The impact of entrepreneurs' oral ‘pitch’ presentation skills on business angels' initial screening investment decisions

Abstract This study adds new insights to the growing body of research showing that entrepreneurs' communication skills and personal attributes influence investor decision making. Twenty-four business angels attending a UK investor forum completed questionnaires evaluating 32 ‘presentational’ and ‘non-presentational’ aspects of three entrepreneurs' oral pitch presentations. The business angels' level of investor interest was significantly related to their evaluations of the quality and content of the entrepreneurs' presentations: the higher an entrepreneur's overall presentation score, the greater the likelihood that the business angels would be interested in pursuing that investment opportunity. Presentational factors (relating to the entrepreneurs' style of delivery, etc.) tended to have the highest influence on the overall score an entrepreneur received as well as on business angels' level of investment interest. However, the business angels appeared to be unaware of (or were reluctant to acknowledge) the influence presentational factors had on their investment-related decisions: the stated reasons for their post-presentation intentions were focused firmly on substance-oriented non-presentational criteria (company, market, product, funding/finance issues, etc.). More generally, comments about the entrepreneurs' presentations centred on presentational issues relating to clarity/understandability and structure, the level of information provided, the entrepreneurs' personal characteristics, and their ability to sell themselves and their investment opportunity. Keywords: entrepreneurshipbusiness angelsinvestor decision makingoral presentationscommunication skills Notes 1. The decision to use a seven-point word scale (as opposed to, say, a word scale of three, five, 10 or even 21 points) was made on the grounds that it provided the best possible compromise between giving the respondents an explicit indication of what the various numbers on the scale represented without making the rating scale as a whole difficult to read or understand. 2. While recognizing that ‘two wrongs do not make a right’, this issue also raises the important question that if such a distinction is difficult or impossible to make then why has the vast majority of prior investor decision-making research largely ignored or at least not explicitly addressed the communicative style dimension of this dichotomy? 3. Because this test requires both variables to be ranked (Siegel and Castellan Citation1988), the overall mean factor score for each presentation from each business angel was correlated with each business angel's stated post-presentation intention for the three presentations they evaluated. ‘Interested’ was ranked as being the most favoured response, ‘Not interested’ the least favoured. 4. To preserve the anonymity of the study participants, in the excerpts from the business angels' comments all features identifying the entrepreneurs, their company (and any other company mentioned), the specific nature of their product(s) and their investment opportunity have been changed or omitted. 5. All three of the exclusively presentational reasons provided were produced in tandem with a ‘Not interested’ post-presentation decision. 6. But whether this agreement was an accurate determination of the relative quality and content of the entrepreneurs' presentations is, however, another issue altogether.