Chapter 5: Making a Disruptive Pitch: Under Prepare the Obvious, Over Prepare the Unusual

Give your audience a turning point.

“I opened the script and it exploded like a grenade into my face, and I closed it again because I was scared. He puts these crafty little devices in there that take you away from the security of your clichéd thinking.”

—Christoph Waltz, Actor¹ (Describing Quentin Tarantino’s script for the movie Inglourious Basterds)

Well, you’re almost there. You started with some hypotheses, put them into context and defined an opportunity, generated several terrific ideas, and molded them into a single solution. Now, you’ve got a bit of a sales job on your hands. No, I’m not talking about selling to customers. Long before you get to that point, you’ll need to sell your disruptive solution to the people within your organization or external stakeholders who control the purse strings.

Your audience for this pitch could be the budget people you have to convince to take the solution to the next level. Or the VC guys who want to evaluate your idea before they ask for a robust business plan. Or your R&D and marketing departments, so they can do more in-depth testing and analysis. Basically, you need general buy-in from anyone and everyone who might allocate the capital, manufacturing capacity, technology, and personnel to get your solution out of the conference room where you’ve been playing with prototypes and into the marketplace.

Most people don’t adopt a disruptive solution because it’s disruptive. They embrace it because they believe in the value it delivers. And you’re going to need a lot more than a basic presentation to earn that confidence. You have to help them feel their way toward disruptive change, step by step. And that change needs to be easy to adopt, motivating, and clear in the value it provides.

I’m going to tell you right now that the pitch I’m talking about isn’t going to be an easy task. You may have the best solution in the world, but if you don’t come up with a persuasive story of why it matters, it’s not going anywhere. Oh, and did I mention that you’ve got about 10 seconds to grab your audience’s attention and another 8 minutes and 50 seconds to keep it until they tune you out and start tweeting or updating their Facebook status?

I know that 9 minutes doesn’t sound like much, but if you need more than that to tell your story, you haven’t thought it through well enough and you’ll lose your audience. Having done hundreds of these presentations—and listened to thousands more—I can guarantee you that it won’t get better as it gets longer. Quite the opposite. (On the other hand, you don’t want to go too much shorter than 9 minutes. If you do, you’re in danger of slipping into “elevator pitch” mode, and that’s a place you definitely don’t want to be. I’ll talk more about that later.)

Think about a movie preview. If the producers really want to get you excited about seeing a movie, they know they have to hook you quickly with the title and the narration by that guy with the great voice (“In a galaxy far, far away, where everyone’s trying to sell something, it takes a truly disruptive idea to stand out. And only one person can create it…”). After that, they have less than 5 minutes to persuade you with the rest of the trailer. Previews rarely last longer than that.

Author W. Somerset Maugham once said, “There are only three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.”² To paraphrase Maugham, there are only three rules for presenting the results of disruptive thinking. Fortunately, we know exactly what they are: A good, 9-minute pitch starts by creating empathy (“Why should I care?”), continues by building tension (“I’m curious to see where this is going”), and finishes by turning your audience into believers (“Hey, this is great. How do we implement it?”).

Nine Minutes to Pitch

Why am I suggesting that you keep your pitch to 9 minutes? Because it promotes precision. There’s a wonderful example of this principle in the movie Without Limits, which chronicled the friendship between running star Steve Prefontaine and his coach Bill Bowerman, who co-founded Nike, Inc. We see everyone on the running team—except the coach—assembled for a meeting in the bleachers of their school stadium. Prefontaine impatiently asks his teammates, “Why does Bowerman call a team meeting for 7:58? What’s wrong with 8:00?” At that moment, Bowerman arrives, “Hold on. I’ll tell him why, gentlemen,” he says. “7:58 promotes the question: ‘Why 7:58?’ And everybody gets here at 7:58 to find out why.”

Giving you a 9-minute time limit forces you to be precise in your thinking and organization. That, in turn, will help you pack as much meaning into those minutes as you can. Your being precise also makes your audience pay more attention to what you have to say. And the more attention they pay, the more firmly the information you have to share will be encoded and retained in their brains.

Another reason for keeping your pitch short is that your big moment may happen completely unexpectedly. Keeping the pitch to a manageable 9 minutes ensures that you’ll always remember the important details.

That said, do not confuse your 9-minute presentation with an “elevator pitch.” They aren’t the same. Not even close. Over the years, I’ve come to hate that term—and I’m not alone. In her book Good in a Room, former Hollywood executive Stephanie Palmer writes, “The problem is that the term ‘elevator pitch’ is misleading. While it does capture the importance of clear, quick, effective communication, it also encourages us to make three classic mistakes: Pitching in the wrong places (e.g., elevators); pitching to the wrong people (e.g., people in elevators); pitching the wrong things (e.g., cookie-cutter concepts).”³

Stephanie should know. As part of MGM’s executive team for six years, she was pitched elevator-style almost everywhere she went: by a receptionist at her dentist’s office while she was clutching her jaw in pain, by a cabbie on a 5-minute ride to her hotel, by a real-estate agent at an open house, and even by a yoga teacher before class. None of these pitches were ever developed.

Quick Note on Structure

Although I’ve spent a lot of time talking about how important it is to upend clichés, in this chapter, I rely on one of the biggest clichés of all: the PowerPoint presentation. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of PowerPoint, but because so many people know exactly what it is, we’re going to break your 9-minute presentation into nine slides, 1 minute each. As you put your slides together, remember to keep them as visually appealing as possible. Photos, graphics, video, and a few bullet points. But, don’t let yourself fall into the trap of filling the slides with text and then reading them. Zzzzzz.

You’ll divide your pitch into three 3-minute sections—one for creating empathy, one for building tension, one for making them believers—plus some unspecified time at either end for introductions and discussion.⁴ Unspecified is not a synonym for “unlimited,” but you do have a little less control over those sections. So, for now, let’s focus on those all-important 9 minutes.

Please Hold Your Questions

Ideally, you want to fully immerse your audience in what I like to call a “flow state”⁵ for your entire presentation—a state where they’re so absorbed in whatever you’re saying that they stop thinking about the worries and frustrations that they brought into the meeting (or anything else, for that matter, including what’s for lunch and where the bathroom is). If you succeed, your audience will have experienced a modified sense of time. What was 9 minutes on the clock will seem like 3, you’ll have piqued their curiosity, and they’ll be motivated to further explore your solution.

So, throughout those 9 minutes, keep your audience focused and free from distraction. That means that, before you even start your presentation, lay down the law: no phone calls or texting, no wandering in and out, and please hold your questions and comments until the end. If you don’t do this, you risk losing control of your audience (along with any hope of getting them into a flow state) before you even make your opening remarks. I’ve seen it a million times.

I know this may sound harsh, but hopefully, you’re dealing with a group of adults who should be able to play nicely and focus for 9 whole minutes.

What Happens if You Have a Larger Block of Time to Make Your Pitch?

As I’ve pointed out, making your pitch longer isn’t going to make it better. So, consider using the extra time for an extended post-pitch discussion, and if need be, a more relaxed introduction sequence. Having more time to get your audience engaged at these bookends is a worthy use of extra time.

A longer presentation time also may be useful if you have more than one solution to present, which is often the case in business. If so, you should still follow the three-stage sequence for each solution. Why? Because you can’t expect to gain your audience’s attention just once at the start and have them hanging on your every word for 30, 45, or 60 minutes. The 9-minute tune-out phenomenon will still happen, and you’ll have to hook them all over again by creating more empathy and building more tension.

Nine Minutes to Pitch.

Building Empathy: Your Introduction and the First Three Slides

Let’s get back to our 9-minute presentation—actually, to just the first few seconds of it. It turns out that what happens during those opening moments greatly influences what listeners will learn and, more importantly, what they’ll remember. As the author of Brain Rules, John Medina puts it, “If you’re trying to get information across to someone, your ability to create a compelling introduction may be the most important single factor in the later success of your message.”⁶

In my experience, for a compelling introduction to work, you must get the audience emotionally involved: They must feel empathy. So, how do you introduce emotion in the opening 3 minutes?

The best way is to quickly establish the inadequacy of the status quo and then use one relevant, real-world observation from your research to bring a point of frustration to life for your audience. You want them to believe how dysfunctional the status quo is and feel like they are experiencing the pain for themselves.

Of course, most people completely waste their first 3 minutes—the most important ones in the presentation—by going broad instead of deep. They give a general overview, free of any telling details: “First we did this, then we looked at that, then we plotted the information on this framework, then we noticed that blah blah, and then we went back and looked at this again….” Or worse, they spend these opening minutes reviewing an agenda of what they’re going to talk about. (The first stage of the traditional “Tell ’em what you’re going to tell ’em. Tell ’em. Then tell ’em what you told ’em” approach that has been putting audiences to sleep for decades.) Although that may be solid advice for preparing a book report in grade school, it’s completely inappropriate for disruptive pitch situations. Presentations that open that way lack empathy. Any emotion required from the audience dissolves, and they feel nothing.

One of the best-known examples of avoiding this trap and doing it right is the tale of London advertising agency Allen Brady & Marsh’s pitch to British Rail in 1977. The details of the story change depending on who’s telling it or what point they’re trying to illustrate, but it usually goes something like this:

The client team arrived at the agency at the appointed time, to be greeted by an uninterested receptionist who took a break from filing her nails for just long enough to direct them towards a small sitting area where the seats were stained, ashtrays were overflowing, and the tables were littered with coffee cup stains. She didn’t even bother to offer them anything to drink. The clients waited, and waited, and waited. As the scheduled time for the agency’s presentation disappeared into the past, they asked the receptionist what was going on, and she tersely replied that someone would “be along in a minute.” Their frustration grew, until at the moment they were about to pick up their bags and leave, Peter Marsh, the agency head, appeared before them. “Gentlemen,” he said. “You have just experienced what hundreds of thousands of people experience every day on British Rail. And we’d like to talk to you about how to put that right.”⁷

Now, that’s a bit lengthy for the first 3 minutes of a 9-minute pitch, but you get the idea. Peter Marsh gave the clients a visceral and emotional feeling for how bad things are in the current situation. The status quo has a firm hold on most people’s perceptions, so you need to shake them out of a complacent perspective.

The best way to shake them is through some well-placed sensory details—the more senses you can involve, the better. In the British Railway example, the clients were put in a position where they were emotionally neglected by the receptionist and the head of the ad agency, visually (and probably olfactorally) assaulted by the shabby surroundings and overflowing ashtrays, and generally disrespected by being kept waiting for a ridiculously long time.

If you can figure out a way to involve your audience emotionally, terrific. And if you can combine two senses—specifically touch and sight—you’ll greatly increase the chances that you’ll make a lasting connection. In 3 minutes, you won’t have time to talk about every single thing you uncovered in your research observations. But that’s okay, because you only need a few tidbits that are rich in sensory detail—the audience’s imagination will supply the rest. As the legendary film director Orson Welles once said, “…give the audience a hint of a scene. No more than that. Give them too much and they won’t contribute anything themselves. Give them just a suggestion and you get them working with you.”⁸

Make a list of the attributes of the research observation you’re describing. Cross off everything that seems generic, and from what remains, select three or four key details that are unique to the situation at hand. If you can bring one or more of these details to life with a physical prop, even better. Here’s how to structure your first three slides.

Slide 1: The Status Quo

To set the scene, you need to quickly and effectively demonstrate a problem of parity in your industry, segment, or category situation. Look back through your competitive audit and the clichés you uncovered. Use those clichés to demonstrate that everyone is doing the same thing, competing the same way, or that nothing has changed in a long time.

Example: If the company is Starbucks, the fact that baristas are serving cappuccinos everywhere now, even at McDonald’s and 7-Elevens, should be a parity problem. (But of course, on this slide, the example you’ll be using is your own situation.)

Slide 2: The Observations

Put the focus on the consumers. Look back through your research observations around tension points, and choose three or four to highlight in your pitch. Remember, the more visual and sensory-rich your observations, the better your audience will remember them. You can do this by using photographs and/or video footage, combined with a great quote from one of the consumers you spoke with earlier in the process. But, be careful. If the pictures and words don’t tell the same story, you’ll be inhibiting the audience’s ability to recall them.

Slide 3: The Story

For people to take action on your solution at the end of the pitch, they have to feel empathy at the beginning. And the way to make them care is through the details of one key story from your research activities. What did you hear or see that could bring the points of frustration to life for your audience in the most memorable way?

In the British Railway example, the story was that customers are emotionally neglected, visually assaulted by the shabby surroundings, and generally disrespected by being kept waiting by ridiculously long delays.

Building Tension: Slides 4–6

In this part of the pitch, you’ll explain the opportunity you see, and your insights about it, in a way that, hopefully, elicits surprise, interest, and curiosity.

In his book This Means This, This Means That, Sean Hall asks readers to vote on which of two sentences is the best. “The cat sat on the mat.,” or “The cat sat on the dog’s mat?”⁹ I know that may sound painfully simple, but it illustrates the point beautifully. If the cat sat on the mat, does anyone really care? Cats sit on mats all the time. But, if the cat decided to curl up on the dog’s mat, well, that’s a different thing. There’s a good chance that if the dog finds out, he’ll have a serious problem with someone messing with his mat. Was the cat trying to provoke the dog? How did the dog react? Is the cat still alive? Again, it’s a simple example, but it shows how effective some tension can be.

Tension is at the heart of every compelling story, which makes it rather surprising that it’s usually glaringly absent from most pitch presentations. Most of the ones I’ve dozed—I mean sat—through have been some variation of “Boy meets girl and lives happily ever after” (product meets consumer need and sells happily ever after). Not emotional and not believable. If you’re going to pique an audience’s interest, you need a major piece of tension that throws the status quo off kilter. In other words, “Boy meets girl. Boy loses girl. Boy wins girl back.” In disruptive pitch terms, “Boy meets girl” is all about empathy. “Boy loses girl” is tension. “Boy wins girl back” is where the audience truly believes.

Tension is what gives a presentation the zing it needs to be meaningful and memorable. To set up the emotional component of your presentation, you first need to introduce your audience to a counterintuitive insight and opportunity.

Slide 4: Tell Them What They Don’t Know (The Insight)

A presentation without tension is usually a presentation built solely on common sense, on information the audience already intuitively knows. (The prevalence of common-sense presentations is what probably gave rise to the rather sarcastic definition of a consultant: someone who takes your watch and then tells you what time it is.)

What’s wrong with appealing to what the audience already knows? Plenty. When people hear something they already know, they tend to tune out. And if there’s one thing you don’t want during your presentation, it’s an audience that has mentally left the room. Your pitch has to be something your audience will remember long after you finish your presentation. And the way to make that happen is to create some tension between what they already know and what you want them to know.

Interestingly, the definition of “common sense” can change, depending on the audience. I’ve often found, for example, that what’s common sense for the consumer is often uncommon sense for the producer. While working on a project for office printers, we noticed a disconnect between the ways manufacturers and consumers load paper into their machines. Manufacturers generally design their printer trays to hold a full ream of paper—500 sheets. Seems a lot easier to just rip the sheath off, place the whole thing into the tray, and shut the door. Good, old-fashioned common sense, right?

But, our observations of consumers in their office environments revealed a different story. It turns out that people never put a full ream into the tray. For them, it was just plain common sense that the printer would jam if they put in the full ream (the fact that this wasn’t true didn’t seem to matter). So, they’d rip open the package and put only about 350 pages into the printer. I’m sure if you’ve ever been anywhere near an office printer, you’ve seen numerous partially used packages of paper.

The point is, what’s obvious to one group of people may not be at all obvious to another. To the right audience, even the most mundane details can come as a revelation. It’s all about creating a disturbance, a disruption, between what your audience assumes they’ll get and what you actually give them. Common-sense, tension-free presentations do the opposite: They give the audience exactly what they were expecting. And that’s the kiss of death.

In putting together slide 4, use the following steps as a guide:

• Review the key insight that gave rise to your opportunity.

• Frame the insight in such a way that it breaks your audience’s expectations. That means emphasizing the part that is uncommon sense—the part they don’t know or aren’t expecting. For example, don’t just tell them that people think cars are important for transportation (common sense). Emphasize the finding that owners rarely describe their vehicle as a mode of transportation. Instead, they use words like protection, rescue, and office (uncommon sense).

Slide 5: Give Them a Turning Point (The Opportunity)

In Hollywood terms, the result from this kind of unexpected tension is a turning point. That’s the plot twist that takes the story in a new direction and makes the audience ask themselves, “How is this thing going to turn out?” Master screenwriter Robert McKee says that turning points have to surprise, increase curiosity, and present a new direction. If the turning point is compelling enough, it’ll keep the audience in their seats until the closing credits roll. In the movie Jaws, for example, the audience wonders, “Will the sheriff kill the shark, or the shark the sheriff?”¹⁰

So, how do you introduce a turning point? The good news is that you’ve already got everything you need. Remember the disruptive opportunity from Chapter 2—that key insight and supporting opportunity—which you built your disruptive ideas and solution around? That’s what you’re going to use to create the turning point for the pitch. A disruptive opportunity is to a pitch what a turning point is to a movie.

In Chapter 2, I used the example of an opportunity to satisfy an unmet need in automobile design by optimizing productivity features for drivers who aren’t actually driving. The automotive industry places such a high value on the driver’s and passenger’s experience while the car is moving, that an opportunity focused on the experience of using a car when not driving came as a surprise, piqued their curiosity, and presented a new direction. This was a turning point.

Pitching the insight and opportunity should provoke your audience to wonder what, exactly, your solution will be. So, finding the turning point means looking back through your research findings to pull out the key insight and opportunity that inform your solution. After that, your job is to communicate them to your audience—in a counterintuitive way that wreaks havoc with their expectations. Then, back up your claims with plenty of supporting logic.

For the printer project mentioned earlier, the turning point was framed around a pricepoint insight. We discovered that one of the biggest indicators of quality—at least in the minds of consumers—is the upfront price. If a printer costs between $300 and $600, buyers tend to worry about the machine’s robustness. If it’s under $300, they immediately dismiss it as simply “not meant for the office.” The problem was that the inkjet printers we were researching were in fact, built for office use. But, compared to the bulkier, more expensive laser printers, people saw inkjet printers perceived as cheap toys for home use. In this context, “home use” was a disastrous association.

The conventional strategy for selling inkjet printers is “razor and blades”—that is, sell the printers for next to nothing and make your money from expensive refill cartridges. The turning point was a complete retraction of this strategy. In other words, we were going to try to make money on the “razor” too; in this case, the printer. This opened up the opportunity to build features into inkjet printers and raise the price until it was roughly the same as a comparably outfitted laser printer. We supported this assertion with evidence that, in general, people didn’t do long-term burn analysis on the difference between ink and laser cartridges. In other words, they focus on the purchase price, not the total cost of ownership. So, the plan was to keep the price of the cartridges the same, but double the price of the printer so people would see it as competing head-to-head with the more expensive lasers. Can you imagine being told that the only way you’ll be taken seriously is if you double the price of your product? That’s a turning point with a smile.

To sum it up: Review the opportunity area that gave rise to your solution (Chapter 2). Once you have the opportunity described, add credible logic with key supporting observations, and facts gathered from your research. For example, the observation that, “people rarely describe their vehicle as a mode of transportation” supports an opportunity to provide “productivity features” for drivers who aren’t actually driving (a turning point for in-car experience). Sometimes, it’s more powerful to illustrate your point with photographs or clearly stated quotes from your research. For the printer project, we showed numerous photos of the consumers we observed and their quotes that supported the pricepoint opportunity we were describing.

Slide 6: Make It Familiar (The Analogy)

A minute or so ago, you’d grabbed your audience’s attention and piqued their curiosity by introducing your counter-intuitive opportunity as the turning point. Now that you’ve surprised them, things have dramatically changed. You no longer need to spark their curiosity. Instead, you need to spark their understanding. The sooner your audience truly gets what your opportunity is about, the better. That means that the potential of the opportunity has to be intuitive.

I know, I know—after all the emphasis on turning points, breaking expectations, and being counterintuitive, why would I suddenly go for something as mundane as “intuitive?” Because when an audience encounters a new opportunity, they tend to respond by comparing it to everything they’ve learned when they’ve been in similar situations and confronted with similar issues. They can’t help themselves—it’s just something people naturally do. It’s much easier than consciously trying to learn something new. And you haven’t got time for an extended course in thinking outside the box.

Given all that, you need to tilt the playing field in your favor by controlling the associations they make. This gives you a far better chance of getting the reaction that you want rather than leaving it to chance. In other words, to make your solution resonate, you need to quickly signal to your audience that it is disruptive, yet familiar. And the easiest way to do this is to juxtapose it with an example of something they’re already familiar with.

This form of juxtaposition is sometimes called “high concept,” and the movie business is full of these descriptions. For example:

• Speed is Die Hard on a bus.

• 13 Going on 30 is Big for girls.

• Alien is Jaws on a spaceship.¹¹

“The compact, five-word phrase ‘Die Hard on a bus’ pours a breathtaking amount of meaning into the previously nonexistent movie of Speed,” write Dan and Chip Heath in Made to Stick.“ …[T]hink of all the important decisions you could make, just on the strength of those five words. Do you hire an action director or an Indie director? Action. Do you budget $10 million for the movie or $100 million? $100 million. Big star or ensemble cast? Big star. Target a summer release or a Christmas release? Summer.”¹²

With the printer project, the solution was to offset consumer bias against inkjet printers by leveraging the positive associations they had with laser printers. In other words, we could build into inkjet printers some of the things consumers liked about laser printers. To make the point, a high-concept analogy from the automotive industry was used. Volvo has reinvigorated station wagons by borrowing tough attributes from SUVs and incorporating them into their XC70 station wagons. They have successfully reengaged the station wagon owners who were at risk of defecting to SUVs.

As you see from this example, the important thing when using a high-concept analogy is that the analogy must come from a different and non-related industry. If you’re using an analogy from the same industry that you’re focused on, it’s not really an analogy—it’s a me-too copy—which defeats the purpose of disruptive thinking.

To make the analogy memorable, take inspiration from those movie examples and boil it down into a short, compact phrase—your equivalent to “Die Hard on a bus.” Little Miss Matched did this effectively to communicate their vision with the statement, “We’re doing for socks what Starbucks did for coffee.”

Ready to try one on your own? Fill in the blanks in the following statements, juxtaposing the meaning of your opportunity with an analogous example (such as another brand, product, or service that your audience will recognize) from a non-related industry. Generate a few alternatives for each and then refine the one you think best compares your disruptive thinking to something your audience already knows.

This is   ___________    (analogous example) for    ___________   (your category).

Example: This is the Volvo XC70 for inkjet printers.

Or

We’re doing for    ___________   (your category) what   ___________    (analogous example) did for    ___________   (alternative category).

Example: We’re doing for socks what Nike did for running shoes.

Making Your Audience Believe: The Final Three Slides

Your audience’s reward for having paid attention for 6 whole minutes (which, hopefully, has seemed only like 1 minute) is that they now get an overview of the solution you’ve created. You want to quickly build their belief in your solution by concisely describing what it is and how it works; the advantages for customers and stakeholders of making the changes you’re suggesting; and finally, why your solution is meaningful in a broader context.

Slide 7: The Solution

To get things rolling, start by presenting the solution’s name, a brief description, a visual of how it works, and the key points of difference that separate it from other offerings in the market. We covered all of these components in Chapter 3, when you came up your disruptive idea—so you probably have some of this content already started. However, your solution may have evolved since the original idea was created, so now is the time to go back and refine those steps as necessary.

Speaking of key points of difference, I said in the Introduction that you want to be considered the only ones who do what you do. But if the phrase, “We don’t have any competition,” flashed through your mind, it’s important that you make a serious effort to banish that thought for the presentation. There is no quicker way to kill a disruptive pitch than to claim you’re all alone on Mount Everest and that no one can catch you. To prospective investors, competition is often seen as a good sign. It lends a little weight to your proposal by demonstrating that there’s an issue that someone else besides you thinks is worth addressing.

Look back on the competitive audit you did in the disruptive hypothesis stage (Chapter 1), and pull together a list of potential competitors from that industry, as well as any others that may be relevant. Hopefully, in the disruptive idea stage (Chapter 3), you already thought about some of the differences between your idea and what else is out there. Now, it’s time to make those differences obvious to your audience. In our inkjet printer project, we did this by declaring that we were “playing laser’s game better than laser,” and listed the key reasons why.

Every solution has four basic components: a name, a one-sentence description, a visual, and the key points of difference. All four components should appear together on one slide.

The name should accurately represent the solution and make it stand out. It should be short, memorable, and credible. You may already have a name for this solution, one that you developed in the idea stage (Chapter 3). If so, review the name and change or refine as necessary.

Identify the core value of the solution and the key benefit you need to communicate. Then, craft a brief description that captures the essence in one sentence. Again, you may already have a description from the idea stage (Chapter 3). If so, review it and change or refine as necessary. If not, follow the steps laid out in Chapter 3.

You need to be able to visualize your solution to concretely describe its components, features, and functionality. Change, refine, or increase the fidelity of the visual you started in the idea stage. If key components of the solution have changed since then, create a new visual.

You haven’t got time to go into a bunch of minor differences. You probably identified some key points in Chapter 3. If not, look for and emphasize one or two really big differences.

Slide 8: Make Change Appealing (The Advantages)

After you make it clear what you want to change (empathy) and why (tension), you need to persuade your audience that the changes deliver clear advantages to the people who will use and implement the solution. You need to shift the focus of your audience from the need for disruptive change to the motivation for disruptive change.

To communicate advantages, you should think about who would be eager to initially have and use your solution. The answer lies in the “early adopters.”¹³

Generally speaking, all commercial offerings progress sequentially through four stages: introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Your focus right now is on the introduction, the official birth of your disruptive solution. Focusing on the introduction stage means that you’ll need to work closely with early adopters to refine and tune your solution before it gets anywhere near a mainstream market.

Why? Because, for a disruptive solution to really take off, you must introduce it to people who have the motivation to appreciate the change in status quo. These people like being part of disruptive change, and if you succeed, they’ll tell the next group, which will pass the word on to the mass market. In demonstrating why the creators of Napster initially targeted college students, Seth Godin wrote, “They combined the three things necessary for the virus to catch on: fast connection, spare time, and an obsession with new music.”¹⁴

Keep in mind that early markets are small, so don’t focus your pitch on convincing your audience of how huge a potential market is. Only mainstream markets are huge, and disruptive solutions never get their start in mainstream markets. Promising that is a sure-fire way to lose credibility with your audience. So, think small and target only early adopters where you can make an impact with what Gary Hamel calls, “revolutionary goals, but evolutionary steps….”¹⁵

After you consider the advantages for the early adopters, turn your attention to articulating the motivation for the key stakeholders involved. Pay particular attention to anyone whose help you’ll need to implement the new solution.

Your list of stakeholders should be as broad as possible and will include account suppliers, partners, and alliances—not just the decision makers in the room. If you want to get any stakeholders to shift to your disruptive solution from something else, you’ll need to show them the advantages of doing so, and you’ll have to convince them that the change is worthwhile.

• Suppliers: What will motivate key suppliers? How does your solution benefit potential suppliers? Are they integral to the success of the solution? Is there value in business goals being more closely aligned?

• Partners: Consider what will motivate critical partners in the development of your solution. What partners do you need for this solution to work? How could these partners be motivated in a creative way?

• Alliances: Is a joint venture or strategic alliance with another company required? Is there another company that could be motivated to share the risk and rewards involved in your solution? Is there a mixture of resources that could be advantageous for this solution?

Slide 9: Leave Them on a High (The Ethos)

An ethos gives your solution a higher purpose, something that goes beyond pure functional and emotional value. It’s the narrative theme around which people will remember your solution. Whenever I talk to clients about creating an ethos, Nike is one of the first brands that pops into their minds. That’s no big surprise—after all, Nike’s tag line, “Just Do It!” may be the most recognized slogan in the world. But, the real reason it’s so memorable is that it represents more than just a product. “If one had to put the matter succinctly, it was that ‘Just Do It’ was not about sneakers,” said Scott Bedbury, one of the Senior VPs of Nike responsible for the campaign, “It was about a brand ethos.”¹⁶ That ethos represented a call to action for ordinary athletes that meant get off the couch and jog; be active at something you enjoy.

An ethos also opens the door to more expansion across multiple categories than the traditional notion of a single-product value proposition. What you’re doing here is giving people a feel for how big the solution could get, how far it could expand. Little Miss Matched did this nicely in its brand book, coming right out and saying, “I’m the first voice in history to say, ‘Mix it up!’ Today I’m socks; tomorrow I’ll be… bikinis and flip-flops for summer. Tights, gloves, and scarves for winter. Pj’s and slippers for bedtime (and a whole lot more).” I’m not asking you to create a polished, public-facing tagline here. What I am suggesting is that you come up with a concise and profound phrase that sums up your solution’s message to the world. What’s it saying? What’s it challenging? What’s it provoking? By declaring that, “Taking a trip is more than just going for a drive,” frog designs’ automotive client captured the idea that the in-car experience had little to do with driving.

Think Outside the Socks! The Disruptive Pitch

As we discussed in Chapter 5, if you want to stimulate interest in your new product or service, your disruptive solution requires a disruptive pitch. In the case of Little Miss Matched, this meant thinking beyond a standard PowerPoint presentation. To this day, when Jonah pitches their story, he relies on a much lower-tech option: a handmade “brand book.” The book is essentially a tangible business plan that helps articulate exactly what’s so unique and disruptive about Little Miss Matched.

On page 1, we see an image of Little Miss Matched herself, smirk and all. “Hi,” she says. “I’m Little Miss Matched.” On page 2, she boldly declares, “I’m the first voice in history to say that nothing matches but anything goes.” On page 3, she announces that, “I’m doing with socks what Starbucks did for coffee and Nike did for shoes.” Over the next few pages, Little Miss M talks about her socks and other products that the company plans to expand into, including bedding, swimwear, hats, gloves, and even television shows and movies.

The brand book is just part of the pitch. Little Miss Matched also sends out a “box of fun,” filled with sock samples and a hand-written note inviting the recipient (they send these only to CEOs) to talk about their disruptive solution. It’s a remarkably successful formula and has allowed them to tell their story to the CEOs of FAO Schwartz, Linens ‘n Things, JC Penney, Foot Locker, Toys R Us, and many other stores that have ordered millions of dollars’ worth of mismatched socks. In late 2008, Little Miss Matched did a large deal with Macy’s and closed a $17 million funding with the same investment partners that backed Build a Bear. With 6 retail stores and over 150 employees, Jonah and his partners are a long way from where they started 5 years earlier.