “Intrigue frame I found the most interesting.

When you read as many “offer documents” as I do you find that the majority of them are written in the “Analyst Frame”. That is when the writer of the document, usually a passionate technical type, “does a deep drill down” into minute details. Things like problem solving, numerical calculations and statistics are paramount and the writer usually loses the prospective investor in the process. The prospective investor is interested in the investment opportunity and not in becoming intimately aware of the intricacies of the product or service behind the investment opportunity.

Intrigue? Most people take a great deal of pleasure in being confronted with something that is new, novel and intriguing. New, novel, and intriguing often do better than the traditional more certain offerings to raise funds. Our brains are wired to enjoy these pleasurable challenges. When people read through an offer document or attend an investor meeting they arent really interested in what they know and understand already. They yearn for the new, novel and interesting aspects of the opportunity.

That means that as they listen to your pitch at an investor meeting and read through your offer document, if it is pretty much at the level of what they know and understand now, they will zone out and you will probably lose them. How often do you hear “we had several people that were interested but it seems they have lost interest”.

Great story telling keeps people’s interest. Stories are very much part of the “intrigue” in an offering. If the brain isn’t fed with value that is enjoys it simply turns off and focusses on something else.

So for your next investor presentation or pitch document stack it with intrigue. With things that are new, novel and interesting. Couch the intrigue in stories and not numbers.