Tag Archives: pitchcoach

RHETORIC IS ALIVE AND WELL

It has been a good week for rhetoric. It started with Stephen Fry on BBC Radio 4, with his English Delight series, hosting an entertaining and informative programme under the heading ‘Rhetoric Rehabilitated.’ This reminded us that despite the popular dismissal of rhetoric as political spin, it is in fact alive and well and underpins most persuasive communication, whether we realise it or not.

It has been a good week because several public figures have demonstrated rhetoric at its best, not least of course Martin Luther King in various anniversary programmes. In different ways they have brought to life the art of rhetoric, built around the five canons or parts; invention, arrangement, style, memory and delivery. All are as relevant to developing the political address as they are to the professional business pitch. Continue reading →

THE FRONT COVER JUDGEMENT.

As the idiom goes, “Don’t Judge a Book by its Front Cover.” The reality of course is that most of us do just that. The look of the cover alone is a big factor in the buying decision and even influences our enjoyment of the read.

We ‘should’ be judging on intrinsic values such as the writing, the story and the characters but in the main we respond to the visual clues around style, genre and subject. The look alone is a significant communication. It acts powerfully to raise our expectations and to influence our enjoyment, and experience, of the real thing. Continue reading →

LESSONS FROM THE GENERALS

They may not be wars but pitches are battles. To win you have to succeed on two fronts. You must beat your rivals and you must win-over the hearts and minds of the prospect. Not surprisingly the world’s great military strategists are worth listening to.

“In war, three quarters turns on personal character and relations; the balance of manpower and materials counts only for the remaining quarter.” Napoleon.

Your content, size and clever solution may meet the rational brief, but the people and chemistry, the relationship building and the emotional connection count for the three quarters. He also said “A a picture is worth a thousand words.” Continue reading →

THE KILLER PITCH

In the June edition of Harvard Business Review one of the most popular articles is the excellent How to give a Killer Presentation. It is written by TED curator, Chris Anderson who describes the process developed, in over 30 years of TALKS, for helping inexperienced presenters “frame, practice and deliver talks that people enjoy watching….cycles of devising (and revising) a script, repeated rehearsals, and plenty of fine tuning.”

On the basis of this experience, he is convinced that “giving a good talk is highly coachable. In a matter of hours a speaker’s content and delivery can be transformed from muddled to mesmerising.,.and that the lessons learned are surely useful to other presenters,including anyone pitching”. He is right and the article is a must-read guide to creating the killer pitch.

frame 3 Frame Your Story

There are differences, of course, between a talk where your audience is judging you as a speaker-engaging, entertaining, thought provoking -and a pitch, where your audience is judging you as a team in direct competition with other teams. In both cases however it is the emotional response that counts and his most valuable lesson is all to do with how you frame your story.

“There’s no way you can give a good talk unless you have something worth talking about. Conceptualising and framing what you want to say is the most vital part of a presentation. The most engaging speakers do a superb job of very quickly introducing the topic, explaining why they care so deeply about it, and convincing the audience members that they should too”.

In more mundane pitch speak, this is the ‘tell’em what you are gonna tell’em’ phase of the presentation. It is potentially the most telling,and compelling part of your argument told when your audience is most alert and most receptive to the well framed promise you are making. Think like the chess masters who plot the killer opening to gain early advantage. Capturing the emotional high ground at the outset will raise the level of engagement throughout.

This is where story telling scores. “Many of the best talks have a narrative structure that loosely follows a detective story. The speaker starts out by presenting a problem and then describes the search for a solution.” In the pitch, as in the talk, bring things to life with examples. Lots of them.

Plan an opening salvo! “Ideas and stories fascinate us. (Organisations bore us-they’re much harder to relate to. Business people especially take note: Don’t boast about your company; rather tell us about the problem you’re solving)”.

“If a talk fails. it’s almost always because the speaker didn’t frame it correctly, misjudged the audience’s level of interest, or neglected to tell a story.”

Please miss, tell us a story, pleeease…

Most failed pitches will share the characteristic of too much content. They fall into the irresistible trap of more is best, cramming in every salient fact, compelling case-histories, blinding statistics, unique reasearch findings, unassailable track records, irrefutable claims of superiority and differentiation.

This ignores the simple truth. It’s not what you put in to a pitch that matters. It’s what your audience takes out. At best this will be three or four key messages and an emotional response that will always outweigh the rational one.

This is where storytelling comes in. Since that famous time, immemorial, stories or narratives have been shared in every culture. Booker Prize writer, A.S.Bryant: “narration is as much a part of human nature as breath and the circulation of the blood. Indeed as human beings we are all natural storytellers…. some more innately skilled than others, but we all have stories to tell”.

So the moral of this particular tale is to sacrifice some content and tell a story. As long as it has some relevance it can come from personal experience or be a formal case history described anecdotally. Just as they did when children, your audience of hardened business professionals will listen and engage with your story, with their imaginations coming into play. They will remember the stories long after they forget the rest of your important argument.

The other plus side of the story is this. It is much easier in the heat of a pitch to tell a story naturally, and with confidence, than it is to present the compelling arguments. And the sooner you bring in your stories, the sooner you and your audience will relax.

Build on this confidence by acting the story, as you would for children. Pause for dramatic effect ( the wolf dressed as grandma), expansive open gestures (the beanstalk reaching the sky) and smile (the happy ending). All are aspects of your performance that can say ‘you are delighted to be here’.

Remember, in any pitch, storytelling is the way to make the emotional connection and that you, the storyteller, are the most important element. It’s all about you and your team.