6 Tips on Pitching Yourself from Filmmakers, Behavioral Psychologists, and Advertising Agencies   

I recently attended SXSW Conference Austin, and my favorite takeaway was timeless advice about how to pitch yourself and your ideas. These suggestions, which everyone can use at one point or another in their lives, come from presentations made by the following people at SXSW 2017:

• Shwen Gwee – Head of digital customer insights at Biogen / MIT Hacking Medicine
• Noah Lowenthal – VP, group creative director at AbelsonTaylor
• John Heinsen – Founder and executive producer at Bunnygraph Entertainment
• Tristen George – VP, experience design at AbelsonTaylor
• Robert Cialdini – CEO of Influence at Work / professor at Arizona State / author of multiple best-selling books on persuasion, influence, and behavioral psychology

Here are six tips from these experts to ensure your next pitch will be a home run:

Connect with the heart, not the brain
Think about a time when there was someone at a cocktail party who seemed like the most interesting person in the world. What made this person someone you wanted to talk to? It’s probably the fact that he or she was a good storyteller.

When you’re trying to sell something, you need to connect with people’s hearts rather than their brains. Very few people make purchasing decisions without emotion. The best way to infuse emotion into your pitch is to begin with a personal story. Why are you pursuing this idea?

A personal story creates an experience that your audience wants to engage with (a hook) and establishes personal credibility (a link between you and your idea). Your goal at the beginning of a pitch is to make yourself into that interesting person at a cocktail party that your audience can’t wait to talk to.

Remember that pitching is storytelling
Once you’ve engaged and established your personal credibility, take your audience on a storytelling journey. Tristen George told us about her last client pitch for a project on menopausal women. She painted such a vivid picture of the experiences menopausal women go through that a woman listening to the pitch started to cry.

“Remember that a demo does not replace an airtight story,” George reminded. If you’ve got limited time for a pitch, spend it on the story, not the demo. Do not discount the value of your audience’s imagination. If you show a subpar demo, you’ve taken away their imagination – they won’t be able to get past that mediocre embodiment of your idea. On the other hand, if you tell an amazing story, the audience can fill in the gaps with their imagination.

Create the proper structure for your pitch
Create a buying experience for your audience by addressing the following three questions. This will make them feel as if they will miss out if they don’t take action on what you are offering them.

• What is the unmet need? This is the first thing you need to identify in any persuasive scenario, whether it is pitching a vacation to your husband or selling your services to a new client.
• Why is what you are pitching going to solve this unmet need?
• How is it going to make your audience money?

 Simplify, simplify, simplify
When you are preparing your pitch, be sure to ask yourself, “If my audience remembers only one thing from this entire pitch, what do I want it to be?” Put this single idea front and center in your presentation.

Sometimes just deciding what that one idea should be is a very productive exercise to do with your team. Noah Lowenthal recommends putting up all the options on a wall so that you can see the story visually. This will help you to determine if the options you are discussing  are truly serving the one idea you want to drive home.

When all else fails, just remember to construct a story that a 6-year-old can understand, and your pitch will be fine.

Trustworthiness is disarming
The things that happen before a pitch can be just as important as the pitch itself. Robert Cialdini, who calls this phenomenon “pre-suasion,” shared a story about Warren Buffet that highlights a pre-suasion strategy that should be added to everyone’s persuasive toolkit.

Every year, Warren Buffet writes a letter to the shareholders of his company, Berkshire Hathaway, and the first thing in that letter is a description of a mistake Berkshire Hathaway made during the past 12 months. Psychologically, this strategy sets Buffet’s readers up to believe he is telling the truth. Then Buffet writes about all the successes his company has had over the year. Buffet sets up his successes by first demonstrating his trustworthiness.

As Adam Grant writes in his book, “Originals,” entrepreneur Rufus Griscom did the same thing when he was trying to sell his startup, Babble, to Disney. Griscom started his pitch by listing the five reasons Disney should not buy Babble. Disney ended up buying it for $40 million.

Trustworthiness is disarming. Add this pre-suasion strategy to your pitching toolkit and give it a try next time you have a pitch.

Prepare for the five questions you are dreading
Content is important, but so is delivery. That’s why filmmaker John Heisen recommends asking yourself the five questions you dread being asked. The mood in a room is really important when delivering a pitch; if the energy drops after you are asked a question, it will not look good for you. If you prepare ahead of time, you’ll get through these tough questions without losing your energy and positivity.

In addition to these six tips, I offer the following: know when your pitch meeting is over, and never be afraid of losing the job when you go in for a pitch.

 Written by Lina Avancini Colucci, PhD Student at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)