Chapter 4
Pitching Your Big Idea

In 1953, molecular biologists James Watson and Francis Crick introduced the world to the double-helix DNA structure, the so-called secret of life, widely considered the most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century. The presentation earned Watson and Crick the Nobel Prize. And what is most striking about this accomplishment is that the full presentation takes just five minutes to read aloud. That’s the complete presentation—introducing the secret of life, explaining it in detail, and showing how it works.

Pause and consider this for a moment: The most important scientific discovery of the twentieth century can be pitched in five minutes. Yet nearly every pitch that I’ve seen—and I see hundreds every year—takes at least 45 minutes and usually an hour, a ridiculous amount of time! No company in America should let its executives pitch for an hour. In a moment, you’ll see why.

Pitching the Big Idea

So far we have worked in the realm of frames and status, which are abstract notions. Now, however, lace up your shoes and tuck in your shirt—it’s time to get in front of someone and deliver a pitch.

And if you’re the front man, the guy who has to take a big idea on the road and pitch it, you need to know exactly how to give a complete presentation in a much shorter time frame than most. But as you’ll see in a moment, short time frames are not a choice. You can’t afford to run longer. The audience’s brain won’t give you more time. And worse, when attention runs dry—after about 20 minutes—the brain starts forgetting things it has already learned. Talk about going in reverse.

As soon as the pitch or presentation begins, one critical thing must happen: The target must feel at ease. In the vast majority of cases, they don’t because they don’t know how long they’re going to be stuck listening to you, and you’re a stranger. Most people just don’t want to sit through an hour-long pitch. To put them at ease, I have a simple solution: It’s called the time-constraint pattern. This is what you say, exactly, to let the target know he isn’t trapped in the typical hour-long-meeting: “Guys, let’s get started. I’ve only got about 20 minutes to give you the big idea, which will leave us some time to talk it over before I have to get out of here.”

Doing it this way puts the target at ease. It shows that you know what you’re doing and that you’re a pro. Anything can be pitched in 20 minutes by a pro. It also shows that you’re busy because you have a strong idea and you can’t hang out too long in a single meeting.

What’s important here is not your mastery over the details but your mastery over attention and time. Instead of trying to achieve what is virtually impossible—holding the target’s attention for longer than 20 minutes—we need to observe the limits of the human attention span.

You’re going to make the pitch in four sections or phases:

1. Introduce yourself and the big idea: 5 minutes.

2. Explain the budget and secret sauce: 10 minutes.

3. Offer the deal: 2 minutes.

4. Stack frames for a hot cognition: 3 minutes.

Phase 1: Introduce Yourself and the Big Idea

Following this formula, the very first thing you need to do—even before you think about explaining your idea—is to give people your background. But you have to do this in a specific way; your success depends on how well (and how fast) you do it. After the introductory chitchat, where you establish status and use frame control, it’s natural for the target to ask, “What’s your background?” or “How’d you get started in this?” At this point, you can begin the pitch, starting with your track record of successes. Not a long rundown of all the places you worked. Not all the projects you were tangentially involved with. Not your whole life story. The key to success here is making it about your track record. Things you built. Projects that actually worked out. Successes. Spend less than two minutes on it and definitely not more—and don’t worry. Before your pitch is over, the target is going to know a whole lot more about you.

When a friend, Joe, was getting funding from Boeing, here’s how he did it:

1. “My degree is from Berkeley. I did my MBA at UCLA.

2. After that I was at McKinsey for four years, but really, my only homerun there was the sales program I did for Lexus. Saved them about $15 million, and they still use it today.

3. I left consulting six months ago to work on the ‘big idea.’”

Yes, Joe has done a lot more than that over the years, but so what. Only his big wins are worth talking about at this point. Is there a lot more to your background than this? Of course there is. But in the pitch, time and attention are not infinite. In fact, they’re extremely scarce. And you’re going to need all the time available to get (and keep) frame control. Plan to stroke your own ego later—when the deal is more likely to go through.

Many times I’ve seen people spend 15 minutes or longer on their background. Absurd. No one is that fantastic. Yet people often think that if some background biography is good, then more is better. But people’s brains do not work that way. Research has shown that your impression of someone is generally based on the average of the available information about them, not the sum. So telling people one great thing about yourself will leave them with a better impression of you than telling them one great thing and one pretty good one. And it gets worse if you tell them one great thing, one pretty good thing, and two mediocre things. Stop with one great thing. Get your track record on the table, and do it fast, clean, and problem-free. This is not the place to get hung up with questions, deep conversations, and analysis—there’s still a lot to do.

Is this different from what you’re used to? Is framing this way a completely new way of looking at pitching? Yes to both. But if you don’t feel like changing to frame-based pitching, you can always console yourself with the fact that you are not alone. Wasting time and focusing on the wrong things are problems that exist at the highest levels of business.

The “Why Now?” Frame

You’re almost ready to pitch the “big idea.” But first, a reminder of the obvious: Nobody wants to invest time or money into an old deal that has been sitting around. This is why you need to introduce a “Why now?” frame. It’s vitally important that the target knows that your idea is new, emerging from current market opportunities and that it’s not some relic left over from bygone days. The target needs to know that you are pitching a new idea that came to life from a pattern of forces that you recognized, seized, and are now taking advantage of. And the target needs to know that you have more knowledge about these things than anyone else.

There are unspoken questions in the target’s mind as to why your idea is relevant and important and why it should be considered as important now. By anticipating these questions and definitively answering them before they are verbalized, you will tick an important checkbox in the target’s mind and put the target more at ease. Everything you say from that point forward will have context, greater meaning, and more urgency, reinforcing its scarcity.

What I have discovered over time is that in every business there are three market forces that together triangulate to answer the “Why?” question, and you can use these forces to create a strong “Why now?” frame.

Three-Market-Forces Pattern: Trendcasting

When you describe your idea, project, or product, first give it context by framing it against these three market forces or trending patterns that you believe are important.

1. Economic forces. Briefly describe what has changed financially in the market for your big idea. For example, are customers wealthier, is credit more available, is financial optimism higher? Increases or decreases in interest rates, inflation, and the value of the dollar are considered as prime examples of forces that have significant impact on business opportunities.

2. Social forces. Highlight what emerging changes in people’s behavior patterns exist for your big idea. An obvious example in the market for automobiles, concern over the environment—a social force—is driving demand for electric vehicles.

3. Technology forces. Technological change can flatten existing business models and even entire industries because demand shifts from one product to another. In electronics, for example, change is rapid and constant, but in furniture manufacturing, change is more gradual.

Describe the genesis of your idea, how it evolved, and the opportunity you saw as it was emerging. The backstory of the idea is always interesting to the target. Once this story is told, everything you say in your pitch will be legitimized by it.

As you craft your backstory, think in terms of how it come to be where it is today and how you found it. Describe the steps in its evolution, and show how it evolved—how it moved—to finally become the opportunity you have now identified and captured.

The three basic steps are:

1. Explain the most important changes in our business. Forecast the trends. Identify important developments—both in your market and beyond.

2. Talk about the impact of these developments on costs and customer demand.

3. Explain how these trends have briefly opened a market window.

Here is an example that ties the three market forces together into a tight pattern that supports the “Why now?” frame for a product called UpRight, a device you wear on your wrist that wakes you up slowly, at exactly the right time, so that you feel well rested.

Economic force. The cost of making this product has just gone below the $10 mark. This means that the retail price can be $69. We’ve been waiting two years to hit this price point.

Social force. One of the changes in our society is that people don’t get enough sleep or even the right kind of sleep. While this problem is growing only 1.8 percent a year, awareness of it is skyrocketing. People know that they need better sleep; it is a hot topic at all levels of society.

Against this backdrop, your idea begins to occupy the foreground. To continue with the example:

Technological force. This device requires a controlling chip and solenoid that now can be manufactured small enough and at a controllable price, allowing us mass-market capabilities.

By starting your pitch with the three market forces, your idea now enjoys a prominence that it did not have before. Now your idea has a history, an exciting evolutionary path to the present time, and credibility. The idea is displayed against the economic, historical, and sociologic changes that made it emerge from the shadows—but it has just barely emerged. You were alert and saw the potential and are now developing it. (This is a nice point to strengthen your prize frame.)

It does not matter what your idea, project, or product is—they all have a history and legitimacy when framed within the three-market-forces pattern. With the three-market-forces pattern, everything has a story.

As you write the “Why now?” frame for your idea, start by thinking in the broadest terms possible, going back as far as you need to go to understand and explain how it come from the past into the present and why it is special. Remember, it doesn’t matter if you’re pitching jet fighters, securities, real estate, software, or cotton balls, you need to frame your deal in this way because it explains the force behind its evolution.

Movement is a critical element in the “Why now?” frame. Your target needs to understand the forces that are pushing your deal and to understand that your success is inevitable and imminent as a consequence of these greater forces.

This is another area where you need to understand how the crocodile brain of your audience is working. A huge part of the brain is devoted to detecting movement. This is what makes it so hard to find things you have lost. Your keys, cellphone, or pencil do not move. You can look right at something and not see it because it is still. This is why animals, when they are frightened, tend to freeze. Your brain grows accustomed to things that are not changing, and they effectively vanish. A bird, holding its head very still, can hunt efficiently because the only thing it can see is a wiggling worm. If you injected your eye muscles with curare—a paralytic poison—the same thing would happen to you. Even without such injections, though, it is clear that movement captures your attention. And this is what you want to take advantage of with your pitch. You don’t show people a static picture of how the world would be if your plan were implemented, but instead you show them how your idea is moving away from the current standard to a new way of doing things.

There is one more detail about how the brain works that you need to know, and it’s called change blindness. It is surprising, but if you show people two pictures in rapid alternation, and one of them has some change in it—even a relatively major one—people will not see it. You can replace grandma with a tree. It does not count as movement, and the brain ignores it. You can hunt and hunt for what is different between the two pictures as they go back and forth and think they are identical. It is only when your attention is focused deliberately on the thing that is changing that you can finally “see” it. Once you know this fact about how your audience’s mind works, you realize that you cannot just show audience members two possible states and hope that the difference captures their attention. You need to show them the movement from one to the other.

We are not wired to see or hear a static pitch: “That was the old way, but this is the new way.” That can trigger change blindness, where the target won’t get your deal at all. The formula I’ve just given you, the three changing market forces, overcomes the potential for change blindness. With three market forces coming into alignment, you are literally showing the mind’s eye how the market is moving to benefit your big idea.

Here’s an example of my colleague Joe giving a pitch:

“In recent years, there hasn’t been much going on in the business of building new airports. In fact, it would be fair to say that the market has been dead. But now things are heating up. Three major forces are changing the market. First, banks have started lending to aviation projects. Second, the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) is now issuing building permits. Third, our main competitor is excluded from bidding on this deal because of a conflict of interest.”

The target sees that there’s a market rationale for Joe’s airport deal. It makes sense. The combination of the bank’s new willingness to lend, the new FAA pressure on the airport, and the lack of competition have created the opportunity for this deal to happen now.

One of the most important things I’ve learned that has made every one of my deals possible is that targets simply do not like old deals. They want to see movement, and they don’t like deals that have been sitting around, ignored by other investors or partners. It would be like the copier salesperson saying, “Hey, how would you like the Model T100? We’ve had 50 of them in the warehouse forever.”

Introducing the Big Idea

This does not take 15 minutes. It takes 1 minute. You don’t have to explain the big idea in great detail. Oh, I know you want to. It’s instinctive: First, introduce yourself; then dive into details. I get the same urges. And this seems like the perfect time to do it. But it’s not time for details. Your target doesn’t want the deal yet. So the pitch temperature is cool. Lots of details will turn it cold. The details can come later. First, you will establish the big idea using an idea introduction pattern. The venture capitalist Geoff Moore developed this pattern in 1999, and it still works today.

The Idea Introduction Pattern

This idea introduction pattern goes like this:

“For [target customers]

Who are dissatisfied with [the current offerings in the market].

My idea/product is a [new idea or product category]

That provides [key problem/solution features].

Unlike [the competing product].

My idea/product is [describe key features].”

Here’s an example of a quick introduction for a big idea called the “EnergyTech 1000.”

Example 1

“For companies with large buildings in California and Arizona

Who are dissatisfied with their aging solar panels.

My product is a plug-and-play solar accelerator

That provides 35 percent more energy from old panels.

And unlike the cost of replacing panels,

My product is inexpensive and has no moving parts.”

That’s it. The big idea can be introduced with this pattern in about one minute.

Here’s another example of the idea introduction pattern.

Example 2

“For busy executives

Who don’t have enough work space on their computer monitor.

My product is a visual array

That provides eight flat-screen monitors, linked together, that can fit on any desk.

Unlike the common do-it-yourself solutions, having just two or three monitors,

My visual array lets executives use Excel, Firefox, Word, Gmail, Skype, Photoshop, Explorer, and TradingDesk at the same time with no confusing windows.”

Here’s how Joe used the idea introduction pattern to introduce his airport deal.

Example 3

“For investors needing a 10 percent cash yield or better

Who are dissatisfied with risky investments such as stocks.

My airport deal is a project with low risk and lots of protection

That provides a current cash flow.

And unlike most development projects, you can cash out any time you want.”

Certainly this does a lot to capture the target’s attention. It is important to realize, however, that capturing the target’s attention doesn’t mean that you are commanding attention. You will soon be skeptical that attention can ever be commanded. What’s worse, you’ll appreciate how it can be lost in a few seconds by making the wrong moves. The rudimentary model of how attention works goes like this: We notice things that have movement through space and time because they are likely to be important. But there’s a catch—a lot of the time things that move are also things we have to run away from. Starting from this premise, in the pitch we want to create attention without threat. This is why I have come to believe in—and rely on—the idea introduction pattern, because, of all the ways to introduce an idea, it does the least to trigger threat avoidance in the croc brain.

Neuroscientist Evian Gordon is convinced that minimizing danger and threats around us is “the fundamental organizing principle of the brain.” As I’ve said before, the croc brain doesn’t think about threats too deeply. It just reacts. It doesn’t stop to research whether the snake coming toward us is a copperhead or a cottonmouth.

Although this natural defense mechanism is beneficial in evolutionary terms, researchers believe that when we enter social situations (like a boardroom where we are expected to pitch), there’s one undeniable fact—we sense a potential threat to our own well-being. For example, we could get rejected. We could embarrass ourselves. We could lose the deal or lose face. When these social threats appear, the threat-avoidance system in our own brain starts pumping adrenaline and other neurotransmitters. Anxiety kicks in. We’ve all felt it—that moment when we are standing in front of an audience and it feels like they’re not paying attention. Our heart rate increases, our face turns flush, and sweat pores open up. We are responding to a social threat.

It’s important to recognize that humans are hardwired for social interaction. So, if you haven’t thought of social situations as potential threats, it’s might be time to start thinking that way now. In one study, researchers had subjects play a computer game where they thought they were throwing a digital “ball” with a few other participants. After a while of playing the game, the subject’s online partners started throwing the ball only to each other, leaving the subject as the odd-man out. Ouch! The researchers measured the subject’s reaction through brain scans. What they found is that social threats engage the same threat-response system in the brain as physical threats do. And to make matters worse, the brain can trigger threat responses far ahead of when you consciously become aware of the threat.

If you don’t use the idea introduction pattern to deliver the big idea (or some other highly controlled way to encapsulate the big idea), here’s how trouble can start brewing. First, the target picks up on your anxiety. Second, when you see the target get uncomfortable, you get more tense; you look tense. Third, an endless feedback loop starts: The targets senses your anxiety, and a similar threat response triggers in his system. You have lots more to do in this pitch, you’ve barely started, and you don’t want to get caught up in a negative-feedback loop. It’s too early in the pitch to start dealing with serious malfunctions.

The idea introduction pattern breaks the idea down to the essential basics: Here’s what it is; here’s who it’s for; and here’s who I compete with. No anxiety, no fear, no drama.

Let’s review the actions to take in phase 1 of the pitch:

• First, you put the target at ease by telling him in advance that the pitch is going to be short, just about 20 minutes, and that you’re not going to be hanging around too long afterward. This keeps the target’s croc brain focused on the here and now and feeling safe.

• Then, you give your background in terms of a track record of successes, not a long list of places and institutions where you simply “punched the clock.” There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the more you talk about your background, the more average it becomes because the target is hardwired to average information about you, not add it up.

• Next, you show that your idea is not a static flash of genius. Rather, there are market forces driving the idea, and you are taking advantage of a brief market window that has opened. (And you’ve admitted that there will be competition, showing that you’re not naive about business realities.)

• Because the brain pays attention to things that are in motion, you paint a picture of the idea moving out of an old market into a new one. Doing it this way, you don’t trigger change blindness, which would make your deal easy to neglect.

• Last, you bring the big idea into play using the idea introduction pattern. Now the target knows exactly what it is, who it’s for, who you compete with, and what your idea does better than the competition’s. This simple pattern makes sure that your idea is easy to grasp and focuses on what is real. This strategy works so well because it avoids triggering a threat response.

However, this method should not imply that everything in your pitch must be simplified and reduced—you’ll be delivering plenty of complex and detail-oriented information soon.

Phase 2: Explain the Budget and Secret Sauce

It’s been easy to maintain the target’s attention so far. In phase 1, all you had to do was introduce yourself and the big idea in about 5 minutes (or less.) In phase 2, it gets harder to hold the target’s attention. Now you have to explain what problems the big idea really solves and how it actually works. The opportunities to scare the croc brain seriously multiply when you start to explain how stuff works.

Over the years, an enormous amount of pressure has been put on businesspeople to make their complex ideas more simple—but few gurus have come up with methods to do this that translate into real-world success. At least I haven’t seen them—and I’ve been looking for 10 years.

The frustrating thing about simplicity is that it’s supposed to work wonders in a presentation. Summarize your information, make it supereasy to understand, roll the concepts into an “executive summary”—the target will love you for it.

I realize that what comes next goes against conventional wisdom, but what I’ve discovered is that simplicity doesn’t really matter. If it really worked, everyone would be doing it. But it doesn’t, and they aren’t. Simplicity can make you seem naive or unsophisticated. You can underwhelm the target with too little information just as easily as you can overwhelm him with too much information.

What you really want to do is tune the message to the mind of the target.

Think about the way you have to talk to a child. You don’t just make the thing you want to say simple. For example, if you want to say, “There’s no dessert being served before dinner is eaten,” you don’t make it more simple and say, “No dessert before dinner.” In fact, you might have to make it even longer and more complex, explaining the reasons. Again, what’s important is that a child’s mind is different from your own, and you have to understand how that mind reasons. This is why it’s so important to understand how the croc brain reasons. I’ve concluded that ideas you come up with using your problem-solving brain—the neocortex—must be intentionally retuned for the croc brain that will receive them.

Early in my work to figure this stuff out, I stumbled onto something cognitive psychologists called “theory of mind” that supports this. When you have a working theory of mind, you are able to understand how thoughts, desires, and intentions of others cause them to act. When someone can only see a situation one way, their theory of mind is weak. When you have a strong theory of mind, you recognize how other people have different perspectives—and that they know different things about the situation, and that their desires are not always the same as your desires. A strong theory of mind also will let you know that anything involving statistics needs to be highly simplified. The croc brain hates thinking about probabilities. Our advanced society had to invent complex formulas and equations for statistics exactly because our brains are not wired to think about statistics on their own. While there’s ongoing debate about what “complexity” the average audience will like and dislike, one thing is certain: If you’re describing relationships between people, you can provide plenty of detail. The brain is really good at understanding complex human relationships.

As I look back on my experiences, two giant realizations tower above all others:

Realization 1: It doesn’t matter how much information you give, a lot or a little, but instead how good your theory of mind is. In other words, it’s important how well you can tune your information to the other person’s mind.

Realization 2: All the important stuff must fit into the audience’s limits of attention, which for most people is about 20 minutes.

Get Their Attention

Earlier I said that one of the things that can go wrong is that your pitch is boring. In a large majority of presentations, this is the problem. In fact, virtually everyone is long-winded when they present. Yet there is absolutely no doubt among either executives or academics that audience attention fades out fast once a presentation has started. Studies of vigilance show that the targets generally can’t focus on an idea for more than a few minutes. Some believe that it is a few seconds. Either way, why quibble? Attention wavers almost uncontrollably. People’s minds wander. Distractions, from inside the person and the outside world, are constantly competing with your pitch. And anyway, even if there were no distractions, the brain is still a cognitive miser—it wants to exert as little energy as possible figuring out you and your idea.

What grabs the target’s attention, and once attention is grabbed, what holds it there?

Attention will be given when information novelty is high and will drift away when information novelty is low. You already know this. If your stuff looks boring, if it has no visual stimulus, is a bunch of cold, hard facts and involves spaghetti-like complexity—no one is going to offer you much attention.

Yet there’s nothing more important than attention. Oh, we can vigorously debate whether attention accounts for 70 percent of the reason someone succeeds with a pitch or 50 percent, but no one can seriously question that getting and holding attention are the biggest reasons a pitch either connects with the target and succeeds or misses the target and fails.

Looking at it another way, if the target were willing to pay attention to you for a few hours, then just about any pitch—good or bad—would work. But you don’t have hours. More likely, you’ve got those 20 minutes we’ve been talking about. And maybe, if you’re just winging it, you only have five minutes before your pitch wanders into a mental no-man’s land.

What Is Attention?

To control attention, I have always felt that it’s important to know what it’s made of. Attention is a sort of vague, all-encompassing term that seems to just define itself. But who would ever try to make a martini without knowing what’s in it first? I phrase the question this way because you’ll see in a moment that attention is just that—a cocktail of chemicals served up to the brain as a lubricant for social interaction. You need to know how to blend this perfect cocktail and when to serve it.

How did I find what the ingredients are? I didn’t have to. Researchers with brain scanners and hardcore neuroscience chops did the work. What they’ve worked out is that when a person is feeling both desire and tension, that person is paying serious attention to what’s in front of him or her.

The critical lesson of brain scans is that attention is always a delicate and unstable balancing act between desire and tension. It comes down to the presence of two neurotransmitters: dopamine and norepinephrine.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of desire.

Norepinephrine is the neurotransmitter of tension.

Together they add up to attention.

If you want someone’s undivided, fully engaged attention, you have to provide these two neurotransmitters. These two chemicals work together—you need them both to be coursing through the crocodile brain of the target. But each has a different triggering mechanism.

To give a dopamine kick and create desire, offer a reward.

To give a norepinephrine kick and create tension, take something away.

You’re going to learn the patterns for triggering the desire and tension right now.

What Does Dopamine Do? Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that chases rewards. It takes about 1/20 of a second for dopamine to guide humans toward some kind of action. Dopamine levels rise in the brain when you see or hear about something you want. When you see a person acting curious, open-minded, and interested in something—it’s dopamine that’s motivating them. A strong cup of coffee, Yohimbe root, cocaine, and the cold medication sudafed all increase dopamine levels in the brain. In most people, so does the thought of winning a large gamble or of even buying what’s known as an ornament—like a Rolex watch or some other status-enhancing product.

Dopamine release in the brain is connected to pleasure activities, such things as food, sex, and drugs. But now brain scans show that dopamine isn’t exactly the chemical of experiencing pleasure. Instead, it’s the chemical of anticipating a reward. In his book, Satisfaction, Dr. Greg Berns explains this: “How do you get more dopamine flowing in your brain? NOVELTY. A raft of brain imaging experiments has demonstrated that novel events … are highly effective at releasing dopamine. Your brain is stimulated by surprise because our world is fundamentally unpredictable.” He adds, “You may not always like novelty, but your brain does.”

You create novelty by violating the target’s expectations in a pleasing way.

Let’s review. When you introduce something novel to the target’s brain, a release of dopamine occurs. This triggers desire. For example:

A short product demo provides novelty.

A new idea provides novelty.

Good metaphors for otherwise complex subjects provide novelty.

Bright objects, moving objects, and unique shapes, sizes, and configurations all provide novelty.

You want the audience’s full attention, and you want to erase everything else audience members are paying attention to, so introduce novelty.

How Dopamine Leads the Feeling of Novelty. Until now, I’ve talked about the raw amount of information that comes into the brain and how it all can’t be processed at once. All this information and data from the senses collect in one small part of the brain. There has to be some way of selecting what to ignore and what to act on. Dopamine motivates the human body to act on some things and ignore others.

Research done at the University College London, written about by Wall Street Journal reporter Jason Zweig, suggests that getting what you expected to get produces no dopamine kick, but a novelty in the form of an unexpected gain gives the brain a blast of dopamine. On the other hand, if a reward you expected fails to materialize, then dopamine dries up, and negative feelings start happening.

Just like the martini making we talked about earlier, the amount of dopamine in the cocktail has to be just right. Not enough, and there is no interest in your or your ideas; too much, and there is fear or anxiety.

Earlier we also talked about the importance of a simple introduction to your big idea but that simple is not always better. The dopamine kick explains why: People enjoy some intermediate level of intellectual complexity. It has been argued that people are curious about things they cannot explain but that seem explainable—mystery stories work this way. And this, of course, is why novelty is so important in the pitch. Curiosity is the croc brain becoming interested—feeling like it’s safe to learn more. Curiosity derives from an information gap—the difference between what you know and what you want to know. This is the addictive quality of curiosity—and what you are trying to create for the target: curiosity about the big idea.

It’s only when the target feels that he knows enough to fully understand your big idea that the curiosity ends—and he becomes satiated. At that point of satiation, whether you recognize it or not, the pitch is over.

Novel information has the potential to trigger one of two responses—retreat or exploration. Curiosity is a feeling of novel information taking on the second, exploratory path, which is the first step toward a satisfying intellectual experience.

When a signal from the pitch tells the target there is something new to be discovered, dopamine is released in the brain. Unexpected (and pleasant) rewards release more dopamine than expected ones. But dopamine has a dark side, too; if the target is expecting a reward and don’t get it, dopamine levels fall off fast. And when dopamine levels drop that fast, the feeling of stress is just around the corner. Not only does the target stop taking in new information from you, but he starts forgetting the information you’ve already delivered.

In summary, expecting rewards generates dopamine. Dopamine is the buzz of novelty. Alone, however, it’s not enough to create attention. While dopamine is the chemical of curiosity, interest, and desire, it can’t generate attention without norepinephrine, which tends to create tension, and this is why I call it the chemical of alertness.

Tension

In the earlier discussion of novelty and desire, I talked about just half the formula for creating attention. The other half of that formula is tension. First, let’s start with some definitions: Tension is the introduction of some real consequences to the social encounter. It’s the response to a clear and unequivocal realization that something will be gained or lost. It is letting the target know that there are high stakes. Tension indicates consequences and therefore importance.

There’s no reason for the target to pay attention when there are no stakes—when tension is absent. A few words about the purpose of tension will help. Here we are interested in the interplay between pushing the target away and pulling him toward us. Not as a point of manipulation—at no point in the pitch are we ever interested in that—but as a way to keep the target alert. If you want your target focused and energized—to really pay full attention—you also must get him to stay alert. Tension accomplishes this by injecting a shot of norepinephrine into the target’s brain.

This brings us to an examination of the relationship between novelty and tension. Without both, Dennis, the avocado farmer, loses $640,000; Jaws becomes one of the worst movies of all time; and Benoit, the French waiter, can barely make a living.

We may never have thought about attention this way before, as a cocktail of neurotransmitters, and honestly, why bother now? We certainly don’t know what neurotransmitters are, and if we’re being honest with ourselves, this is something we don’t really care about at a deep level. To most of us, it’s worthwhile only in that it illustrates the following:

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The two parts of the attention cocktail are novelty and tension, which in a pitch work together in a feedback loop for about 20 minutes until—no matter what you do or how hard you try—they get out of balance and then stop working altogether.

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Tension comes from conflict. Some beginning presenters want to rely on their charisma (a pure form of novelty) and try to avoid all conflict in their pitch narrative. They want everyone to play nice. Only smiles, no grimaces. Why? Because in regular life, outside the pitch, confrontation can be stressful and nerve wracking, so it makes sense that we would try to avoid it everywhere. But in narrative- and frame-based pitching, you can’t be afraid of tension. In fact, you have to create it.

The rudimentary patterns I have outlined below have proved extremely rewarding in my career. This might seem surprising—and not because patterns are so simple and basic, but because they are intended to build tension. This is what has given me an edge.

There are three tension patterns, each with an increasing level of intensity. These are conversational patterns you can use at any point in a presentation when you sense the target’s attention dropping.

Low-Key, Low-Intensity Push/Pull Pattern.

PUSH: “There’s a real possibility that we might not be right for each other.”

[Pause. Allow the push to sink in. It must be authentic.]

PULL: “But then again, if this did work out, our forces could combine to become something great.”

Medium-Intensity Push/Pull Pattern.

PUSH: “There’s so much more to a deal than just the idea. I mean, there’s a venture-capital group in San Francisco that doesn’t even care what the idea is—they don’t even look at it when a deal comes in. The only thing they care about is who the people are behind the deal. That makes sense. I’ve learned that ideas are common, a dime a dozen. What really counts is having someone in charge who has passion and experience and integrity. So if you and I don’t have that view in common, it would never work between us.”

[Pause.]

PULL: “But that’s crazy to think. Obviously you value people over smart ideas. I’ve met corporate robots before that only care about numbers—and you are definitely not a robot.”

High-Intensity Push/Pull Pattern.

PUSH: “Based on the couple of reactions I’m getting from you—it seems like this isn’t a good fit. I think that you should only do deals where there is trust and deals you strongly believe in. So let’s just wrap this up for now and agree to get together on the next one.”

[Pause. Wait for a response. Start packing up your stuff. Be willing to leave if the target doesn’t stop you.]

There’s a two-way connection between pushing and pulling that, when it operates simultaneously, introduces enough tension to create alertness. If you always pull the target toward you, he or she becomes cautious and anxious. Constantly pulling someone in, also known as selling hard, is a signal of neediness. It’s a balancing act, of course, because if you are constantly pushing them away, they will take the hint and leave.

One of the most celebrated examples of this push/pull in the Pitch community involves Mad Men’s Don Draper, a pitchman for a fictional ad agency who gets a negative reaction from a client during a pitch. He pushes.

“Looks like there’s not much else to do here. Let’s call it a day,” he tells the client, extending a handshake. “Gentlemen, thank you for your time.” Draper stands up to leave.

I’ve watched the clip on many occasions, and the result always leaves me with a greater appreciation for the perfect push/pull delivery, one that creates a blast of norepinephrine in the client’s brain.

In the clip, the tension grows as the client, surprised, asks, “Is that all?”

Draper replies, “You’re a nonbeliever. Why should we waste time on Kabuki [theater]?”

The client responds to the push—suddenly interested in Draper’s ideas and paying attention, he asks Draper to sit back down.

Perhaps the most outstanding example of a push/pull pattern that I’ve encountered occurred some years ago when an audience tried to impose its will on me at a conference.

I was offered an opportunity to pitch my deals to a handful of the most influential investors in a $10 billion market. How could I resist? I would meet them at an upcoming conference in a closed-room, one-on-one experience. The conference organizers charged me $18,000 for the privilege, and they set it all up.

I gladly paid the fee, and I jumped my company jet to Denver, looking forward to a great opportunity to generate new business. After breakfast, I went up to the conference room, ready to rock. I walked in and was shocked by what I saw.

Inside the room were 25 people—more than I expected—and here was the kicker: They were not investors or buyers. They were due-diligence analysts. I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it.

A due-diligence analyst, as the name suggests, is someone whose job is to analyze and evaluate a deal based on facts and figures. These are neocortex people, and they are tough to pitch because they are all about numbers and are trained to avoid emotion. Imagine a bunch of nicely dressed robots looking for flaws in everything you do and say. Dealing with just one of these people is hard enough, but now I stood in front of 25 of them. And none of them could pull the trigger on a deal, anyhow. This was the worst possible audience for my deal.

The tables and chairs were set up in a U-shape, and I stepped up in the horseshoe, despite my misgivings. I started my pitch by passing out our marketing materials—a beautiful 56-page deal book.

The book outlined the math behind a new kind of financial technique called bifurcation, which can really amplify profits. As the audience studied it page by page, I launched into my pitch. And I absolutely nailed it—or so I thought. But my pitch was all dopamine and no epinephrine—that is to say, all promise of reward and no tension. I looked up at one point, hoping to see smiling faces, expecting to hear a barrage of questions from these due-diligence guys. Instead, I got stone cold faces looking back at me. Silence. Not a single question. Imagine looking out at 25 concrete garden gnomes. I can’t remember such a nonresponse to one of my pitches. Ever! This doesn’t mean that the targets were unreachable. It just means that they had strong analyst frames that were not easily disrupted.

I said, “Guys, since you can’t think of any questions to throw at me, let me get those bifurcation books back from you.” I started walking around the horseshoe, taking them gently out of their hands. In some cases, I had to pull more aggressively. That’s when I knew: I had the prize frame. Now they had something to lose—and questions started flowing. Over the next two years, I closed over $5 million with these targets.

To hold your target’s attention, there must be tension—a form of low-level conflict—guiding the interaction. If there’s no conflict, the target may be politely “listening,” but there’s no real connection. The target is thinking, “He seems like a nice guy, and his idea seems good, but I have other things to worry about right now.”

This is a confidence problem. I used to be afraid of creating tension. I was afraid to do anything that might upset the target in any way. Sure, when you and the target are each nodding in happy agreement, it feels great in the moment. You think to yourself, it’s a lovefest. But when it goes on too long with no counterbalance—it’s boring. At the end, the target gets up and says, “That was really nice,” and then walk away. Targets want a challenge of some sort. They don’t want the easy answers.

If there’s a single reason why some of my most important pitches failed, it’s because I was nice and the audience was nice, and we were all very polite with each other. There was no tension or conflict. Conflict is the basis of interesting human connections.

As businesspeople, we come together to find solutions to problems—not to admire problems that have already been solved for us. If you don’t have a series of challenges for the target to over-come—with pushes and pulls and tension loops—then you don’t have a pitch narrative.

A pitch narrative can be thought of as a series of tension loops. Push then pull. Create tension. Then resolve it.

When there’s no tension between you and the target, there’s no interest in what happens. The target also has no emotional involvement in what’s going on. In other words, the target doesn’t much care about what you do, why you’re doing it, or what happens to you after you leave. Without tension loops, nothing is compelling the reader to stay with the pitch storyline.

The Heart of the Pitch

Once you have attention by creating desire and tension—you’re ready to deliver the heart of your pitch. But keep moving fast because this cocktail of dopamine and norepinephrine you’re serving is sloshing around in the brain of the target in the right combination for just a few minutes. And as we discussed earlier, no matter how hard you work, eventually the target’s desire is going to become fear, and the tension in the room is going to turn into anxiety.

The greatest problem in short-form pitching is deciding what details and specifics to single out for attention—what to leave in and what to leave out. And since I’ll need to give you specific examples, I think that selling a company or raising money is a good framework in which to discuss this subject. For one thing, it is the market with which I am most familiar. I have been working in the capital markets for about 15 years. For another, these markets have provided a fantastic test bed for me because hard data and fast feedback have been readily available. I’ve got this down to a method.

Actually delivering the core of the pitch is very straightforward stuff. The main requirement is that you understand that what’s happening in your mind is not what’s happening in the target’s mind. Package the information for the croc brain, as I described in Chapter 1. Big picture. High contrast. Visual. Novel. With verified evidence.

Before you decide to spend too much time on this part of the presentation, remember that the following items are a simple punchlist of issues that most pitches have to cover. These are the prerequisites. The stuff you have to have no matter what. It’s the minimum information you need to show up and be relevant.

Recognize that you can be incredible at turning a business plan into an executive summary or any other kind of elevator pitch and still have that pitch fail miserably. Doing a good job here is not about some genius new way of organizing and presenting information. Would you argue? We don’t need yet another organizing theory for information. The basics work fine. What we need is a way to present this material without the target becoming too analytical about it.

When it comes to a choice of what to focus on when pitching the plan that will make the big idea work, I would start by presenting the budget because most people screw this up. It’s your chance to be different.

Pitching Numbers and Projections

In his book High Tech Ventures, Gordon Bell writes, “Start-ups often prepare absurdly aggressive and optimistic plans, which have a very low likelihood of success, just to maximize the company’s perceived dollar value.” Your financial projections, whether for a product or a company, are supposed to answer such basic questions as, How strong is the company? What if plans go awry, does the company have enough cash to last a few bad quarters? Do you know how to budget well?

A word of caution, however, as you approach these topics: Every experienced buyer and investor knows that you will be doing these two things:

1. Saying that your budgets are “conservative”

2. Preparing absurdly aggressive and optimistic plans

To the investor, for example, every pro forma looks the same, a hockey stick chart that shows the following: We need lots of money today, and way down the road we’ll make it back (sometimes it works out that way; usually it doesn’t).

Unrealistic budgets and miscalculating costs are the greatest risks to a growing company, especially startups. How do you get around the skepticism that surely will fall on your plans? Focus on demonstrating your skill at budgeting, which is a difficult and highly regarded executive talent. Spend almost no time on your skills at projecting revenue—a task any simpleton can perform.

Competition

The act of introducing the budgets to the target will lead him or her to wonder, Who does the big idea compete with? This is a valid question that you cannot ignore. The attractiveness of an idea is based on the industry it’s in and how much competition there is. Yet almost no one describes the competition they face in adequate terms. Let’s do it right in the pitch. Here are the two major elements of competition:

1. How easy it is for new competitors to jump in the game?

2. How easy it is for customers to switch out your product with another?

Secret Sauce

To avoid the impression that you are a come-and-go idea that will shine brightly in the market one day and be forgotten soon after, you’ll need to show what your competitive advantage is based on. This one thing will give you staying power against competition. In almost every pitch situation, you need something special. Briefly describe it as your “secret sauce”—the unfair advantage you have over others.

You don’t have to get too fancy here—just don’t take longer than 10 minutes to describe the fundamental workings of your big idea—because you’re going to need the last five minutes to offer the deal and stack the frames.

Think the need to move fast doesn’t apply to you? You want to leisurely take an hour to do all this? I’ve met many people who don’t believe in the limits of human attention and feel exempt from the consequences of running long. An investment banker I know brags, “I can read them the phone book for an hour, and they’ll pay attention.” Is the science wrong—should we forget about dopamine and epinephrine cocktails entirely?

Consider for a minute the actor Jerry Seinfeld. His movie, Comedian, is a behind-the-scenes look at the business of performing comedy. In it, Seinfeld reveals the difficulty of being in front of an audience. He is one of the most recognized personalities anywhere in the world. Probably the best-known comedian on the planet. Sure, there’s Chris Rock, Dave Chappelle, and Robin Williams, but really, when you think about it, Jerry Seinfeld is as big as it gets.

When he decides to go on the road to test new material, Jerry says that it’s not as easy as you might think. He can walk on the stage anywhere, even a small town, and it’s clear that the audience knows he’s one of the most accomplished performers of modern times, with over $1 billion of television revenues. They’re thrilled to be in the presence of a man so popular and funny. But the thrill doesn’t last long.

“I have about three minutes where they will just listen to whatever I have to say,” Seinfeld says. “But after that—it can fall apart fast. I get no credit. After three minutes, I have to be just as funny as any other comedian. That’s it—three minutes.”

And there’s more to the story. Seinfeld became aware of the three-minute mark because it takes him as long as a month of full-time work to build up just three minutes of quality content. When he first goes out on tour, that’s about all the material he starts with. Three minutes. It takes him months more of steady work to build up 20 minutes of material that can hold an audience’s attention. That’s worth thinking about. One of the most well-known performers and presenters in the world has to put in months of hard work to build up 20 minutes of material—and when he eventually goes on stage, the average audience will cut him slack for only three minutes. After that, the material had better be really good, or the audience will turn on him.

So when we frame the issue of how long a pitch should be, with the Jerry Seinfeld story in mind, it becomes easier to understand why time is so precious in the pitch: How long can you really be interesting to listen to? Perhaps there is someone who can pitch a deal as dull as the phone book for an hour, which is up to three times the basic limits of human attention, but if so, he or she is a lot smarter and more charismatic than Seinfeld or any other entertainer.

Phase 3: Offer the Deal

In the third phase of the Pitch process, you need to do one thing and do it well: Describe to your audience what they are going to receive when they decide to do business with you. You’ll want to push through this quickly for the sake of time—and get back to framing.

In clear and concise terms, tell the audience exactly what you will be delivering to them, when it will be delivered, and how. If they play a part in this process, explain what their roles and responsibilities will be. Don’t drill down into a lot of detail; just provide summarized facts that they need to know so that their mental picture of your offering is complete.

It does not matter if you are offering a product, a service, an investment, or an intangible—there will be a fulfillment process involved, and that is what you must explain.

Keep it brief but rich in high-level details so there is no question as to what the audience is going to get. And remember, the most important deliverable in your deal is you.