Entrepreneurs need to be pitch perfect

Abstract

Purpose Examines the skills needed to present a good two-minute pitch for a product or service which has been created by the “pitcher”. Design/methodology/approach Aims to analyze successful entrepreneurial pitches to provide practical pitch-related advice to entrepreneurs and to business school instructors – the people developing materials to teach the necessary skills. Findings Uses a ten-stage discourse framework to reveal the linguistic and rhetorical skills required to make good pitches. Although good pitchers will probably have an instinctive ability to use the appropriate linguistic, grammatical and syntactic features, the analysis here offers an intellectual understanding of a process which can never be entirely mastered instinctively. Originality/value The entrepreneurial pitch has, in all likelihood, never been deconstructed in this way, using rhetorical and linguistic discourse analysis.