“The aggregation of marginal gains”

As a one-time track athlete it is tough to acknowledge that cycling will now be the number one Olympic sport and much of that is down to one man, Dave Brailsford, Director of Team GB’s cyclists. The tenet of his philosophy is the “aggregation of marginal gains”, a simple desire to seek tiny improvements in many areas that add up to a significant gain.

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It is a philosophy that should apply to the competitive pitch where winning margins are also often by inches and not the proverbial mile and it starts with an attitude, in his case “We are driven by not wanting to lose more than wanting to win. We’re not bad losers, we just hate it.”

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For Brailsford selecting the right team and then fostering team spirit was a key. He spent some three years identifying the perfect team to support, protect and deliver Bradley Wiggins to the Yellow jersey,while managing highly competitive egos, like Mark Cavendish and Chris Froome. The resulting teamwork won the day. How often in the business pitch do the egos stumble over each other?

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When it came to preparation Brailsford took nothing for granted. Wiggins was already a proven Gold medal cyclist and fit beyond normal doubt. This was not enough and no other team approached the Tour so clinically and this included bringing innovative training regimes from outside cycling, notably the GB swimming team.

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It was Brailsford’s ‘aggregation of marginal gains’ that was the platform for success but it was the genius of Bradley Wiggins that delivered. Trying to explain what makes him so special Shane Sutton, his coach, said “he digs deep”. But said the interviewer “don’t all these cyclists dig deep?” A pause, then, “He digs deeper than the rest. When he shoves his hand in the coals of a fire, he holds it there longer!”

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Work the relationship.

So often the feedback after a close pitch will be that there was little to separate them, “we just felt the working relationship would be better”. In other words they felt the emotional connection was stronger. Feelings rather than rational judgement have influenced the decision.

It is not news to any experienced pitcher that likeability and relationships can outweigh the good creative or technical solution -where real differentiation is tough to achieve. And yet frequently the effort and energy on the solution will be all consuming at the expense of focus on the relationship opportunity. There are two phases to consider.

The first, whether the prospect has met you or not, is the relationship they already have with your corporate brand. They will bring this into the pitch. The positives will have allowed them to short list you but they will have some doubts that will need countering. The creative maverick will need to convince on delivery. The reassuring market leader may be seen as less interested. The brilliantly professional may be seen as too cool.

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In the early days of Saatchi & Saatchi, the attractive brand image of daring creativity and outrageous success was tempered by concerns of ‘difficult to work with’. As soon as they met the agency, these concerns vanished under the charm offensive mounted by Maurice Saatchi and Tim Bell. Cementing relationships was key to their pitch strike rate.

The second opportunity lies in the time between the brief and the presentation. This may be a matter of days or of months. Typically a hell of a lot of time and effort will go in to analysis, briefing meetings, familiarisation visits, document writing with the aim of being better prepared than rivals and, of course, impressing the prospect.

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All admirable provided the time is seriously used to foster and consolidate relationships. Keep on evaluating them all the time, across the board. Simply put, the prospect should like you more, be more comfortable with you and more engaged by you than with any of your competitors.

This is the vital groundwork that sets up the pitch to close the emotional connection.

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Just be yourself.

Easy to say but not always easy to do in a competetitive pitch. Or in an interview. The pressures, particularly for the less experienced, will include the usual suspects- worry about your script, letting the team down, looking nervous, making eye contact, handling visuals, getting your message across, creating the right impression and so on….

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With experience the suspects dwindle and your normal self, performing at its best, comes into play. And most people do have such a self. This is the one that comes alive in animated conversation where strongly held views are being expressed, and listened to. About a ‘must see’ movie, the restaurant you must try or whether Beckham deserved selection.

In these conversations you will not gaze, with unflinching eye contact, trying to dominate your audience or trot out a shopping list of loud uninterrupted reasons why. You will, naturally, gesture to make a point, you will, naturally, pause for thought, you will attack key phrases for emphasis and you will use occasional eye contact to check your message is connecting. Everyone has their own characterisic best self and this is what is needed in the pitch.

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Usually, unless nerves really take over, this best self will start to assert itself as the pitch goes on but this may be too late. First impressions matter! All the emotional judgement swings into action in those few early seconds and will colour the rational conclusions of your audience throughout the pitch. Worse still, your ‘ inhibited’ self is not the one that inspires you, which makes inspiring the audience difficult.

Experience, training, rehearsal are all important, but one way to hit the ground running with your best self is to focus your preparation on how you start the pitch, start each segment, start each new argument. Think of your first words as the most important. Words that are natural to you and words, like signposts, that allow you to introduce the subject with confidence and attack. Get these right and all that follows will be easier.

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As Oscar Wilde said, “Be yourself. Everyone else is already taken”.

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And if you can’t find that best self take Bob Marley’s advice: “When you smoke the weed it reveals you to yourself “.

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The pitch and the passion

Is passion the most over used word in the pitch?

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The dictionary definitions include “object of intense desire”, or “a strongly felt emotion such as love, hate or envy” or for passionate, “capable of revealing intense emotion”. How often, truthfully, can these expressions describe your response to any aspect of your pitch or the prospect? And yet passion will be ‘claimed’.

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To impress people about your wit, you don’t claim “I am funny”, you make them laugh. (Incidentally, unless you are indeed genuinely funny, don’t try jokes in a pitch.) Even more so, if you want people to feel your passion, do not proclaim it. “We are genuinely passionate about your project” will ring false.

Either you are passionate or you are not. Generally you can’t just add a dose of ‘manufactured enthusiasm’, or instant ‘professional passion’ during rehearsal and expect it to work on your audience. “Instant passion is like instant coffee; it’s quick and makes you wish you had a percolator”. Cala Lane.

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Passion has become a lazy way to communicate willingness to work hard for a client, or customer, says James Edsberg, of strategy consultancy Gullandpadfield www.gullandpadfield.com who lists’ lazy’ passion killer advertisers such as Deutsche Bank “Passion to perform, Purina Catfood “Your pet. Our passion”, Microsoft “Your potential. Our passion” and Fiat “Driven by passion”.

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So if overt declaration of passion may be rejected what is the solution? As always, any pitch will be down to what people feel. Do they like you? Do you really, really want to work with them? Does your solution turn you on? If it doesn’t, it won’t inspire them. Have you made an emotional connection?

“Passion is the energy that comes from bringing more of YOU into what you do”

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Getting into the role

Any pitch however informal calls for a degree of performance. You need to project personality and sell yourself before you can sell your company or your solution. For some, the so-called born salesmen, this comes naturally. For most of us there is a need to find a little of the actor inside, to put on a show that convinces.

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A talented young drama student explained how an actor gets into a role. It starts with what are known as the “given circumstances”. These are the facts that describe the basics of the character. Sex, age, occupation, nationality and of course the script itself. For the pitch these facts will include the content and structure, the rational arguments and proposals. (For many this is as far as ‘performance’ goes.)

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For the actor the next critical step is to understand the “super objective”. Just what is it that the play is all about and what must this role contribute emotionally to get the desired audience response. In a pitch the aim will be to put across the proposal, of course, but to do this in a way that makes an emotional connection with an audience of perhaps only three or four.

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The actor does not make an instant judgement on how to imbue the role with an emotional truth. It takes time. “Time to ponder” and find a way into the role that is not forced but draws on a personal interpretation. Only then can they perform with the honesty demanded of good performance.

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Most pitches will not have the benefit of a great script and quite often the content difference between pitches will be slight. In this situation the temptation is to perfom with what can at best be termed ‘manufacured enthusiasm’ or ‘professional passion’.Generally speaking this will not make the holy grail of an emotional connection. The solution? Take time and search for an element in your pitch that allows you get personal, a story perhaps, that helps you talk with real conviction and even passion.

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