If you've made it this far into your product pitch without everyone glazing over, you're probably going to get to finish your presentation. So now you can relax and give a bit of background information before delivering the most important bit of information; the product's revenue potential.

Rule#7: Describe the thinking behind the product.

You might want to head off some time-consuming and arduous cross-questioning by describing what lines of thinking you've discarded in the past. Of course then you'd have to say why have you've chosen your current approach. It's not necessary to go into detail but the people listening to you need to be able to make their own minds up about whether your idea has been tackled in the most promising way.

Rule#8: Explain what potential customers think of the product.

If the budget allows good qualitative research, commission it by all means. If not, a good indication of the product's likely appeal can be obtained with a simple questionnaire. It's critical that no-one closely involved with the project be sent to gather this research. They're likely to sell the idea, however tacitly, to the interviewees. This kind of research doesn't need hundreds of respondents. Usually as few as 20 or 30 properly filtered respondents will give a good idea of whether the product has the right appeal or not. The filter to be applied is simply the core user description from Rule#3.

Without going into the psychology of the interview situation, there are at least three points to note. First, the object is to understand whether the person sees any valuable, rare benefit in this product that they would actually pay for. Second, dead end questions (for example yes/no questions) are much less helpful than open questions that don't lead the witness and allow them to express their opinion. This would include, for example, asking whether they see any difference between this and other similar products. Finally, the most important question is going to be something like "Why wouldn't you buy this product?". This is to discover whether there are any hurdles to this person adopting this product. People overwhelmingly prefer the status quo. Almost every new product has to displace some existing product or preconception in your customer's life or face utter failure. This is a good place to find out whether your product has enough appeal to do that.

Rule#9: Estimate the potential revenue of the product.

As a project develops, sophisticated financial analysis may become necessary but, like all of these rules, the idea is to arrive at a realistic guess early on. Working on a scrap of paper or a quick spreadsheet, what is your best estimate of the retail revenue of the product over time? What key assumptions are you making about the size of the core market? Awareness levels? Distribution coverage? Sustained market share? Price? Repurchase rates and repurchase cycles? In other words, nothing that the census bureau and a bit of web surfing can't turn up.

The Perfect Product Pitch is a 4-part series by guest contributor Tasos Calantzis of Readymade. It covers the 12 essential things you already knew about pitching a product idea to your boss, client or VC guys but forgot last time around. Thanks go out to Dave Bayless at Evergreen Innovation Partners for providing the basis for this series.