Pitch to Win

The Tools That Help Startups and Corporate Innovation Teams Script, Design, and Deliver Winning Pitches

David Beckett

• Editorial: Management Impact Publishing
• Año: 2019
• ISBN:
  9789462762756
• Categoría: Business
• Categoría: Meetings & Presentations

"Hi, my name is David Beckett, I'm a pitch coach, and I'm here to ensure your ideas have a voice."

The big pitch is coming up. You've got just a few minutes to convince that investor or your Board, that your idea is worth investing money, time and people in. What should you say? How should you say it? And how do you beat those nerves that are already building up inside?

David Beckett has coached over 700 startups to raise over €170 million in investment. And he has trained thousands of professionals in innovation teams at companies like Google, Unilever, Booking.com and PwC. He is also a TEDx speech coach.

In Pitch to Win, David provides practical tools to help you Script, Design and Deliver pitches that are short, professional and persuasive. His methods and practices have been tested with hundreds of pitchers and reviewed by numerous investors and members of the Board.

The focus is on actionable tools and real-life examples. With step-by-step exercises that will guide you to your best pitch ever.

SCRIPT.
ONE

1.1 BEFORE YOU START

1.1.1 Stop! Don’t open PowerPoint!

The first step is to get the story straight, and decide what content, in which order, you will tell.

My strongest advice at this moment is:

Don’t open PowerPoint!

Or Keynote, or Prezi, or whatever you use to create slides. Work on the storyline first.

Most people think: “I’ve got a pitch coming up on Thursday. Better get the slides done!” They open the laptop and immediately try to translate their thoughts into some kind of logical order, while working in slide software. This is an impossible task.

As soon as you start to work on slides, you get caught up in the technical work of slide design. While thinking what your story is, you write something down and begin to wonder:

• “Should this text be 32 points or 36 points?”

• “Should it be left or right aligned?”

• “Should the text be bold or normal?”

• “Which picture goes with this idea to make it clearer?”

• “Should the background be blue or green?”

And so on.

This questioning means your attention flips between the message you want to bring and how the slide will emphasise that story. Doing these two things simultaneously makes you extremely inefficient and increases your preparation time by many hours.

On top of this, you never see the whole presentation. You keep switching backwards and forwards through the slide deck, trying to see if it is logical and if it flows. Meanwhile, the whole presentation is in your head and focused on a very internal process. You’ve been working to make slides instead of identifying the story that will resonate with the audience.

I did exactly the same during my 16 years at Canon, and never understood why I felt so frustrated making slide presentations. In the last few years, I’ve created a new approach to building a pitch, which I share with all my clients and is now working for thousands of people.

That approach begins with thinking about some big factors that influence the success – or otherwise – of your pitch. And it involves a revolutionary tool that will save you 20 to 30 percent of preparation time for every pitch you ever make. I’m going to give you days of your life back!

It starts with the audience. Before touching any presentation software, you need to tune your thoughts and actions towards three things. Who is the audience?

What is the objective of the pitch? And which parts of my story do I need to tell to influence the audience and reach that objective?

Once you have this in place, you can start to structure how to tell that story in the most effective way. But first, let’s get clear on who we are talking to and what we are trying to achieve.

1.1.2 Communication is what the listener does

Lance Miller told me this phrase from management guru Peter Drucker back in 1992, and it has been a powerful guide for every pitch I’ve given and every pitcher I’ve trained ever since.

You don’t want simply to tell your story. Instead, you want the listener to do something.

The starting point is: Who is the listener? What type of people will hear the pitch? What drives her? What keeps him awake at night? What do they care about?

Taking time to understand your audience will make your objective so much easier to achieve. Here are a few examples of potential audiences you might pitch to and what kind of content they may be interested in.

When you’re pitching your next big project to the Board, they’ll want to know about results and money.

Face to face with impact investors? They want to understand how your positive effect on society or environment will be sustainable with a solid business plan.

Do you need to convince sales and marketing people to get behind your product? They’re probably not going to be hooked by the process you’ve followed to develop your idea; instead, focus on results, what they can do with these results, and how you help them achieve their targets.

Engineers? Show them what’s under the hood and share some tech innovation to excite them.

VCs (venture capitalists) are interested in big opportunities to scale your business into a huge market. Show ambition and the size of the opportunity.

If you make the exact same pitch of your concept to all of the above audiences, it simply won’t succeed because you’re not tuned in to all their various interests. You’re only pushing your own message.

This is not about: “Telling them what they want to hear.” It’s about looking at all the many elements of your proposition and selecting those points that will resonate with your audience based on their interests. Doing so will increase the chance they will take the action you need.

ACTION

Action – 5-minute task – Write down who your audience is and what they care about?

Spend five minutes writing down a short profile of your audience. The following questions will help you get started, but don’t limit your profile of the audience to these points. Write down everything you can think of.

1. What do they care about?

2. What are their biggest challenges?

3. Are they conservative or innovative?
(Note: sometimes people say they’re innovative when in fact they are actually conservative, but just want to have things a little better! And some people really want to change the world and turn an industry on its head. Which one is your audience?)

4. Are they technical and want to know how things work?

5. Are they money focused? If so, are they interested in reducing cost, increasing turnover, more profit, 10x growth, or gradual improvement?

6. Are they interested in social impact? The environment?

7. Do they care about details, or do they tend to be interested in headlines only?

8. Are they theoretical or doers? Do they want to know the thinking behind the idea, or just the outcomes?

When you make your pitch script, come back to these descriptions of your audience and the questions they may be asking themselves, and ensure you’ve covered what they are expecting.

What if there is a mixed audience?

In this case, it’s about identifying whom you need to influence. For example, if you have an audience of fifty people but only three decision makers, it’s best to focus on these three people for this exercise and target your message to them first. It could be that you miss the mark with the remainder of the audience, but if you persuade the decision makers, then you’ve reached your goal.

1.1.3 You want them to do...what? Be clear on the objective

It might seem obvious that you should have a clear goal for your pitch in terms of action you want the audience to take. However, most pitchers are too focused on telling their stories, or they focus only on the bigger, long-term goals, winning the investment or getting the sales.

I often ask my clients, “What do you want the audience to do as a result of your pitch?” They reply with statements like: “I want them to understand what we are trying to do,” or “We need them to support the project,” or “I want them to believe in our product.” For any of these outcomes to happen, you need to define and clearly state your Call To Action.

Therefore, to make the most of your pitch, it’s essential to identify two objectives.

Firstly, what’s the big goal? For example: Gain €500K investment. Get approval of a €1 million budget and a five-person full-time team for the project to go ahead. Believe in the product. Solve world poverty.

Secondly, what’s the first next step the audience can take on the journey towards your big goal? This step needs to be something they can do, not just think.

For the big goals given as examples above, the actions would look like this:

Big goal	Immediate first-next step objective
$500K investment	Get a one-hour meeting arranged with the investor
Approval of budget/team	Inspire them to read a proposal, in preparation for a go/no-go meeting
Belief in our product	Trigger them to download the free version at the App Store and try it out
Solve world poverty	Get them to visit your website and donate something

Think of the objective as: The morning after the pitch, what can they do? What can they click, who can they call, what will they read, who will they introduce you to? Most importantly, they click to accept your invitation for a follow-up meeting.

ACTION

Action – 2-minute task – What’s the objective?

Write down the following:

1.What’s the big objective of this pitch? Write it down.

2.What’s the first next step you want the audience to take to get them closer to your big objective? Write it down.

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