By Laura Ashby
The director of sales at Klymit, winning team of last year''s Business Plan Competition, spoke at a BPC workshop on how to construct a winning pitch on Thursday.
Last year, Klymit won second place at the Global Moot Corp Competition, a prestigious and exclusive business plan face-off.
Jon Ward, a second-year MBA student from Logan, and the director of the BPC, said BYU''s Business Plan Competition has worldwide recognition.
'Our first-place team has an automatic birth to Moot Corp, a competition by invitation only,' Ward said.
Nick Sorenson, Klymit''s director of sales, said a large part of his team''s success was due to the delivery and organization of their pitch.
Practice is essential to perfecting the delivery of a pitch, Sorenson said.
He then related how he learned the importance of practice through playing high school football. His coach would run a play one thousand times in practice before using it in a game.
Sorenson said that while it may not be necessary to practice a pitch one thousand times, it is important to practice a pitch several times on different people.
'I can promise you that that will be the single most valuable thing you''ll get out of this little workshop we have today,' Sorenson said.
He also stressed the importance of simplifying the pitch in terms that relate to investors. His team found that using analogies worked well in explaining Klymit technology.
Klymit offers revolutionary insulation in its snow sports products. Klymit''s founder and former BYU student, Nate Alder, started Klymit to become a world leader in noble gas technology, Sorenson said.
At first, the team explained the technology using the periodic table of elements. However, they found this approach elicited several questions from investors and did not effectively communicate what they hoped to.
Now, they use the analogy of a thermostat to explain Klymit technology, the 'Intel Inside' campaign to explain how they market their product and razor blade refills to explain how they make residual income. They have found the use of analogies to be much more effective, Sorenson said.
Sorenson then unveiled 'The Power of the Secret Stash,' a phrase he plans to trademark, he said. The secret stash is a compilation of 10 to 15 slides at the end of a pitch presentation that answer questions the investors may ask.
Third party validation is also very helpful in building credibility, Sorenson said. Klymit used a one-minute video of Tom Berry, former President of Salomon, talking about how great Klymit is.
Sorenson said the most important part of the pitch is when you ask investors for funding. It is important to extend a specific invitation to investors and tell them what the money will be used for.
Michelle Baron, a Ph.D. student studying Instructional Psychology and Technology, came to the workshop to learn pitching skills to aid her in furthering her consulting firm.
'I want to be able to build my business and to talk to people about my company,' Baron said. 'This is used not just with investors, but with clients as well.'