I am contacted regularly by organisations, be they large or small, who have pitched and failed to have successful outcomes, be it to win sales or investment.
I explain to my clients that the pitch is in lots of ways similar to a ‘First Date’.
On the ‘First Date’, if you keep talking about how wonderful you are and all the great things you have done, you are very likely to bore your date to distraction and highly unlikely to get a second date.
Impress the audience or bore them?
Take a long hard look at your last failed pitch; were the earlier slides all about you and your organisation? Then, usually the presentation moves on to a statistics and technical overload that the audience may not need to know in any great detail, if at all!
Is there a better way – YES
Talk about what is essential to the audience, their problem!
At the start of the presentation, talk about your understanding of the audience’s current situation and the problem they wish to solve.
(This is where previous meetings, a review of their website and LinkedIn profiles of your audience will pay dividends).
When you do this, you will be acknowledged as an expert as opposed to someone wishing to sell a product or idea.
In this aspect of the presentation, you should be encouraging as much interaction as possible, leading to engagement with you and not their screens.
Once it’s clear that you understand their problem and have demonstrated your expertise in this area, it’s now time to tell them about yourself and your organisation.
Are they more likely to listen and want to know more? YES.
How do you fix their problem?
The next step is to explain to them using an appropriate level of detail what you will do to fix their problem.
In this part of the presentation, it’s your job to convince the audience using facts/features to explain the benefits of your proposal to the audience.
The End
When bringing the presentation to a conclusion, you need to remind the audience of the problem that they have and how as a result of your intervention their problem is no more.
E.g.
- Energy usage down 35%
- Defects in production reduced to acceptable levels.
- Production lines stoppages dramatically reduced.
- Use of pesticides reduced by 25%
- Tender pitch success rates have improved from 1 in 10 to 1 in 3
Talk Worm not Cake
I have now published over 60 articles and spoken to thousands of people about how to be successful when pitching for sales or investment.
If you were to remember nothing else other than these concluding few lines, you will dramatically improve your communication skills and business growth opportunities.
When you go fishing you put a worm on the hook, not cake! (I like cake, fish like worms)
The same applies when pitching for business, you need to talk to your prospect about what’s attractive to them (worm) and not about what you want (cake).
