The Final Countdown – Pitch Training 2025
Southampton we are back! It feels like only yesterday I was driving down to Southampton to start ICURe and now 11 weeks later I find myself back and at the end of the journey. To say the last 11 weeks have been a whirlwind would be an incredible understatement, and I’m both excited for the ICURe finale in London next week and devastated for it all to be ending. One highlight of coming to the end though is that I’ll get the chance to see all the ELs in person again, a nice change from seeing them all on zoom calls!
As I’ve mentioned before, the 12 weeks of ICURe culminate in London at the Options Roundabout, where each EL will present their market findings to a room full of investors, funders, entrepreneurs and consultants. We will ask the panel for additional funding from Innovate UK to move onto the ICURe Exploit programme and continue our commercialisation journeys.Before we get to the big day, ICURe provide one final training weekend where we can practise our pitches to other teams and get expert guidance from the mentors.
The Power of the Pitch
There was a great buzz in the air as all the teams assembled bright and early to the conference centre. The first day started with a presentation from Chris Prett, one of the ICURe mentors and leads. Chris showcased presentations from previous years and then began going through how to craft the perfect pitch deck.
Pitching, or presenting, is a critical skill in every entrepreneurs toolkit. Get stuck on the technical intricacies of your product and you can very quickly lose your audience, on the other hand, talk at a buzzwordy high level and you might get written off as lacking substance and credibility. Striking the right balance between clarity and depth is what makes a pitch truly compelling. So how do we get there?
Chris talked a lot about how we should rethink the traditional approach of presentation making and think more broadly about the story we want to tell. Everyone loves a good story, so how can you tell the story of your team, tech and traction in a compelling, engaging and exciting way? That’s the question and the challenge! What I find most interesting about this approach, is that you can make almost anything sound interesting when you find a good angle on it and spin it into a story. Take my technology for example, the ‘high school presentation’ approach would be to start with a definition of clinical decision support, provide some examples of how its been used in practise and then present my technology and talk about how great it is. That seems sensible and straightforward, but will it have the audience on the edge of their seats or investors pulling out their cheque books? Probably not. So how can I make clinical AI into a story worth sharing? Below I’ve outlined some of the practical ways you can do this, they are a culmination of advice from Chris during pitch training, Steve Rawlings Story teller tactics and some activities I trialled myself.
Tips for finding your story:
- What questions do you often get asked about your product?
Rather than think about what you usually tell people about your product or company, think about what people usually ask you once they hear your intro. This often reveals what people find truly interesting about your work and what is worth talking about.
After 100 conversations and hundreds of more casual interactions across the world, I had a good sense of what parts of my product people were interested in. After a while, the questions I was asked and the topics that people were most engaged started to converge. People rarely asked me what machine learning approaches we used in our research, but more often people asked how we were convincing clinicians to use AI, or how our product could actually solve real challenges that remained following the COVID-19 pandemic (e.g. waitlists, ICU bed shortages, budget cuts etc.). - Identify the tension or challenge your product addresses
Every good story has conflict. Most products are developed to solve an existing problem, or make something easier or more convenient. As a researcher, products often come from questions, so think back to the beginning of your work. What research question were you trying to answer? What problem were you set on solving? Use this to find where your conflict lies and were the current tension is. What is broken, or inefficient, or expensive or frustrating? Highlighting this can help your audience relate to you, maybe not on a personal level (if they aren’t your ideal customer) but at the very least on a human level. Regardless of profession, everyone has experienced frustration with the status quo. Emphasise this and then tell the story of how you and your company are working to fix this.
This method probably proved most effective for finding the story and narrative for my pitch deck. This method humbles and humanises you as a company/individual. You don’t come from a place of ‘I have all the answers and my product is the best’ (a vibe which often leads to scepticism from your audience) but rather you come from a place of relatability, a place where you just noticed a problem or something in the world that could be better and you are striving to improve it. You are bringing your audience into the fold with you and saying ‘this [problem/frustration] could be better, here’s a way I think it could be improved, and here’s how I think I can do it’. It invites questions and constructive feedback from your audience and, critically, it allows them to come on the journey with you and feel involved – and everyone likes to feel a part of something! - Highlight your customer journey
If you don’t feel that the challenge you are solving makes a compelling story (I’ve found this is very rare but it might be you!) then another method is focusing on your target customer. Back at bootcamp, the ICURe mentors taught us about creating customer personas and how powerful a tool this can be for finding your key markets, understanding your customer and forming your business model and strategy. Personas also make for a great story! Introducing your customer and explaining their situation to an audience is a great way to capture people’s attention and let them understand who it is you are targeting, why you are targeting them and what it is you are going to do for them. Think about the place that customer is when they find you and then the place you are trying to take them. Keeping returning to this persona can allow people not to get lost in the details of what you do but understand at a fundamental level what it is you are changing and what impact this will have.
In my case, I can present the persona of a doctor in the ICU. By describing their day to day and the challenges they face, my audience can start to empathise with our company mission. I can then detail how clinicians workflows directly impact patient care and talk about how improving tools for clinicians will improve patient care and experience. I’ve gone from having an unrelatable machine learning algorithm, to showing how we will impact the experience of patients in intensive care. - Benefits, benefits, benefits
Finally, I’ve spoken in previous blogs about the difference between features and benefits. As a quick recap, a feature is what your product does, the technical capability or function, but a benefit is why that matters to the person using it. People don’t remember your list of features; they remember how your product changes their life, work, or experience.
When you’re forming your pitch story, start by thinking about what your product actually gives your customers or users. What frustrations does it remove? What outcomes does it create? Rather than diving straight into the technical details, focus on the transformation your product enables. This approach makes your story relatable, human, and easy to follow, even for audiences who aren’t experts in your field.
For example, in ICURe I could explain the technical accuracy of our AI model all day, but what really resonates with people is the benefit: clinicians get clear insights on patient discharge readiness, which reduces stress, improves patient flow, and helps keep ICU beds available. That’s the story your audience connects with – not the feature itself. Focusing on benefits invites engagement and helps your audience understand why your product matters, not just what it does.
Once you have spent time finding your story, I find the presentation can almost write itself as you have the arc and can now ensure your slides tell a complete story. It’s then a case of slotting in different parts of your business at different points of the narrative. introducing your team where it makes sense, showing your market insights after setting up the problem, and demonstrating your solution right after highlighting the tension. Each slide becomes a chapter in your story, guiding the audience naturally from challenge to impact, and making the overall pitch feel coherent and compelling rather than a disconnected set of facts.
Practise makes perfect
Once our stories had started to take shape, we were all given the opportunity to practise our pitches in front of other teams and mentors. It’s easy to think you can just write a script and deliver it on the day, but perfecting your delivery requires a lot of practice – nobody wants to be the person glued to cue cards when the nerves kick in! Chris even recommended practising at least 30 times to truly learn it off by heart. The goal is to make your presentation feel like second nature, so that you know the rhythms of the story and the timings without thinking, and can appear relaxed and confident.
We’ve all been in the audience of pitches that feel robotic or disjointed, where the presenter struggles to connect or is clearly reading from a script. Practising multiple times in the right conditions embeds the story in your muscle memory, so that when nerves hit on the big day, you can focus on engaging with the audience rather than worrying about the next line. It transforms your pitch from a set of slides into a natural, compelling narrative that draws people in, makes them care about the problem you’re solving, and leaves them remembering you and your vision long after you’ve finished speaking.
Wrapping Up
Pitch training was exhausting, but in the best possible way. There was a real, palpable nervous energy it was so exciting to watch everyone’s pitches grow and evolve over the course of the two days. You could see the difference that practice, feedback, and iteration made in real time, and it was incredibly fulfilling to be part of that process. I felt genuinely proud of my ELs and was blown away by the journeys each of them had been on, hearing about what they’d learned, the places they’d been, the challenges they’d faced and overcome, and how much they’d grown as entrepreneurs in such a short space of time.
It also really brought home the value of good market research. Many of the teams’ companies had evolved almost beyond recognition from bootcamp, shaped by the insights they’d gathered and the feedback they’d taken on board. You could see how understanding their customers, refining their problem statements, and really thinking about where their product fits in the world had transformed their pitches.
By the end of the weekend, I felt proud, inspired, and a little emotional at the thought of the ICURe journey ending. I’ve definitely made lifelong friends in my ICURe colleagues and have immense gratitude for the mentorship, training and support I’ve received throughout. With only one week to go, its time to get my head down and practise, practise, practise!
Thanks for reading and I’ll see you in the next (final!) one!