The Art of Pitching

Earl Weaver once said that the key to winning baseball games is pitching. I’m not a baseball expert, but if you want to win in a professional environment, you need to know how to pitch.

What’s the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word ‘pitching’ (in a professional sense)?

In the past, I’ve associated it with what entrepreneurs, sales people, and consultants do. I never took a training or explored the topic, thinking it just wasn’t for me.

In the spirit of the ‘summer of learning’, I took a chance and went to a workshop run by Cécile Bastien Remy (self-described public speaking Jedi extraordinaire) of Speak4Impact . During the 2 hour workshop, we created several versions of a pitch (from 30 seconds to 3 minutes) on a project of our choice.

It was a revelation for me. When it was all said and done, I ended the course with the clearest understanding of what I wanted to accomplish and how.

The following is a condensed version of my key “ah-hah!” moments from the workshop:

1. 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, ask deeper questions, and not stop on the surface. Not unlike the‘5 why’ process, I had to explore the emotional impacts to create a clear and effective hook.
2. Pitching sharpens your concept.
   The Feynman technique teaches us that the best way to learn anything is to explain to a toddle, identify gaps, go back and review. In the case of pitching, we’re not dealing with toddlers, but with busy consumers, stakeholders and sponsors that often cannot spare us more than 5 minutes of their attention (not unlike a toddler’s attention span).
3. An effective pitch creates engagement.
   A successful pitch goes deep into the ‘pain’ of your users, and how you 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 and internal users? 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?
4. Pitching spikes creativity.
   Most of my work is focused on logic, process and numbers. When transitioning from the ideation phase to ‘selling the concept’ and executing, I never took a step back to really write in full sentences what the objective was. My brain never deviated from ‘project and process mode’.
   
   Taking the time to write my pitch word for word created distance between my project and my daily routine. It alerted my brain that I was doing something different. This sparked a creative flow that I had only experienced when going for long runs.

After going through Cecile’s workshop, I feel that the concept of pitching should be part of any key training or company on-boarding process.

How about yourself? 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 ideas and learn more from your experiences.