The COVID-19 pandemic forced all interactions between investors and fundraising founders into virtual settings. And the return to a “new normal” will certainly leave a place for them into the foreseeable future. This article includes several best practices for optimizing you virtual investor meetings for the highest odds of success.
Audio & Video Quality
If your audio or video stream get glitchy, it will greatly impact the overall quality of the interaction. If you subscribe for the most basic data package with your Internet provider, upgrade it. You can probably double your bandwidth for an extra $20/mo. If you have a crappy webcam or headset, replace it. Evaluate the lighting in your chosen default setting and decide if you need to add some accent lighting.
Location
If you have a home office, great. If not, your couch or outdoor porch are not good settings. Neither is a setting with a window behind you and that causes you to look like a silhouette.
Situate yourself with the camera as level with your face as possible (ie – not on your lap looking up at your face) and think about what’s behind you. A blank wall or a wall with a piece of artwork is great. A collage of party photos from your college days isn’t. Finally, either try to pick a location where background noise is minimized or use a headset with a microphone that only picks up your speaking voice and not surrounding noises.
Dress Attire
Dress like you would if you were meeting the other party at their office. And go through your normal morning grooming routine, as if you were going to meet them in their office. Look like you’re fresh and sharp on a Tuesday morning much more than Saturday morning after a hard night of partying.
Number of Founders
If more than one founder really needs to attend the meeting, realize that it adds complexity that should be considered. The lack of body language clues and the delayed audio stream from the videoconference dramatically increase the odds that the founders will trip over each other. Make sure to follow my “one driver” advice from above. Additionally, for any interactive part of the meeting in which you’re answering questions, you have two approaches to consider. Pick one and make sure your co-founder knows.
Your first option is to have one person serve as the router of questions. In other words, if you’re the router, your co-founder doesn’t answer a question unless you flip it to her. The other option is to decide ahead of time who should answer questions based on the topic area. Maybe you handle all questions related to business and your co-founder handles the ones related to product and technology. Just beware that there could be hybrid topics that cause a collision in response. As you can probably tell, I tend to prefer the router approach for videoconferences.
Finally, whoever isn’t talking needs to remain focused on the meeting (looking into the screen), not texting on their phone, working on emails, or writing code. You wouldn’t do those things if you were sitting at a table with the investor.
Presenting and Demonstrating
In the event that you’ll have a chance to present some of your pitch deck or do a short product demo, prepare and practice ahead of time with a co-founder. Know exactly where the share buttons and related collaboration functions are for the selected videoconferencing service. If you fumble basic presentation and collaboration tasks, it will have a negative effect on the overall quality of the interaction while offering the extra punishment of wasting time.
At all costs, DO NOT read from a script during your presentation. It is OK to have some cheat notes to help remember important factoids and things like that. But reading from a script will be obvious, take your visual focus away from the camera, and generally not be natural or exciting.
Noticeable Distractions
There’s not much you can do about your barking dog or a doorbell ring due to an Amazon delivery. But two easily avoidable distractions are listed below:
- Silence your cell phone – Silent is better than vibrate, because a vibrating phone on your desk could still mentally distract you and the buzzing noise might get picked up by your microphone
- Disable instant messaging pop up notifications on your computer – When you’re doing a screen share of your pitch deck, visible pop-up notifications are hugely distracting – especially so if they’re accompanied with an audible chime.
Following the advice in this article won’t guarantee you get funded via your virtual investor meetings, but since fundraising is an “at bats” process, you must do everything possible to optimize each and every investor interaction. And since most intro meetings with investors are only 30 minutes long, you will want to read my related article titled “Mastering the 30-Minute Meeting“.
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