When a pitch goes badly — sales pitch, investor pitch, plea for company resources, whatever — there’s usually a specific moment when it falls apart.
Before that moment, your audience gives you the benefit of the doubt. After that moment, they’re tuned out. You can almost feel them turn against you.
I’ve noticed that nine times out of 10, when things go south, it happens at a single, identifiable point in the story:
The moment when you introduce the thing you’re pitching.
Why Does This Happen?
When most people pitch, they introduce their solution as an assertion. It usually sounds like this:
So to solve that problem, we’re building X, which does … “
Introducing your solution this way seems obvious and straightforward. And certainly, most pitch advice tells you to do it.
However, I regularly see negative audience reactions immediately after the solution is presented this way. Here’s why:
You become less likable: Stating categorically that you’ve got the solution to a big problem — especially if you’re just starting out — can make you appear arrogant and/or naive. Even if you’re correct, your audience will be skeptical.
You invite attacks: An assertion prods your audience to ask, “Is he/she right?” In other words, the assertion invites people to hunt for reasons you’re wrong. And if there’s one thing skeptical audiences (read: VCs and potential customers) love to do, it’s find ways that you’re wrong and, by implication, they’re right.
Your credibility on everything that follows takes a hit: You’ll need to offer evidence that your solution is promising (traction, market size, etc.). But because you’ve already introduced your solution as correct — even implicitly — everything you say from that point forward is contaminated by bias. Your audience will be thinking, “He/she is pushing this solution, so of course he/she’s going to handpick data that supports his/her case.”
A Better Approach: Your Solution as a Question
Any time I’m pondering how to get an audience engaged, I go back to basics. For me, that means starting with a true story.
Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
Check out Travis Kalanick pitching Uber’s car pool service, uberPOOL, in his February 2016 TED talk, “Uber’s plan to get more people in fewer cars”:
And so we started thinking about, well, how do we make those two trips and turn them into one. Because if we did, that ride would be a lot cheaper — up to 50% cheaper — and of course for the city you’ve got a lot more people and a lot fewer cars. And so the big question for us was: Would it work? Could you have a cheaper ride cheap enough that people would be willing to share it?” -Uber CEO Travis Kalanick
How to Frame Your Solution as a Question
As you can see, the general form of these questions is:
“So we thought, what if we built/tried X … ”
So I thought, (yes, okay we have it!) what if I tried this with leadership teams that are my clients?
We immediately saw — in investor pitches, sales conversations, change leadership speeches, whatever — the opposite of what used to happen:
You become more likable: People are more willing to go on the journey with you when you project curiosity instead of certainty.
You invite collaboration: Now, when audience members voice their own ideas about how you might proceed, the conversation feels more like they’re collaborating with you on an experiment, rather than attacking you. The feeling of collaboration seems shared by speaker and audiences alike.
You build engagement and credibility: Because you’ve positioned your solution as a question, your audience starts thinking, “How will it turn out?” (That’s what Ira Glass meant by dramatic tension.) Everything that follows is more engaging and believable because you haven’t attached yourself to an outcome.
If you try this, let me know how it goes.
Based on promising results, I’m considering making this — introducing the solution as a question — a part of all the strategic messaging that I build. Still, I’d be fascinated to hear from others who try it. How did it go?
Inspired,
Lashanda Gary
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