Checklist

To separate rehearsing from preparing. Most pitch practice is spent on delivery, which is the part that improves least, while the structural problems stay in the deck and get discovered by the audience.

Use it the day before, not the morning of, because everything it turns up takes an evening to fix. It is as useful for an internal budget request as for an investor meeting. The audience is different, the failure modes are not.

Start with the ask, written as one sentence with a number in it. If you cannot write it, the pitch has no shape yet, and no amount of narrative will give it one.

Then work backwards: what must the room believe for that ask to be reasonable, and what evidence do you have for each belief. Mark every claim as demonstrated, sourced, or asserted. Asserted is allowed, but you should know which ones they are before somebody else finds out. Last, write the three questions you least want to be asked, and answer them out loud.

The deck grows to cover every objection and the story disappears underneath it. A pitch is not a defence, it is an argument, and an argument that anticipates everything persuades nobody.

The second failure is a demo carrying the load the argument should carry. A good demo makes people want it to be true; it does not make it true. The third is finding out in the room that the person you are pitching cannot approve the ask. Check that first, because it changes what the whole meeting is for.