How to Make a Successful Pitch to JV Partners

About a week ago I received an absurdly long email from someone asking me to be a Joint Venture Parter with him to endorse his training programs. My reply to his email began like this:

“I’ll cut to the chase and respectfully decline your offer.”

I then gave him 3 ways how he could make his pitch more effective. By the time I finished, I thought the information needed to be shared with more than just this one entrepreneur. So I’ve taken the liberty to eliminate his name and the details of his business and create a generic list of 3 things he (and most likely many other business owners) could do to make their JV Pitches more effective.

1. Eliminate any unnecessary information that just wastes the investors time.  Don’g ramble on an on about your past, your marriage, your financial situation in life, and any other irrelevant information. None of that has anything to do with an investor deciding to explore a Joint Venture opportunity with you.  It may be good information on a phone call when you are building the relationship, but during an initial pitch, get rid of it. If you ever feel the need to say things like, “I’ve rambled enough” or “I’ve probably bored you to tears” or “I’ve taken enough of your time” then you probably have shared way too much information.  If you think you are rambling, you are.

Successful business people don’t want to read ramblings.  Even if your pitch is stellar, if it’s mixed in between irrelevant filler, most investors will delete the email before they get to the pitch.  Investors cherish their time, if you waste their time before you are in business with them they will fear you will waste even more of their time when you are in business with them.  Your rambling reflects disregard for an investors time – which they cherish more than their money.

2.  Eliminate words like “need” and “fast cash.”  This makes you sound desperate.  I get it, you might be, but you don’t need to amplify that desperation… successful people work with successful people.  Instead of talking about your need (which as an investor I don’t care about), talk about my opportunity.  That’s what successful people look for… they look for opportunities.  In addition, if the product or service are trying to get an investor to endorse you for has anything to do with success or abundance, these types of words (and most likely, the ramblings from point #1) will make it appear that the program or products you offer don’t work. What right do you have to tell someone how to have the life they want, when the very techniques you will be teaching them isn’t giving you the life you would want?  If you sell a weight loss drink, don’t share that you are 50 lbs over weight. Share that you used to be 100 pounds over weight and since taking the drink you have lost 50 of that already. You are saying the same thing, but it’s positioned in a way to focus the investors mind on the effectiveness, not the incongruence. As an investor, when you demonstrate that you don’t have the success you are trying to sell with your program, this comes across as very unethical.  I would never endorse someone for a program that hasn’t worked for them in their own life.  (On a side note, this is why I left the NLP community, and no longer endorse the teachings.  There are far too many NLP experts teaching people how to have amazing lives, when they themselves are still in crisis mode.)

3.  Be specific in your offer so the investor knows exactly what benefits they will receive.  To say such things like, “I will share the profits with you on a reasonable basis” tells me you haven’t taken the time to calculate your true costs and even determine your price points.  Don’t ever go to an investor without having this information readily available.  It hints that I’m going to be the one having to come up with these figures which means I’m now your CFO, and I don’t want that role.  Also, a savvy JV Partner will never agree to a percentage of the profits because it’s too easy for the company to hide their profits in expenses.  You could make $500,000 in profit and then go buy a Maybach 62S as a company car and all of a sudden you have no profit to show, meaning I just bought you a car and I get nothing in return.  You should offer JVs a percentage of sales and if you can’t calculate what a smart percentage would be for that, then you have no right asking for a JV partnership either.

If you would like to learn more about how to pitch investors for any type of partnership opportunity, you can grab a copy of my latest national best-seller, “Collaboration Economy” in bookstores nationwide or on iBooks and Kindle Fire.