How do you give a successful VC pitch?  A recent study suggests what determines success, and indeed what allows subjects watching VC pitches to guess accurately which ones are the winners and which ones are not.  What’s surprising is that even people who knew nothing about the pitch, the company, or indeed venture capital, can predict the winners as readily as the venture capitalists themselves could choose where to put their money.  In other words, we really do have a widespread understanding of what makes for good public speaking of this kind, and widespread agreement on who’s getting it right and who’s not.

What’s even more surprising is that the most accurate predictions didn’t involve listening to the pitch at all.  Test subjects who were invited to watch silent videos of the pitches could predict the outcome most accurately.  What do you get from watching silent videos of a talk?  The extent to which the speakers project confidence and passion.  It really is all about the body language.

How can the content not matter in this instance?  Every communication is two conversations, the content and the body language.  When the two are aligned, and the content is beautifully supported by the body language, then the message the speaker intends gets through to the listener.  When the two are not aligned, the body language always trumps the content.  To put it very simply, if we see someone walk on stage and say, “I’m really happy to be here,” but he/she looks tired, or timid, or nervous, then we are inclined to think they are not really happy to be there.  We decode the ‘real’ intent of the speaker from his or her body language.  We do that instantly and powerfully by reading the body language of the speaker with our unconscious minds.  We don’t always get it right, but much of the time we do.

We humans spend our lives trying to figure out each other’s intent, because we care about that more than anything else.  So we get a lot of practice, watching specific individuals, and humanity in general.  Of course, sometimes the exact words matter, but more often we care about the intent behind the words.  When my co-workers spoke those words of praise or criticism, did they roll their eyes, or did they smile warmly?

It turns out that what wins VC pitches is confident and passionate body language.  Of course, the pitch has to be good enough, and of course the slides that those startup people spend enormous amounts of time developing matter.  But not as much as confident and passionate body language.

The silent, unconscious script must go something like this.  All of these ideas are pretty good.  All of these financial projections point up and to the right. That speaker seems really passionate and confident about her company. That’s the one I’m going to bet on, because she’s going to hang in there when things get tough.  She’s going to go the distance. 

Coaches like me have been working with speakers, whether they are pitching for their companies, or talking about something else, and telling them that they have to put passion into what they do, for many years.  Probably ever since there have been speakers and coaches to help them. It’s all about the stage presence.  The good news is that, if you’re willing to do the work, stage presence is something that almost everyone can learn.  And if the stakes are as high as they are when the future of your company is at stake (or your job, or your project), aren’t you willing to do the work?