The Pitch and the Investor: How Delivery Shapes Business Angels’ Decisions, Whether They Admit It or Not

By Noam Shemla · The Studies

TL;DR Colin Clark asked business angels at a UK investor forum to rate three entrepreneurs’ live pitches on 32 aspects, from the business itself to how it was presented. The better an entrepreneur’s overall presentation score, the more interested the angels were in investing, and the aspects about delivery weighed most. Yet when the angels explained their decisions, they talked almost entirely about the business.

• Paper: Clark, C. (2008). The impact of entrepreneurs’ oral “pitch” presentation skills on business angels’ initial screening investment decisions. Venture Capital, 10(3), 257–279.
• Participants: 24 business angels attending a UK investor forum.
• Design: After three entrepreneurs pitched, each angel completed a questionnaire rating 32 aspects of each pitch and stating whether they were interested in pursuing the investment, and why.
• Measures: “Presentational” aspects (delivery and style) and “non-presentational” ones (the substance of the business), an overall presentation score, and investment interest.
• Access: Subscription-only. This summary rests on the published abstract; the paper’s own tables were not available to us, so no figure below is drawn from them.

A start-up’s first real test with an investor is usually a short spoken pitch. Colin Clark studied that moment as it happens: live pitches, real angel investors, and a questionnaire filled in straight afterwards.1

Business angels are private individuals who invest their own money in young companies, and at a forum like this one they are doing what the paper calls initial screening: deciding, after a pitch, whether a company is worth a closer look. Clark asked what drives that decision, and whether the investors themselves know.

What the angels rated

Each angel rated the three pitches on 32 aspects, which Clark sorted into two kinds. Presentational aspects concern the delivery and style of the pitch. Non-presentational aspects concern the substance: the company, its market and product, its finances and funding needs. Alongside those ratings, each angel gave an overall presentation score, said whether they wanted to pursue the investment, and gave their reasons.

Delivery mattered, and investors did not say so

The first finding is the one the title promises. The higher an entrepreneur’s overall presentation score, the likelier the angels were to want to pursue the investment. And among everything the angels rated, the presentational aspects, the ones about delivery and style, had the strongest influence, both on the overall score and on the level of investment interest.

The second finding is the one that makes the paper memorable. When the angels wrote down why they did or did not want to pursue an opportunity, they cited substance: the company, the market, the product, funding and finance. Delivery hardly appeared. In Clark’s words, they seemed unaware of, or reluctant to admit, how much the presentation had influenced them.

Two accounts of the same decisions

The comments angels made about the pitches point at what “presentation” meant to them in practice. They centred on whether the pitch could be followed, its clarity and structure, and on whether it gave the right amount of information; and on the entrepreneurs themselves: their personal characteristics and how well they sold themselves and the opportunity.

Has it held up?

The idea that investors respond to how a pitch is delivered, beyond what it says, has since been tested in experiments that can separate the two, which a field survey like Clark’s cannot.

The most striking holds the words constant and changes only the voice. Brooks and colleagues showed 521 people two real pitch videos that showed the product but never the founder, each narrated in a dubbed voice. Everyone heard one pitch in a man’s voice and one in a woman’s, assigned at random, and chose one to back, with their pay tied to how experts rated the venture they picked.2

That study is about bias, not skill: it shows that the delivery channel can outweigh the substance, including in ways nobody should endorse. The same paper found, at real pitch competitions judged by angel investors, that men were 60% more likely than women to win funding.

A randomised field experiment asked the question the other way round: can entrepreneurs be taught to pitch better, and does it help? At four university pitch competitions, Clingingsmith and Shane assigned entrepreneurs at random to pitch training or to a minimal briefing, then to panels of accredited investors. Training made pitches more complete, but it did not simply raise everyone’s score: it helped the stronger ideas more than the weaker ones, particularly in front of experienced investors.3 A clearer pitch, in other words, let investors see the idea more clearly, for better and for worse.

What this study cannot tell you

• It is small. Twenty-four angels, three pitches, one forum. Differences between three entrepreneurs could reflect anything that distinguished those three people or businesses.
• It is correlational. The same angels rated both the delivery and their own interest, so an entrepreneur who impressed them overall may have been rated well on everything.
• The presenters were not matched. Better presenters may also have had better businesses; only an experiment that holds the business constant can separate the two, which is what the later studies did.
• We could not read the full paper. Every statement here about Clark’s findings comes from its published abstract, so the sizes of the effects are not reported.

What a speaker can take from it

Investors will tell you they judge the business, and they believe it. This study suggests that how you present is part of how the business is judged, and that it happens without anyone saying so. That is a reason to rehearse a pitch as seriously as you build the model behind it.

What the angels praised and criticised was mostly clarity: a pitch that can be followed, with a structure, and with neither too little information nor too much. The pitch-training experiment adds the honest half of the lesson. Good delivery does not disguise a weak idea for long; it lets a strong one be seen. Work on the pitch so that the idea is heard as it deserves, not so that it is heard as better than it is.

This article summarises a subscription-only paper from its published abstract; we did not have access to its tables. The later findings come from the full text of Brooks et al. (2014) and from the published abstract and a working version of Clingingsmith and Shane’s experiment. The voice-versus-venture comparison and its z-scores are ours, from the counts Brooks et al. report.

Measured

• Angels’ ratings of 32 presentational and non-presentational aspects of three pitches
• Their overall presentation scores, investment interest, and stated reasons

Inferred, not measured

• That delivery influenced interest: a correlation within one small group of investors, not an experiment
• That investors do not recognise this influence: inferred from the gap between their ratings and their stated reasons

References

1. Clark, C. (2008). The impact of entrepreneurs’ oral “pitch” presentation skills on business angels’ initial screening investment decisions. Venture Capital, 10(3), 257–279. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691060802151945
2. Brooks, A. W., Huang, L., Kearney, S. W., & Murray, F. E. (2014). Investors prefer entrepreneurial ventures pitched by attractive men. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 111(12), 4427–4431. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1321202111
3. Clingingsmith, D., & Shane, S. (2018). Training aspiring entrepreneurs to pitch experienced investors: evidence from a field experiment in the United States. Management Science, 64(11), 5164–5179. https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2017.2882