You know how sometimes you meet somebody who is successful, wealthy, intelligent, articulate, at the pinnacle of their career, with the tan and the teeth to match? It’s an easy assumption to make that this person would perform well in a pitch situation. I met a person exactly like that some years ago. With film star looks, a sharp intellect and the self-confidence that courses through the veins of those who already own a second home abroad, how could he possibly fail?
My company had been assisting in the marketing of his business (an advertising agency) and we had become concerned by the lack of conversion of pitch opportunities into paying clients. This agency had forgotten how to win. The most recent one was particularly galling. Kirk, the managing director (not his real name, but it should have been), sat at his desk looking particularly glum. ‘So Kirk,’ I say, ‘why the long face?’
‘We didn’t get the XYZ pitch.’
‘No way! I thought you said it was fantastic. What happened … ?’
‘It was a brilliant pitch! The strategy was genius, the work was really original and fresh. Bill presented it spot on. And although I say it myself, I was fantastic, I mean really in the zone. Can’t understand it – must have been fixed.’
And so we decided to find out what really went wrong. The answer came through a simple ‘post-pitch debrief’ call to the prospect, who as it turned out was only too happy to tell all.
‘The thinking was a bit predictable, the work was nothing special – I’ve seen that sort of thing plenty of times before – but the main thing was the people. They’d done no preparation about us, about me, about the market, and then they come in here acting like they know it all. And their MD was incredibly arrogant … ! They basically came last by a mile.’
Do you know what? I got the distinct impression that this prospect was delighted that I’d phoned, as he seemed to feel the need to get this off his chest. (There were a few expletives in there too, for added emphasis, which I’ve taken out.) He was genuinely angry that the pitch was so wide of the mark. This reaction is completely predictable. Herein lies the key to how we can ensure that your own pitching ends up brilliant and not just competent.
Your audience wants you to succeed
I have found it to be the case, time and again, that the people to whom you are pitching are genuinely willing you to succeed. How great is that? They want you to be the answer to their problems – to their prayers even. Have you ever had the experience of interviewing people for a job, and you really need to find the right person, and you’re hoping that every new interviewee might turn out to be that person? Trust me on this. When you’re on the receiving end of a pitch there is nothing better than when someone makes your life easy – by making it easy for you to say yes.
If you’re reading this then pitching will be important to you. Maybe it’s because pitching is an important part of your job (you’re in sales, perhaps). Or maybe you’ve never pitched before in your life, but now you need to and, consequently, you have one pitch in particular on your mind. In either case, you can take heart from the story above. The prospect was angry because it was really important to his business (possibly to his own personal career prospects) that someone pulled a brilliant pitch out of the bag. His stress levels were going up because he knew that given a pitch list of three, his chances of achieving his own objectives had just gone down by a third.
The fact that the desire for a successful outcome is shared equally by your audience is a key factor in developing a pitch. ‘Brilliance’ is not an absolute value, it is a relative one. Your audience will assist you in defining it, whether you like it or not.
Relax. Underneath the frosty exterior, your prospect will be secretly willing you to do really well. Because if you don’t, they will be no further forward in finding a solution to their problems.
And what of Kirk? Well, Kirk made some obvious errors, yet although the mistakes may seem obvious, you’d be amazed how often they crop up in pitches. He doomed himself to failure the minute he decided that his experience and brilliance were such that he could short-cut the preparation. Fortunately for us all, the world is full of people like these – prospects who want you to win, and competitors who seem hell bent on losing, lacking either the knowledge or the inclination to produce a brilliant pitch.
Great news! You already know how to pitch
Another encouraging fact is this. I referred to the person ‘who has never pitched before’ a couple of paragraphs back. This person simply does not exist. Everyone has pitched. By the age of ten, most children in mainstream social situations have learned important lessons in how to get their parents to agree to things. Take my daughter. She can manipulate me not because she has been on some sales course, but simply because she has picked up how to press exactly the right buttons to get me to act in the way she wants. Her approach may fall flat on someone else (wrong buttons), but it works on me every time.
Standard pitching is a lot about selling, but brilliant pitching is very much a process of working out which buttons to press by getting under the skin of your audience. It’s a little like being a detective. Have you noticed how the comments people write in leaving cards for departing colleagues can be surprisingly funny and apt? Is it because there is a talented comedian hidden away in most people? No. It’s because these comments are based on a very high – almost intimate – level of knowledge about the target audience. The more you know about your audience, the easier it gets.
It’s all about the IDEA
I’m going to make a radical suggestion to you: that whatever level you think you are at, by following my method it will be easier for you to produce a brilliant pitch than to produce a merely good pitch. A ‘good’ pitch will include a lot of stuff you can get from reading a book about sales and a book about presentation skills. It will therefore (by definition) be somewhat generic, and so it follows that it will probably be quite similar to the kind of pitch your competitors will produce. My method is designed to help you construct and deliver a compelling, competitive advantage for when you absolutely, definitely want to win. Its premise is that the old marketing ‘purchase cycle’ model known as AIEDA (awareness, interest, evaluation, desire, action) is flawed in a pitch situation, and that brilliant pitches are based on a new model: IDEA. In the IDEA pitching model, awareness is a given and the crucial shift is that desire now comes before evaluation and action. Most people don’t get that. This is why you can be brilliant.
Many of the people I talk to suffer from anxiety about how good they are at pitching. ‘I’m not a natural in front of an audience,’ they’ll tell me. What they mean is that they feel uncomfortable in front of an audience and under pressure. You may have given some thought as to where you yourself lie along the spectrum of pitch genius. Your conclusions might be causing you some concern. If they are, you are troubling yourself unnecessarily. Let’s consider one highly relevant example of oratory. Bar-room oratory.
Brilliant pitches are an everyday occurrence
If you want to hear some of the best (most effective) pitching, you might want to pop into a bar in any big city an hour or so after work. It’s quite enlightening. What you will find are the middling ranks of the office-dwelling world letting off steam, putting the world to rights and also putting their own organisations to rights. The latter example is where it gets interesting. Very often I’ve overheard really outstandingly persuasive ‘pitches’ – one person putting forward a strong argument, without notes, props or any trace of nerves, which completely persuades their audience. I’ve often thought, ‘Wow! That was good!’ Followed by, ‘If only you could do that during working hours rather than afterwards, you would be these people’s boss not their colleague.’ What I was tuning into were three elements, three vital lessons for anyone keen to improve their pitch performance. Let’s examine each one in turn.
The first thing is passion.
Be passionate
You can hear it in the voice, you can see it in the eyes, that right here, right now, this person cares more about this topic than anything else in the whole wide world. Not only that, but you’ll also notice that they possess an absolute, unshakable conviction that they are right. This sheer conviction creates a powerful impression. An impression that can be so powerful that I have seen it carry the day on many occasions despite the merits of the case – sometimes even when the case being made is patently absurd. That’s a powerful weapon. It’s a weapon people find easy to deploy in a bar environment because they are at ease; they don’t feel threatened, they know that in a bar they can speak more freely, they know their audience and they’re not afraid of offending them.
Where they go wrong is that as soon as they walk into the office, they park all that at the door. Sadly, most offices contain lots of nervous people who seldom say what they really mean and always nod when asked if they agree with the consensus view. This kind of behaviour might, in the more disappointing variety of organisation, provide you with a long and successful career. But it’s no way to act in a pitch. One sure way to make any buyer feel nervous about saying yes is to give them the sense that you’re not completely sure that you would say yes. You cannot expect anyone to buy into a proposition unless it’s crystal clear that you have 100 per cent belief in its validity.
You can also watch this technique in action around the world, in places like the House of Commons and the US House of Representatives. In politics, many fine careers have been established upon the solid rock of unswerving self-belief in the face of contradictory evidence. The surprising thing, of course, is that they keep on getting away with it. How does that happen? It happens for the simple reason that they are able to stand up and tell us with real passion and conviction that black is white. They don’t just tell us this, they proclaim it! They explain that in this day and age no sane, reasonable and rational human being could possibly think otherwise – and so they demand that we believe it. And enough of us do to get them by. But these particular politicians share one other important characteristic with our bar-room pitch experts.
They know their subject. But only to a point.
A little knowledge is a wonderful thing
We know that in the bar, the passion comes from the relaxed environment (and let’s not forget that the passion will have been cranked up several notches now that the lager is kicking in …), but the conviction part actually comes from having a good grasp of the subject matter. So the brilliant pitches in the bar environment tend not to be the ones where the orator is picking holes in the CEO’s explanation of the company’s operational gearing. Oh no. You can bet it’ll be when it’s about something that impinges upon the orator’s own job. And we’re all experts on our own job, aren’t we?
Well, actually no, in fact we’re not. There may be many factors that relate to our role about which we remain almost totally ignorant. Factors that might from another perspective completely outweigh our own narrow point of view. The point here is not that the bar-room orator knows everything about their job, but simply that they know enough about it. Enough to overwhelm the current audience. Did I mention politicians? Again, note that when politicians are talking about a topic, they will have absorbed not every fact connected with it, but just enough key facts to support their own standpoint, as well as a few to knock down the most likely opposing view. You do get some with a genuinely broad and deep grasp of their subject, but not often. Like a politician, you too could get by on a handful of ‘need to know’ facts, but only if you have thought through what is required in order to sustain your argument. Don’t knock it. It works.
An extremely helpful phenomenon for any pitcher is the thing I call ‘knowledge gap elasticity’. Say there are two people in the room, A and B, and they’re discussing gardening. Early on, person A demonstrates slightly more knowledge about gardening than person B. At this point knowledge gap elasticity kicks in, because person B will now assume that person A knows a lot more about gardening than is actually the case. The more technical or academic the subject, the wider the knowledge gap will be assumed to be. I used to find this a lot when I ran digital marketing agencies. Because we actually did know more about digital issues than our clients, our opinion would always prevail. However, it was clear from talking to them that our clients had assumed we were gurus on the subject and absorbed what we had to say without question. If we’d wanted, we could have made up any old nonsense and they would have believed it. But that’s because by then I knew just where the boundaries lay. I had my audience nailed. Not only did I know where the areas of ignorance were, I also knew what kind of suggestions they wanted to hear. I could already guess what the ‘right answer’ would be to most questions. And this brings us to the third and final point arising from bar-room oratory.
Bar-room orators don’t pitch to strangers.
Never pitch to a stranger
This is perhaps the least obvious but most significant point. Watch what happens next. The orator, without even fully appreciating the power of his knowledge, will pick off the audience one by one. He can do this because he knows exactly what buttons to press. He knows that Clive, for example, hates filling in forms and so he can emphasise how his own plan would halve the number of forms that need filling in. So Clive’s nodding already. Judy, meanwhile, is a big fan of the bonus scheme because she relies on it to fund the school fees. The orator knows this too. So the next point is how his plan would improve sales performance and thus help the team beat the bonus by 50 per cent. Now Judy’s nodding too, and believe me, collective agreement is a very contagious thing. Skilfully our orator has manipulated the needs and wants of his audience and got them onside straight away. And chances are he didn’t even realise that what he was doing was creating desire ahead of evaluation and action. But we too could do this, and do so quite deliberately, if only we knew a bit more about our audiences. If only we didn’t have to pitch to strangers.
The hardest person in the world to pitch to is a stranger. The most effective pitches happen when you are pitching not to a company or to a job title, but to a person you have already got to know.
So how good are you at pitching? Forget it, it doesn’t matter. If you can understand how someone in a bar can win an argument through passion and self-belief, knowing the right things about a subject and the right things about an audience, then you are already on the way to being a better pitcher than you are now.