Appearance Counts: Consider whether your dress, manner, body language and/or presentation style distract from your selling message.Carefully Craft Your Message: It's remarkable how many entrepreneurs (inventors in particular!) seek to impress their audience with the cleverness of their invention instead of pitching a well-rounded business propostion tailored to their audience's interests.

Rehearse: Get fully comfortable with your presentation material. Anticipate and pre-empt likely questions. Work out flow issues and ensure that you adhere to time constraints. 

Test Your Message: Consider the substance of your message (including language) and test it with a trusted colleague. Does it elicit the desired reaction (...or not)?  

Show Passion! Show a high level of personal conviction and energy for the proposition you are sharing. It can be contagious!

Live to Fight Another Day: Poorly prepared and rendered proposals die painful deaths. Still, most business decisions are made based primarily on a proposal's merits rather than subjective factors (even if these can help tip the scales a bit). With this in mind, if your proposal is declined, don't say or do anything that could limit your ability to make a subsequent presentation.

What do you think? Are there other suggestions you'd like to share?