Entrepreneurs, keep your pitch simple
In one line, tell them the specific problem you’re proposing to solve
Career experts at the University of Maryland’s Dingman Center for Entrepreneurship help a startup founder sharpen her business message to customers.
That business message? It was about helping people who don’t know what to do to get promoted.
THE ENTREPRENEUR
After graduating, Marie-Louise Murville became a consultant at a top global firm. She advanced quickly, managing projects and making sales. She learned 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 startup, 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 analyze 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 Mary-
land’s Robert H. Smith School of
Business: “It’s hard to know what you mean when you say you’re solving the “$20-billion problem of knowledge-worker attrition.” You need to communicate the specific problem you are solving in one line. 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. People think, ‘I’m smart. I work hard. I should be able to make partner next year.’ When they don’t get that promotion, they don’t understand why.”
Fine: “That’s 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.
“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.”