Pitch a Conversation
“I went to a presentation once and a conversation broke out!”
— With apologies to Professional Hockey
Something goes haywire in the mind when you’re invited to “Pitch…” The normal intelligence which drives your business behavior short circuits and you fall back to the basic question: “What am I going to say?”
There, on a lonely island in a sea of Idea Soup, you start examining every single thing you might present, wondering if, in fact, you should really say it.
Multiply that by the number of players on the team and a kind of intellectual paralysis sets in. Everyone pitching another idea or series of them as “worth inclusion” in the great stew of ideation which in normal business passes for a new business pitch. It’s a problem made worse by every added player.
You need a Quarterback, supported by an unbending Team Captain to make the final decisions.
And while you’re at it, you need two distinct lists of teammates. They’re the same people, each playing a dual role:
- The Pitch Team: Who says What, bringing and covering how many areas of expertise?
- The Presentation Team: Who Decides, Calls Plays, Handles Media, Answers Questions, Wrangles Materials, Greets and Introduces?
When you’re on the stage as part of an ensemble, you don’t just magically come together and mesh perfectly at Kick Off on presentation day…
You Rehearse! Really! (Until you get it right and you can do it perfectly, professionally and personally in spite of the multiple upsets that always accompany a pitch…)
You know all of this of course, which is what makes everyone emotionally recoil when a pitch opportunity presents itself.
So consider “getting in shape to pitch” long before an actual opportunity appears.
Get a coach, and get a workout with your chosen pitch partners. Get a feel and an appreciation for each other’s relative skills, both intellectual and emotional. Late the night before, someone is going to have to pull it together and crack the right joke to get everyone over the hump. It’s good to get that, and all the other team psychology questions established and answered far in advance, so on the real day, you just line up and do the drill.
It’s a matter of preparedness. If you know who’s a good Opener, who does great Late Research, who’s the Electronics Whisperer, who’s great with Questions and who should make the Instant Decision when it’s time to close; you’re ahead of the game. And you’re going to appear as if you’ve done this successfully a thousand times.
So you finish the gig and they retire to get coffee and walk around to decide.
All the teams had things to say. Two of them had a handle on the business, the execution and the strategy. But only one had all that and could lay aside their script to have a conversation.
And that makes all the difference.
Applications
1. For You
The secret to winning business is not the offer, not the presentation, but the confidence that you get them. Of course you have to be stellar and smart, but after those things are calculated, they have to like you. “Likability” has a lot to do with having the material and the stagecraft down cold; leaving you some space to actually connect and converse with the listeners…
2. For the Family
Getting past the script and the artificial quality that takes hold the first time you face an audience — that’s the hurdle the kids face when they first address an audience, or worse, do it with other people as an ensemble… So Mom and Dad, your best contribution is to browbeat the cast into not just one rehearsal, but several! That makes all the difference!
3. For the Pitch Team
You have to want it badly enough to suffer through the entire process, not just the strategizing and scripting, but the multiple rehearsals required for you to absorb the material and allow yourself to freely interact with the audience/prospect. You can’t interact if you’re tied to reading a script. The whole point of those multiple team rehearsals is to rise above the script — allowing them to see, connect with, and like the genuine you. That’s a big gamble — which has big rewards.
4. For the Team Captain
Many individuals are nervous about presenting, and catatonic about pitching. The last thing they want or prepare for is casting the script aside and freelancing at the end to nail a contract. But that’s often what’s required to win.
When you choose your team, select for more than mere expertise.
Select for great presenters, then rehearse them until they become a flexible, personable, ensemble.
In the end, you’re hoping for a conversation to break out!
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