Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
Are You Prepared for Q&A? (You Will Be After This)
52 Plays4 months ago
The real make-or-break moment for any founder who’s pitching investors or customers isn’t the actual pitch. Yeah, you heard that right. The less-discussed but extremely important skill you really need: answering questions so the people on the other side feel certain in your abilities to deliver results. When you have a conversation that excites your audience – rather than a one-direction stream of information that bores them – you’re far more likely to get the yes.
Every situation has a clock ticking, and everybody has a limited attention span. With those facts in mind, your host and communications expert Kirin Kalia shares her top three criteria for any answer in episode 3 of Message Worth Millions:
- QUICK - 30 seconds or less, no matter the topic.
- CLEAR & DIRECT - no jargon or buzzwords, no long sentences.
- CONFIDENT - word choice, tone of voice and body language.
So just how do you prepare? Kirin’s process starts with researching what matters to the people you’re meeting with (or who’s judging you, if it’s a competition), then writing down all the questions you’ve gotten before or can expect. Next, record and time your answers, ideally with a team member to keep you honest. Although it’s not fun, review your answers and determine how you can make them quicker, clearer and more confident. Practice again :)
Kirin also takes you through five key questions from investor Nicole DeTomasso and answers two of them as if she were a founder of Dex, a language-learning toy company that recently raised $4.8M. Nicole's questions:
1. What’s the unique pain point?
2. How are you solving it?
3. What is your earned secret in solving this problem? Why you?
4. What’s your go-to-market strategy? Near-term and at scale?
5. Why is now the time to build this solution?
And for you female founders, watch this TED talk from founder turned business school professor Dana Kanze so you know the difference between a prevention (defense) and a promotion (offense) question and how to handle the prevention ones that (unfortunately) you’re more likely to get from investors.
Message Worth Millions is a weekly podcast for startup founders like you who want to raise money and grow their revenue faster. You need a message that moves your audience – usually investors and customers – to say YES…and all those yeses add up :)
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: Crafting Messages for Impact
00:00:00
Kirin Kalia
Welcome to episode three of Message Worth Millions. This is a weekly podcast for startup founders like you who want to raise money and grow their revenue faster. You need a message that moves your audience, usually investors and customers, to say yes, and all those yeses add up.
00:00:18
Kirin Kalia
So I'm your host, Kieran Kalia, founder of a company called Grow Through Story, and every episode is for you in this AI world because I believe human connection beats perfection every single time.
The Importance of Q&A Preparation
00:00:33
Kirin Kalia
So today we are talking about being prepared for Q&A, and I bet you, if you follow my advice, listen to this episode more than once, you will be after this.
00:00:45
Kirin Kalia
So before we dig in, I would love to give you a little bit more background about me and why I do what I do. This is from a founder who encouraged me to share more about myself. So this time I'm going to talk about my SAT prep that I had really pressure from my dad to start at age eight.
00:01:05
Kirin Kalia
I am not even joking. My dad came to the United States from India in the 1960s for grad school, and he prepared for everything, okay? And he wanted me to succeed all of You out there with immigrant parents, you know what I'm talking about.
00:01:19
Kirin Kalia
And so from that, I learned that there's no way I'm going to wing it if I want to do well on anything. That includes pitches. That includes Q&A, my friends.
00:01:30
Kirin Kalia
So I want you to show up prepared for everything in your life, just the way like I was starting to prepare for the SATs at age eight. So I pose this today as a question. Are you prepared for Q&A?
00:01:44
Kirin Kalia
because it's really, frankly, a fast way to get you to the truth of your situation. Now, it's totally fine to answer no, but by the end of this episode, like I said, i believe you will be on your way to a yes.
00:01:57
Kirin Kalia
And if you actually did say yes, that you are prepared, I'm frankly going to challenge you and see if it holds up under some scrutiny, because I bet you some stuff that I share today is going to help you level up your preparation.
00:02:08
Kirin Kalia
So, Just for the record, I am talking about Q&A with investors or customers, but there'll be a little bit more emphasis on the customer, or excuse me, the investor side of things today. So let's just start with the very basics, why Q&A actually matters.
00:02:23
Kirin Kalia
And it's for a very simple reason. it's going to be incredibly important to getting somebody to say yes or no to the next step with you. Because anyone you want to persuade is almost certainly going to ask you questions about what it is that you do and the value that you provide.
00:02:40
Kirin Kalia
So if you can't give them encouraging answers or ones that give them that certainty, I'm going to tell you it's going to be really, really hard for you to salvage an opportunity and get that yes that you're looking for.
00:02:53
Kirin Kalia
so Just for the record, also ah in sales customers, you probably want to ask them some questions yourself first so you get information to tailor your pitch. So let me just put that aside there, back to you being able to answer their questions.
Why Do Customers and Investors Ask Questions?
00:03:09
Kirin Kalia
So customers usually ask you questions for a couple of reasons. They might want to see if you check their boxes, right? They've got a list of features or things that they need. That could be about the product. It could be how fast you can get up and running. It might be the results that you deliver.
00:03:24
Kirin Kalia
They might also want to find out if something that they need is on your roadmap. A lot of you are early stage. There might be something that they need to know is coming in order to say yes now. And frankly, they're going to be asking questions to find out how you're different from competitors.
00:03:37
Kirin Kalia
And I'm sure everybody has this issue if they are in a space that's actually interesting and growing. And if you are not getting those questions yet, I bet you at some point you will be.
00:03:50
Kirin Kalia
Now, why do investors ask questions? couple of reasons. They want to understand how you think about things, about the present, about the future. They also may be testing your knowledge and your reactions to things. So are you getting defensive or are you going to cave in straight away to their way of seeing things?
00:04:06
Kirin Kalia
ah They might also want to poke holes in your strategy or your model. ah Let's see if you really do know your stuff or if you really have thought about this angle. And then this is not that often, but sometimes depending on the investor, you might get somebody who wants to show you they know something you don't.
00:04:22
Kirin Kalia
And that might be coming more from an ego thing. Not great. It happens. I'm really sorry if it happens to you, but it's just something to be aware of. So those are some of the reasons why people are going to ask you questions.
00:04:34
Kirin Kalia
And ultimately, let's just be really clear about this.
Building Trust and Avoiding Pitfalls
00:04:38
Kirin Kalia
It's all about determining whether they like you and trust you. Nobody wants to do business really with people that they don't like and definitely not with people that they can't trust.
00:04:50
Kirin Kalia
So your ability to answer a question really matters for both those things, liking and trusting you. Now, some ways... to derail things with your Q&A. You could frankly BS them.
00:05:02
Kirin Kalia
And I'm going to be honest with you, that's going to come back to bite you at some point, even if it doesn't in the moment. ah You might sound evasive or unsure in the way that you're answering something. And look, we've all heard plenty of politicians. They do this pretty routinely.
00:05:17
Kirin Kalia
It's not in your interest to be evasive or unsure or dodge the question, shall we say. like That's my next one, in fact, is don't dodge the question. Actually answer the question.
00:05:27
Kirin Kalia
that you've been asked. And then the last thing is going into way too much detail. And this is very easy to do because I know you love what you built, you're super passionate, but not everyone needs that level of detail, especially in the beginning.
00:05:41
Kirin Kalia
So I have narrowed this down. There's lots of things I want to talk about around Q&A, but I've narrowed it down to three key criteria for answering any question.
Criteria for Effective Q&A Responses
00:05:51
Kirin Kalia
And this is because people have limited attention spans and there's usually some kind of clock ticking if you're in a competition situation for sure.
00:05:59
Kirin Kalia
Even if you're in front of someone, you have a limited amount of time before they want to talk to somebody else. You're on a call. You know that the call is going to be up in probably 20 to 30 minutes. So that's why number one is be quick.
00:06:12
Kirin Kalia
And quick means 30 seconds or less, no matter the topic. I know you're gonna think that's hard, but believe me, you can figure out how to answer most questions in 30 seconds or less, and then stop so that the person can ask you a follow-up.
00:06:28
Kirin Kalia
The second thing is to be clear and direct. And by that, I mean no jargon or buzzwords and no long, boring sentences, okay?
00:06:38
Kirin Kalia
Clear and direct. The third thing is to be confident. And I mean that in three ways, your word choice, your tone of voice, and if you are in front of somebody or on a video call, your body language.
00:06:52
Kirin Kalia
And if you think about it, these three three these three things, being quick, being clear, direct, being confident, they all work together to make for a much stronger answer to any question.
00:07:07
Kirin Kalia
Now, if you have listened to episode two, and if you haven't, I suggest you go back and check it out. We talk about giving really great examples as part of your storytelling in the way that you're gonna make sure that you're being memorable and you're really getting your message across. So if you include an example with an answer, it's even stronger, even easier for somebody to understand, remember and retell. One of my key criteria for any kind of founder who's in front of anyone is being memorable for the right reasons.
00:07:35
Kirin Kalia
So go back and listen to episode two if you wanna learn more about examples. Now, how do you actually prepare for Q and A?
Preparation Steps for Q&A
00:07:43
Kirin Kalia
now that you know what some of the key things are that you need to be doing.
00:07:46
Kirin Kalia
The first thing, always, always, always, and it's not just because I'm a journalist by background, but that's a big part of it. Remember, it's about being prepared. You want to research the person or people that you're actually meeting with.
00:07:59
Kirin Kalia
This is important because you don't want to say things that sound like you don't know what they're interested in or that are relevant to them or maybe other things that they've done or investments that they've made. So please,
00:08:13
Kirin Kalia
make sure you research the person or the firm. This is also true if you're in a pitch competition situation. You should always know who your judges are. That's usually information that's available ahead of time.
00:08:24
Kirin Kalia
You don't want to necessarily stalk them in a way that they would find creepy, but you should know what kind of things that they are likely to be interested in based on their background and questions that they might ask. So I've done this many times. If somebody comes from a marketing background, they're probably going ask you marketing questions.
00:08:40
Kirin Kalia
If it's somebody from a product background, they'll probably ask you product questions. Second is to write down or capture all the questions you've ever gotten from this particular type of audience. So this could be on the customer side, this could be on the investor side.
00:08:54
Kirin Kalia
And these are questions that you might get frequently, there might be the questions that are outliers, like only sort of happen in certain situations or whatever. Make sure you've got everything so you can number three, start to practice with somebody who times you and records you.
00:09:10
Kirin Kalia
If you're by yourself, you can do the recording, of course, but I do want you to have that timer there so you get really honest with yourself on the 30 seconds. Then the next step is to go back and listen to those answers and to get better at them. So just review and iterate.
00:09:26
Kirin Kalia
So those four things are how you prepare. You research, you write and capture the questions you've gotten in the past, then you practice your answers with someone who times you or at the very least record and listen to it yourself so that you can iterate and get better. That's the last step, review and iterate.
Bias in Questions for Female Founders
00:09:43
Kirin Kalia
Now, I've got a note here for my female founders. And look, I have seen this happen and it's not unusual for you to get what are known as preventative questions from investors. Now, this might also be happening with customers, but the research is there from a woman named Dana Kanz, who did a TED Talk several years ago.
00:10:05
Kirin Kalia
She actually went through all these different ah recordings from TechCrunch Disrupt, specifically the startup battlefield. And her research found that 67% of the questions posed to male entrepreneurs were what were called promotion oriented, meaning they were asking about opportunities essentially.
00:10:23
Kirin Kalia
And 66% of those posed to female entrepreneurs were prevention oriented, which is things like, how are you going to make sure something doesn't go wrong in the business? And that's really unfortunate, but I want you to be aware of it because it's also going to be part of the way that you're going to show up in your Q&A, knowing that you can take one of those questions that come from a prevention place and you can turn it into a promotion type of answer.
00:10:46
Kirin Kalia
So like I said at the beginning, we're going to talk a little bit more about investor questions.
Key Investor Interests and Financial Knowledge
00:10:51
Kirin Kalia
So if you're talking to an investor, some of the things I hear over and over again, they're definitely going to be interested in how you make money, right? Because this is essentially what they need to be able to know you can do so that they can make money ah from investing in your company.
00:11:05
Kirin Kalia
So that's going to be business model, unit economics, anything that's related to the go-to-market, of course, is feeding into this as well. how are you going acquire those customers? How expensive is that going to be?
00:11:18
Kirin Kalia
On the competition side, of course, because look, you're probably not the only one in this space. How are you competing? How do you measure against the competition? And things that are also important to investors are around your team, what kind of background you all have, what does that make you uniquely qualified, your IP and your moat, also important to lots of investors. So just keep those things in mind. You can write your questions down by category.
00:11:43
Kirin Kalia
You can certainly do them by the ones that are most important for you to answer well, or the ones that you know you are weak on that you need to get stronger at. And let me tell you, Please, please, please know your numbers.
00:11:57
Kirin Kalia
There's always going to be an investor who's going to want to ask you questions that require you to know the numbers and the math. So if your customer acquisition cost is X, what does that mean at scale?
00:12:09
Kirin Kalia
What does it mean if you can reduce that customer acquisition cost by a different kind of distribution deal, for example? You should be able to answer those questions. Somebody's probably also going to want to know if they're customer,
00:12:19
Kirin Kalia
what kind of returns they can expect on their investment. That is absolutely something you should be able to answer, especially once you've got enough data to be able to do that. Maybe it's early and you don't have it yet. You can be honest about that and say that that's why you want to work with them.
00:12:33
Kirin Kalia
For example, to start figuring that out and you're going to do everything you can to make sure they get that return on investment. So I wanted to make sure this is also real world stuff. And this is a little while back, but there's an investor who's active on X slash Twitter. Her name is Nicole DeTomaso.
00:12:49
Kirin Kalia
And she has put out several questions that she asks on a regular basis and why she asks them. And I'm going to put these in the show notes. But the five questions are, what's the unique pain point?
00:13:00
Kirin Kalia
How are you solving it? Number three, what is your earned secret in solving this problem and why you? Number four, what's your go-to-market strategy, near-term and at scale?
00:13:11
Kirin Kalia
And number five, why is now the time to build the solution? So these are questions that probably don't surprise you, but it's good to just have a really concise list to start working from, get you going on your own list.
00:13:25
Kirin Kalia
So remember, all of those questions, answer them in 30 seconds or less, that's quick. Number two, be clear and direct. Number three, be confident in your word choice. and your tone of voice, and your body language. And then bonus is to give an example, especially around some of the things where example works really, really well.
Real-world Q&A Example with DEX
00:13:45
Kirin Kalia
So I'm going to do this for you now with an article that ran in TechCrunch recently that I thought was kind of fun and interesting.
00:13:51
Kirin Kalia
um The particular company I found is called Dex. It's a language learning device for children about ages three to eight. They just raised $4.8 million.
00:14:03
Kirin Kalia
And interestingly, one of those investors is Ben Silberman, founder, former CEO now of Pinterest, and he's also a dad. So go figure, have a feeling this was very personal for him.
00:14:13
Kirin Kalia
And as the daughter of a ah mom who was both a language teacher and somebody who loves languages, this one was of personal interest to me as well. So let's go back to Nicole's questions and two that are really easy to answer in this may in this manner based on the criteria we have.
00:14:33
Kirin Kalia
Quick, clear, direct, confident, and with an example. So number one, what's the unique pain point? I can answer that from the article. And number two, how are you solving it? Some of those others would require me making some educated guesses, so we're going to leave those aside for now.
00:14:48
Kirin Kalia
But number one, if I'm in front of an investor and I'm the founder of Dex and somebody asks me what's my unique pain point, here's what I would say. Well, we are professionals ourselves who are also from tech, and we know that kids want to engage with the real world, but we also know it's really too easy to hand them a screen and for them to spend time on those screens, and we don't want them to do that.
00:15:09
Kirin Kalia
I also know that lots of parents want to their children to learn languages. In fact, I come from a background where I want the child my child to speak my language that I grew up speaking. And it's also going to help them in this global world.
00:15:21
Kirin Kalia
So that's why we made a device that's just for kids that checks all these boxes and actually delivers language learning results. Now, you can go back in time. I'm pretty sure that was 30 seconds or less.
00:15:34
Kirin Kalia
But it's plain English, right? There's nothing, like, weird or jargony about it. It was short. And it was confident. And I want to break that confident one down a little bit more for you. And when I say word choice, i mean words that are strong. So the more you think about that, those are the kinds of verbs that you choose. That's really important.
00:15:57
Kirin Kalia
ah You can be thinking about the way that you put your emphasis on some of those words. And then there's the way that you end a sentence. I have heard so many founders who go up at the end of a sentence I'm talking about my product, and this is the problem that it solves.
00:16:15
Kirin Kalia
That doesn't sound confident. This is how we solve the problem. This is how we provide value. There's a period at the end of the sentence. That sounds confident. So just keep that in mind.
00:16:26
Kirin Kalia
You want to make sure you're putting periods at the end of your sentence. For the love of all things, please, please, please put periods at the end of your sentence. OK. Now the second question from Nicole's list that I'm going to answer about DEX is, how are you solving it?
00:16:40
Kirin Kalia
Great. The DEX camera turns what kids see into what they speak. It looks like a magnifying glass with a camera lens on one side and a touch screen on the other. When they use the device to take a picture of an object, the AI is going to end identify that object and translate it into a word in their language. So for example, your five-year-old sees a seed in her apple slice. She points her DEX at it and it says to her, wow, an apple seed, una semilla de manzana, because she's learning Spanish.
00:17:07
Kirin Kalia
And from there, it's going to invite her explore and learn more Meanwhile, you as a parent have your own app, so you can go track her progress, words she's learned, number of days she's used, decks, et cetera.
00:17:19
Kirin Kalia
Great. Again, that was plain English. I spoke in a very clear and direct way. It was quick, and it gave an example on top of being confident. I put periods at the ends of my sentences.
00:17:34
Kirin Kalia
believe me, you could talk about AI and make it all kinds of super ergy, jargony, yucky stuff, and it wasn't necessary. If you're just talking about how you're solving the problem, you don't need all that stuff. If somebody later wants to dig into your tech stack and understand what language models you're using, for example, great, let them do that.
00:17:52
Kirin Kalia
First time they ask this question, please, please don't go into that level of detail.
Conclusion: Encouragement and Contact Information
00:17:57
Kirin Kalia
So, That's what I've got for you today on Q&A. Please go back and listen again because I can guarantee you there are things that you might not have fully grasped the first time.
00:18:06
Kirin Kalia
It's always great to listen to things more than once to really, really, really get the meaning. I encourage you to try this stuff out and let me know how it works for you. That's one of my things as I wrap up here is your feedback.
00:18:18
Kirin Kalia
Did this work for you? Tell me what you liked and what you didn't like about this episode. I want to hear from you. Kieran at growthroughstory.com. That's K-I-R-I-N as in Nancy at grow,
00:18:37
Kirin Kalia
If you loved it, please subscribe. That's super, super meaningful for me. And please consider sharing it with a founder friend. And if you know that you need help with your message for investors, for customers, you want to prepare for Q&A, I got you.
00:18:51
Kirin Kalia
please email me or DM me on LinkedIn and we'll set up a call and get you the help that you need. I'm kieran at growthroughstory.com. As I've said before, human connection beats perfection every single time.
00:19:04
Kirin Kalia
Make sure you're answering those questions quickly, confidently, and with that kind of amazing example that someone's going to remember clear and direct, you will have a much better quality conversation that gets you to that yes, that gets you the money you're looking for.
00:19:20
Kirin Kalia
That's it for today. Look for you on our next episode.