I love you.

Show me.

What do you mean?

Don’t tell me, show me.

Love is a verb, not a noun.

Showing is more powerful than just saying it.

The same goes with your pitch.

Your pitch is more powerful when you demonstrate your product.

Demonstrating how your product works, having your physical product when pitching is more powerful than just telling us about it.

So where is the hierarchy:

• If you don’t have a product, you better be great in using your words to draw a picture about your product;
• But a picture is more than a thousand words. If you have pictures or slides showing your product, how it looks like, that’s better than just explaining it in words;
• A demonstration is more than a thousand pictures. If you can demo it, you are in a much better position than just showing pictures

Tips on demonstrating:

• Don’t make a long demo, a reasonable demonstration should ideally be less than 1 minute
• It must work. Should your demo bomb-out, your pitch bombs-out.
• If you are demonstrating something online, make sure that your demo works offline, don’t take the risk of relying on wifi at the venue. Run your demo offline.
• Test your demo over and over at the venue to ensure that it works, the sound is clear [if you need sound], and it works on the laptop provided for you.
• Ask the organiser of the pitch if you should bring your laptop or they will provide a laptop for you to use to demo
• Ideally use your laptop to connect to the projector, creating a demo on your laptop and moving it to another laptop is risky, the demo may not play on another laptop.
• If you have a product as a demo, ensure that your product is clean, not greasy or oily outside. Make sure that it smells good, and is fresh.

If your product is too big to carry to the pitch, record it in action onsite and then play it as part of your pitch, again the video clip should not be more than 1 minute.

A pitch using a demonstration is stronger than a pitch using just words, unless if you are a good storyteller.