Entrepreneur, keep your pitch simple and specific

When pitching to investors, describe the problem you are solving in simple, specific terms rather than using a macro market approach. Photo / Thinkstock

The experts at the University of Maryland's Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship help a start-up founder sharpen her business message to customers.

The entrepreneur

After graduating from MIT, Marie-Louise Murville became a consultant at a top global firm. She advanced quickly, managing projects and making sales. She learned that the key to successful client engagements was the ability to motivate people.

Murville moved from consulting to venture capital investing and then to starting and building companies. She's seen the challenge from many angles - managing and mentoring employees as well as setting and managing expectations with boards of directors. Now she's tackling it with her start-up, Delight Me.

The pitch

Murville, chief executive of Delight Me: "Delight Me solves the $20 billion problem of knowledge-worker attrition and disengagement at work with our cloud-based goal management and coaching platform.

According to Harvard Business Review, only 13 per cent of workers are engaged. People graduate from good schools, take a job and often become bored or stressed out and leave for another opportunity. This forces companies to spend time and money to replace them.

"Delight Me has an easy-to-use, cloud-based platform where workers can set annual goals with managers and then break them down into quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily action steps.

"Bosses/mentors help workers set goals needed to advance their careers. They can enlist coaches to support them. The platform aggregates data that makes it easy to track and analyse an employee's progress.

"We're focusing first on professional services firms - management consultants, accountants, lawyers, real estate agents - to help reduce turnover and increase engagement."

The advice

Elana Fine, managing director of the Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship at the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business:

"Let's start with your pitch: It is really hard to know what you mean when you say you are solving the '$20 billion problem of knowledge-worker attrition.' This is too macro of a problem to help capture someone's attention. You need to communicate the specific problem you are solving in one line. Be more granular about it. What is the problem an employee has? How does this problem play out?

Murville: "I'll try again. People don't know what they need to do on a daily, weekly and monthly basis to get promoted. They often don't have the mentorship they need. People think, 'I'm really smart. I work really hard. I should be able to make partner next year.' When they don't get that promotion, they don't understand why."

Fine: "That is much clearer. Tweak your sales pitch to focus on the problem - that people don't know what to do to get promoted.

"Investors, employers and potential users can all relate to the 'average worker' who wants to know what to do. Provide examples from your target markets in real estate and law. Show how Delight Me can help define metrics to meet goals.

"We see that a lot of entrepreneurs, particularly when pitching investors, think they need to lead with this macro market and major problem they are solving. But think about it more bottom-up: Solving the problem of the average worker who wants to get promoted and doesn't know how."