The art of pitching

Earl Weaver once said that the key to winning baseball games is pitching. I am not a baseball expert, but I would expand this to say that the way to win in a professional environment is pitching.

What is the first thing that comes to mind hearing ‘pitching’ (in a professional sense)?

I associated it to entrepreneurs, sales people, and consultants. I never took a training, thinking it wasn’t for me. Last week I took the chance, and in the spirit of the ‘summer of learning’ I went to a workshop run by Cecile of Speak4impact (public speaking Jedi extraordinaire).

It was a revelation. During the 2 hours workshop we created several versions of a pitches (from 30” to 2:30”) on a project of our choice. The result, was that I ended the course with the clearest understanding of what I wanted to accomplish and how, than I ever had in a career of preparing executive presentations and project briefs. I have tried to condense the key ah! moments of why I think how to pitch should be part of any company on boarding training below.

- A pitch is about your users. It’s not possible to write an effective pitch without understanding what users need. This forced me to be externally focused, and step by step ask myself deeper questions, and not stop on the surface. Not unlike a ‘5 why’ process, I had to dig deeper, into the emotional impacts, to be able to create clear and effective hook.

- Pitching sharpens your concept. The Feynman technique says that the best way to learn anything is to explain to a toddler. Identify gaps, go back and review. In the case of pitching, we are not dealing with toddlers, but with busy consumers, stakeholders and sponsors that often cannot spare us more than 5’ of their attention (not dissimilar from the time of a toddler attention span).

- An effective pitch creates engagement. A successful pitch goes deep into the ‘pain’ of our users, and how we plan to fix it. Emotional hooks create engagement. Think about what could happen if instead of just communicating, we would pitch projects not only to the sponsors, but to our own teams, stakeholders, internal users etc. If we can create an emotional engagement, and tailor the pitch to cover what’s in it for them, wouldn’t we have a higher engagement instead of resistance to change?

- Spikes creativity. Most of my work is focused on logic, process and numbers, and so are my projects. In the past, when going from the ideation phase, to the ‘selling concept’ and execution, I never took a step back to really write in full sentences (instead of bullet points on a power point) what the objective was. My brain never switched from ‘project and process mode’. Taking the time to write my pitch word for word, created distance between my project and my daily routine and alerted my brain that we were doing something different. Somehow this sparked a creative flow that in the past I only achieved during my long runs.

Do you have experience with pitching in a corporate context? Have you run or attended pitching training offered to non sales functions? Please leave a comment. I would love to exchange more ideas and learn from your experiences.