You Were Born to Pitch Badly
Photo by Pierre Bamin on Unsplash
Winning the pitch hinges on your ability to perform a crucial task: communicating to your prospect that your agency is more qualified to do the job successfully than your competitors.
You do this by:
Demonstrating knowledge you’ve gained from past relevant experiences.
Proving, through case studies and client testimonials, that you’ve successfully solved similar problems in the past.
Showing you have a methodology or approach that leads to repeatable success.
Offering insights or a point of view that you’ve cultivated over time and through experience that indicates you may have cracked a code that still leaves others stumped.
It all sounds pretty straightforward—the stuff pitches are made of. So why are so many agency pitches criticized for being, among other things, too long, too confusing, disjointed, rushed, or downright boring?
Because there’s a fundamental disconnect between how we transmit our message and how our audience receives it.
Blame it on human evolution.
We carry around some legacy systems within us, including the amygdala, the part of our brain known colloquially as the “lizard brain”. It’s the oldest part of our brain, but still essential as it’s responsible for survival instincts such as aggression and fear that keep us safe and alive.
It takes its job very seriously, but it’s not so good at complex problem-solving.
Then, as we evolved into primates, our brains evolved too and we developed a neocortex, the most highly evolved part of the brain. It’s responsible for complex problem-solving, reasoning, languages, and abstraction.
Lucky us! Except that sometimes the neocortex forgets to take the lizard brain into consideration and that’s when we get into trouble.
Here’s the thing—when we encounter any incoming message—from the simplest to the most complex—it’s filtered first by our lizard brain.
The lizard brain asks, “Does this message represent a threat or something safe and pleasurable?”. This happens before our neocortex has a chance to kick into problem solving mode and help us analyze a situation or interpret meaning.
The problem is, when we sit down to think about how to finely craft our pitch, we go straight to the neocortex to get the job done.
Why? Because the neocortex is what we use to communicate abstract ideas and concepts, which are exactly what you’re pitching when you’re presenting your agency’s qualifications.
And so, we call on the neocortex for help, and it obliges by spitting out something like this:
“We are a next-generation brand response agency, offering a full suite of performance marketing and media services. Our focus is to align strategic planning, world-class analytics and flawless execution to produce positive business outcomes for our clients in tangible and measurable ways.”
Be honest, how easy was this paragraph to read?
Sure, it’s grammatically correct and not overly technical. But speaking for myself, it felt like a slog and I’m still not really sure what this agency is or does.
It was my (and your) lizard brain that had to wade through this first. The lizard brain isn’t equipped to interpret these abstract, jargon-y generalizations so it sees them as a threat. And when it’s threatened, it’s going to do one of two things.
It will decide to flee (the “flight” in the flight-or-fight response). In the case of a pitch meeting, this takes the form of distraction, like when everyone seems to be looking at their iPhones and not listening to you. If it’s an email, they hit “delete” before they've gotten beyond the subject line.
Or the lizard brain will do its best to summarize the information without siphoning too much energy away from its primary job of keeping the body safe and alive. That may mean that important parts of your pitch, which you worked so hard to carefully craft, are omitted or mangled by your audience.
We were born to pitch badly (but we don’t have to die that way).
The lizard brain likes messages that are simple, clear, nonthreatening, and intriguing but our neocortex wants to transmit information that is abstract, sophisticated, comprehensive and informative.
So, how do you countermand your deeply entrenched tendencies? Here are a few guidelines to get you off to a good start:
1. Commit to one objective for each interaction.
Early in the sales process, your objective may be simply to get a response to an email or a meeting on your calendar. Later, it may be to position your agency against competitors, counter objections, or come to an agreement on fee. Resist the compulsion to offer more information than is required. You may think you are being thorough or generous; the lizard brain will see it as a threat.
2. Stay focused on what’s in it for them.
Go a little deeper than you might at first. Are your clients truly looking for “a collaborative strategic partner to take marketing to the next level?” While that may benefit them, it’s probably not how they’re thinking about their needs or goals.
They’re looking for praise and glory and a salary bump. They’re looking to keep their jobs, or offload responsibilities, or ditch the current agency that’s turned out to be so difficult to manage.
Be ready to strike emotional triggers. Remind them of the consequences of not making a change and describe to them what presentation expert Nancy Duarte calls “the new bliss” that awaits them.
3. Keep it simple and provide verifiable proof.
The lizard brain doesn’t deal well with abstract concepts. Be as concrete and specific as possible. Offer positive client testimonials. Offer case studies that tell a story through a narrative arc and conclude with strong contextualized results. (Though check yourself against guideline #1 and don’t overwhelm them with data. Case study results lose their effectiveness when they’re a recitation of statistics.)
4. Add an element of novelty that piques interest.
This can take the form of an unexpected or contrary point of view on a persistent problem. Or a few well-placed stories. The lizard brain loves a good story. Stories transform abstract concepts into tangible ideas.
What about clever stunts and gimmicks? Maybe, if you’re good at that kind of thing – and I’ve known many agency leaders who are. Cleverness is often in the eyes of the beholder, however, so this can be a high-risk approach.
5. Make it clear what you want from them and when you’ll set them free.
If your objective is to score a face-to-face meeting with them, be direct and ask for a meeting. Once there, prepare a pitch that’s shorter in duration than the time you’ve been given and provide them some way of understanding where they are at any given moment, whether it’s a written agenda or a set of visual clues in your slides.
And what about chemistry?
A lot of agencies attribute their success in pitching to having great chemistry with clients once they get in the room.
The warm fuzzies we experience when we’re feeling “great chemistry” are the territory of another part of our brain, the midbrain or mammal brain. It’s the part of our brain that, not surprisingly, is responsible for our emotional and emotional bonding with others.
And yes, chemistry has a role to play in the pitch, but you still must make it past the lizard brain first. What’s more, in most cases you will also have to back up that chemistry with a strong and detailed proposal for your client’s neocortex to assess your ideas and qualifications against others.