How to Deliver the Big Pitch

All of us, at least some of the time, practice the art of the pitch. We pitch our ideas and projects. We pitch our company's products or services. We pitch ourselves. For CEO Ronald Tetteroo, the challenge before him right now is to pitch -- in six adrenaline-jolting minutes -- everything that he's spent the past decade working on.

This pitch is easily the most high-stakes presentation of Tetteroo's career. The venue is Demo '99, an invitation-only gathering of the techno-elite -- more than 800 top high-tech executives, analysts, institutional investors, VCs, and select members of the media. During Demo's two-day-long main event, in Indian Wells, California, Tetteroo and 39 other overachieving leaders of young companies will pitch what they hope will be the next generation of grand-slam gadgetry. The show's more illustrious alumni include Netscape and 3Com. Make a drop-dead pitch at Demo, and you make your company a contender.

But the reality is that many, if not most, of Demo's pitchers never deliver the goods. They just get eaten alive by the event's Darwinian world order. It all begins with those six go-for-broke minutes under Demo's harsh spotlight. Drift even a few seconds over the allotted time, and Chris Shipley, the show's trigger-happy executive producer, will yank you from the game.

Tetteroo is no Bill Gates. No one knows this Dutch techno-evangelist, the former drummer of Hermes House Band, a disco group that rocked the Netherlands in the 1980s. No one has heard of InfoRay, his Cambridge, Massachusetts startup. Tetteroo will get his six minutes, but he has only about 30 seconds to make an impact.

He knows that a breakout performance depends on preparation. With just a week until Demo day, Tetteroo will write and rewrite a dozen scripts. He will analyze myriad takes of his videotaped performance. The goal is to make it all look effortless. What follows are lessons from Tetteroo's pitch-in-the-making and a firsthand account of what it takes to knock 'em out.

Rule #1 Know your audience.

At 9 a.m. on the Monday before D-day, Tetteroo slips into a fully equipped "war room" at InfoRay's headquarters. The conference room -- hardwired with several laptops, a video camera, and a mega-monitor -- is where pitchers prepare for a big game. The pitch-making team is assembled: two PR execs from Alexander Ogilvy, InfoRay's worldwide-marketing manager, and the pitch coach, Betsy Komjathy.

Komjathy is a partner at Rogen International Ltd., a communication-skills training outfit in New York that has coached rookie and veteran pitchers alike at such hard-hitting companies as Merrill Lynch, Citigroup, and Sun Microsystems. Tetteroo assures Komjathy that he's done his share of big-league presentations in Europe. In fact, he and the PR team already have a script. To the casual observer, the pitch appears well in hand. But Komjathy is skeptical.

For starters, Tetteroo wants to kick off his pitch with a drum solo. He's certain that a 36-second salvo will rouse the crowd and mark him as a break-the-rules stud.

Here's his plan: Tetteroo will bang out a quick riff and announce that he had been a professional musician who had played just the drums. He'll then segue into his pitch: Because of advances in software technology, he's no longer merely a drummer -- he's a one-man symphony. The point is this: His $150,000 enterprise-wide software, dubbed Info X-Ray, searches a company's data resources and rapidly fetches and organizes once hard-to-get-at business info -- thereby opening unimagined information-gathering realms for corporate decision makers.

But this "creative" opener is a gamble, cautions Komjathy. Misreading your audience is an unforgivable sin. A blitz on the drums might just put off the 800 less-than-playful strangers who will be at Demo.

"If you want to take a risk, play your solo at the end of your sell. If you bomb at the beginning," she warns, "you might never recover. People will remember you as the guy who played the drums, not as the guy who rocked the world with the first true business-data portal."

At least as important as knowing your listeners, says Komjathy, is billboarding the action that you want them to take in. "What do you want the Demo crowd to do?" she asks Tetteroo. "Buy your product? Be your partner? Or hire you for a wedding gig?"