Majicman Notes

I think if you’re selling anything, you want to have an ‘offense deck’ and a ‘defense deck.’ 

The ‘offense deck’ says, ‘Here are the three or four reasons why you have to buy this company. This is why you have to own it.’ And you can be a little aspirational — not untruthful, but aspirational — in selling the dream and the vision. 

The ‘defense deck’ is what’s probably more interesting, which is, ‘What are all the reasons they’re not going to want to invest or not going to want to buy?’ So when we fundraise, we have a defense of, ‘Here are all the objections.’ By the way, if you sat down for 10 minutes and just listed out all the objections, you’re almost never going to have someone come up with one you didn’t come up with. 

The objections aren’t that complicated. They’re going to be things you generally already know. And then, here’s the counterintuitive part: you actually want to bring all of the defense into the meeting. So for example, if someone says, ‘You have no track record,’ what I what to say is, ‘You’re probably thinking, I have no track record.’ And then they’re like, ‘Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m thinking.’ So you’re gaining credibility, and then you have the opportunity to move them from there. 

A lot of people get out of that meeting, and they say, ‘Oh, thank God, my lack of track record didn’t come up at the meeting.’ But then it comes up behind closed doors, and you never actually have an ability to dissuade someone of that objection. 

So the counterintuitive part is to make the ‘defense deck’ and talk about it in the meeting. If they don’t invest, fine, but you got to go down swinging and giving your best pitch on those on those objections.

Graham Weaver

https://www.gsb.stanford.edu/faculty-research/faculty/graham-weaver