What are the most common mistakes when pitching your ideas?

Common mistakes, we can make while pitching: -> Don't give time to research the respective audience -> Don't include any data, story, or statistics in the pitch -> Creating a long pitch A pitch should be catchy and can grab attention in the first 5 seconds! Clarity with examples and numbers would be best. -> Don't

A tell-tale sign that you don't know who you're talking to is when you start talking to everyone: "whether you're a business owner, a marketer, a blogger, or if you're a boutique owner or a freelance writer..." you've just wasted all that real estate in your pitch and proved that you don't know WHO you're talking to. People tend to do this when they want to talk to a lot of people all at once, but really, no one reads this. At first glance, they can tell that the pitch is not for them. You have about 1-2 seconds to prove that your idea is going to work for the person you're pitching to, and you don't want to waste it by listing off all the other people who might be interested in your idea. Just keep your person in mind and talk to them.

So true! People live busy lives and barely have time to read long complex stuff especially sales pitches! Make that pitch clear, specific, short, and creative! That's it! Enough of the jargons, you really don't need those. Go straight to the point. And ensure you know who you are writing to. You should do your research to know what the client possibly want. Don't complicate matters. Life's already hard. A short, specific, result-focused pitch should help rather than the reverse.

So many people try to be clever, but they end up with confusing instead. Big words, jargon, and technical details don't make you look smart and worse, they don't help sell your idea. People want to know that your pitch is going to solve one of their problems, make their life better, or make their business better and more profitable. So instead of listing off all the technical features, focus on what your audience wants and how your pitch can deliver that.

In general, you need to be open to being critiqued. Criticism opens up the pathway for you to see other viewpoints that you may have missed, which can in turn provide more nuances to your pitch.

This is the biggest pitfall I find with clients in their work (and in my own): Not being able to play devil's advocate and recognizing why something wouldn't work. We should learn to look for the holes in our own argument while looking for other possible paths to take so we can patch the holes and explain why our idea is the best path. Or realize in the course of looking for these arguments against what we want that it, in fact, is not the right course. There's nothing wrong with rethinking.

I really dislike it when people say something along the lines of "I am so excited to share with you..." Of course you're excited, it's your idea. But if you have to tell me you're excited, then there's something wrong. Once again, it's extra words that I'm not going to read and that pushes the real pitch down in importance. Instead, your excitement should be coming through as you make your pitch. Think about when someone else is talking to you and they're excited: how do you know they're excited when they don't say the words? Usually because they start talking with their hands, their eyes are widened, and they start geeking out or talking in tangents, sometimes making it hard to get a word in edge-wise.