When you are pitching, you are a big part of what you are selling

Choosing a plumber was what opened my eyes. I had this plumber who was very good, and reasonably priced, but every single time he came round I would get a very, very long lecture on the history and structure of my plumbing, the shortcomings of my boiler and an outline of the many options that now lay before me. What I actually wanted was a clear recommendation, and that was the one thing I never got. I simply wanted to know what, in his expert opinion, I should actually do! How hard is that? So when the time came to replace the boiler I got a couple of quotes. My plumber was as cheap as anyone else, knew my existing system inside out already and could do the job earlier than anyone else. I chose the more expensive quote, and chose to wait longer for the job to be done, for the simple reason that I couldn’t bear the thought of having to listen to my plumber’s inconclusive blithering any more. I chose the person despite the apparent merits of the pitch.

Martin Jones, who ran an organisation called the Advertising Agency Register (a kind of ‘marriage broker’ between clients and agencies), once gave me a great piece of advice. At the end of the day, pitch decisions often boil down to the fact that ‘people buy people’. It’s stuck in my mind because over the years that view has been validated over and over again, from my own choice of plumber to some of the most valuable advertising contracts in the entire country. So what do you do with that information? Can you make yourself ‘likeable’? At the very least, and I mean the very least, you can avoid the things that tend to count against businesspeople and plumbers. Even better, you can adopt some simple behaviours that will help your target audience warm to you on a personal level.

Shut up and have a conversation

Think back to the occasions when you’ve really enjoyed a conversation with somebody and got on with them really well. I would suggest to you that on many of the occasions when you think you’ve had a great conversation – implying a mutual exchange – it has in reality been pretty one-sided, and you did most of the talking yourself. For most people, a really good conversation is one centred around themselves.

Think about the times when someone you know well has reported back to you that they’ve had a great time in someone’s company. You may have observed this phenomenon. I had a client once who had come along with her boss, me and my colleague for an after-work drink. I’d chatted to her boss and she’d been talking to my colleague. The next day she mentioned on the phone how much she’d enjoyed the evening and what a really great conversation she’d had. And yet I’d noticed that for the entire duration of the ‘conversation’ she had been the one doing the talking. My unfortunate colleague would nod, raise and lower eyebrows as appropriate and occasionally chuck in a ‘continuity’ question like, ‘No! So what happened then?’ Quite a difference between perception and reality.

Why do you like the people you like?

What sort of people do you like? They probably share some characteristics. They probably show some interest in you. They probably ask a lot of questions and avoid talking about themselves the whole time. They probably put you at ease when you are in their company. They’re probably easy to talk to (which usually means they are good listeners). They are interesting and interested. There’s no rocket science there, but you would be amazed how often these basic rules are ignored. It also helps if you have something in common. In a pitch situation, you should assume that you do have something in common with the people you’re pitching to, which means your problem is simply to establish what it is. You should do this well in advance.

I’ve had clients over the years who have had particularly unusual interests. One was an enthusiastic amateur military historian and used to spend weekends dressed up in seventeenth century gear, re-enacting battles from the English Civil War. Another had a large collection of blue note jazz vinyl. One of them even kept snakes: in the evening she would kill small rodents by putting them in a cloth bag and hitting the bag against a wall, to turn them into snake food. Even an obscure interest can be an opening for you. You can quickly become knowledgeable on just about any subject thanks to the internet – knowledgeable enough to establish a rapport with your target prospect, who will be thrilled to have discovered a fellow morris dancing enthusiast. So go ahead, invent a shared interest; make it up and make yourself interesting.

Mainly, the connections and shared interests are of the more ‘normal’ variety. A colleague of mine happened to be making small talk of the ‘what have you got planned for the weekend?’ variety, when it became apparent that she and the prospect were both outdoorsy hillwalking types. They then started comparing notes on ‘approach shoes’ and they were away. New best friends. If you can make this kind of connection in the early stages of the pitch process, you are in a highly advantageous position. I still don’t know what an ‘approach shoe’ is.

The importance of trust

Another question to ask yourself is this: what sort of people do I like professionally? What would you look for if you were buying services in a business context, and you’re the customer not the salesperson? They’re probably all the things we looked at above, plus some other important factors. They would probably give you a sense of confidence (a safe pair of hands); you’d be looking for reassurance that they would act in your best interests, give you good advice, be honest with you, be reliable.

I wonder if you remember the ‘quality’ fad from some years back? In the UK it started with something called BS 5750, and before we knew it it had turned into ISO 9000. Who knows what it is nowadays. It spawned a generation of quality ‘consultants’, professional nit-pickers like the one who turned up at a friend’s digital marketing agency and wanted to know where the ‘non-conforming product area’ was. (The ‘recycle bin’ on the computer in this instance.) The one thing that the quality fad had to offer to those of us who didn’t work in factories making widgets was this simple idea: ‘Say what you do; do what you say.’ This simple sentence, when put into practice, is the thing that makes you reliable. No one wants to work with people who are unreliable. A lot of desirable features can be summed up by the word trust. Trust is the bedrock of a good business relationship.

Building belief

How do you establish trust with someone you don’t know? There are a number of ways to do this. Trust is simply belief, and belief is a lot easier to create when you have some hard evidence. Endorsements from current and previous clients are a good start. Endorsements that confirm that you say what you do and do what you say, and perhaps also do it fast, cheap, to a high standard or whatever attributes best suit your pitch. If you have these to hand, make sure you use them. If not, get some. Even better, write the endorsements yourself and ask your favourite clients to sign them. Public relations is another route, but not one that is going to work within a pitch timescale. You should be considering raising your profile in a positive way through PR so that when the time comes to pitch, you can point to positive stories in the trade press.

Then there are awards. There are plenty of these to choose from, and with a little application you should be able to collect one or two that sound reasonably impressive and can be wheeled out at pitch time. In the world of creative agencies, awards for creativity are highly prized – from Golden Lions to Yellow Pencils to Best anything you like. However, if you ask the opinion of the people who pay for the work – the clients – you will usually hear that creative awards are all well and good, but the awards they pay most attention to, and are most convincing in a pitch environment, are those concerning effectiveness. Awards that demonstrate more commercial benefits such as return on investment, increase in sales or market share – evidence that the creative work worked. Enter an awards’ competition so long as the resulting prize is going to work hard for you as an asset in business development.

Finding the people behind the job title

So, in order to engage with your decision makers as people, and thus bond with them and create trust, your early priority has to be to find out as much as you can about them. Not merely on a professional level, but also on a personal level. There are many ways of doing this. An obvious source is the internet. Potentially, you might find out something interesting from the social networks. However, in my experience it’s not often you find anything interesting about the more senior prospects on the likes of Facebook. The junior prospects may well be out there, and if you find something you should go ahead and use it. So what are we looking for?

First, their origins. Where do they come from? Where did they go to school? Where did they go to university? Maybe there is a connection to be made through geography and educational history. When they were at university, what did they do? Perhaps they supply news about themselves to an alumni network? More importantly, what do they do now? Sports and hobbies are highly relevant, but keep an open mind as you never know what you might turn up. If the internet fails to deliver (unlikely, if you try hard enough and use some ingenuity and lateral thinking) then you could try talking to a real person. In the past I’ve found out about people through all kinds of means. Phoning up to ask advice about ‘buying a present’ is an unusual example but has been known to work. Colleagues will often tell you stuff about people they work with, if you ask. Think of it as being one of the fun parts of the pitch process.

An IT sales professional told me that his first major sale was to a delightful old gentleman who worked in a ‘deep staff’ department of a bank. A couple of weeks after winning the pitch, when the pressure was off, he asked him the reason for his decision. More persuasive benefits? Better reference sites? Cheaper solution? None of these, in fact. The reason was that this particular solution would allow him to leave earlier, and thus in the summer give him more time to tend the love of his life – his rose garden. With hindsight (a wonderful thing), it may have been possible to establish that particular personal requirement before the pitch, but only if you had already decided to make people a priority.

The more senior your targets, the easier it gets to find out about them. The investor sections of corporate websites frequently contain short biographies of the directors. If the person has ever spoken at a conference, there will be information about them available online. Really senior targets (such as major corporation chairmen and their ‘C-suite’ colleagues) may appear in directories like Who’s Who. A company I was working for once needed to get through to the CEO of a large organisation to influence the outcome of a pitch. It wasn’t working, and his PA (a hybrid creature somewhere between a hyena and a pit bull terrier) wouldn’t let us anywhere near. Finally, I was able to get a message through to him when we found out he was a member of a London club. A hand-written note, personally delivered to the club, was eventually picked up a week later, and I like to think the CEO’s decision to get back in touch with us was made over a Scotch and soda at the club, whilst seated in his favourite leather armchair.

Knowledge is power – use it to build a relationship

Having found your information, use some common sense in applying it. I happen to be a player of the Great Highland Bagpipe. It wouldn’t take me long to work out what level of knowledge you had of the pipes once we started talking about it. But you could claim a peripheral interest and then say something sensible on the subject. Or we could just talk about the shared experience of learning to play a musical instrument. Those conversations would stick in my mind a lot longer than the conversations we might have about purely work-related matters.

Some people may think it’s difficult, false and slightly absurd to turn the conversation around during a pitch to feeding small rodents to pet snakes. This is indeed true, but consider the following point. If the first time you really get to talk to your prospects is in the final set-piece pitch, you’ve probably already lost. Or more to the point, someone else has already won. Material of this kind should be deployed from the very early stages of the pitch process (it’s always a process of some kind). It has a second role, too. Through a better understanding of the character and personalities of the people to whom you are going to pitch, you might conclude that you need to change the people on your own team. These little personal details can give you crucial insights into the human issues of the pitch.

Use your knowledge of the prospect’s team to shape your own

Casting is important, because personal chemistry is important. I’ve mentioned already the business-to-business ‘speed dating’ events that we run. Each session lasts 11 minutes. It’s very successful and is a logical consequence of the ‘people buy people’ theory – personal chemistry is an important part of the buying process, but that can be established within minutes. As a seller, it’s every bit as useful to know that the buyer thinks their people could never work with your people as to discover that you get on like a house on fire. It saves a lot of wasted time, for both parties. A key benefit of researching the individuals on the buying team is that you can maximise your chances of positive personal chemistry – simply by fielding the right sort of people. If you can compose your team so that it contains not only the right skills, but also the right mix of personalities, you will straight away be one step ahead of a competitor that has a similar product or skill set to you, but is not going to hit it off on a personal level with the buyers. In fact, picking the right pitch team is probably the simplest yet most important thing you can do. Did I say the simplest? I lied.

There are three qualities to consider in selecting someone for a pitch team:

The latter element can be worked on, through training, personal development and so on. However, this takes time, so you need to be sure that whoever you pick at this stage is already up to scratch, or nearly so. You will find it almost impossible to identify individuals who tick all three boxes. A person who has the right mix of professional skills, can handle themselves well in a pitch and just happens to be perfect casting for your buyers is rare, and you can count yourself lucky when you find one! Mostly it will be a case of two out of three ain’t bad. However, across the pitch team as a whole you not only can, but must tick each of the three boxes. Your team must contain the knowledge and experience to field the most difficult questions, the right personal qualities to bond with the buyers at a personal level and the skills required to manipulate the course of the pitch. And as with any team, each member needs to be clear about exactly what their role is, and what they are meant to be doing, when, and why. In the next chapter we’ll take a look at that.