Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal (14 page)

We are responding to a social threat.

It’s important to recognize that humans are hardwired for social interaction. So, if you haven’t thought of social situations as potential threats, it’s might be time to start thinking that way now. In one study, researchers had subjects play a computer game where they thought they were throwing a digital “bal ” with a few other participants. After a while of playing the game, the subject’s online partners started throwing the bal
only
to each other, leaving the subject as the odd-man out. Ouch! The researchers measured the subject’s reaction through brain scans.
What they found is that social
threats engage the same threat-response system in the brain as physical threats do.
And to make matters worse, the brain can trigger threat responses far ahead of when you consciously become aware of the threat.

If you don’t use the idea introduction pattern to deliver the big idea (or some other highly control ed way to encapsulate the big idea), here’s how trouble can start brewing. First, the target picks up on your anxiety. Second, when you see the target get uncomfortable, you get more tense; you
look
tense. Third, an endless feedback loop starts: The targets senses your anxiety, and a similar threat response triggers in his system. You have lots more to do in this pitch, you’ve barely started, and you don’t want to get caught up in a negative-feedback loop. It’s too early in the pitch to start dealing with serious malfunctions.

The idea introduction pattern breaks the idea down to the essential basics: Here’s what it is; here’s who it’s for; and here’s who I compete with.

No anxiety, no fear, no drama.

Let’s review the actions to take in phase 1 of the pitch:

First, you put the target at ease by tel ing him
in advance
that the pitch is going to be short, just about 20 minutes, and that you’re not going to be hanging around too long afterward. This keeps the target’s croc brain focused on the here and now and feeling safe.

Then, you give your background in terms of a track record of successes, not a long list of places and institutions where you simply “punched the clock.” There’s plenty of evidence to suggest that the more you talk about your background, the more average it becomes because the target is hardwired to average information about you, not add it up.

Next, you show that your idea is not a static flash of genius. Rather, there are market forces driving the idea, and you are taking advantage of a brief market window that has opened. (And you’ve admitted that there wil be competition, showing that you’re not naive about business realities.)

Because the brain pays attention to things that are in motion, you paint a picture of the idea moving out of an old market into a new one.

Doing it this way, you don’t trigger change blindness, which would make your deal easy to neglect.

Last, you bring the big idea into play using the idea introduction pattern. Now the target knows exactly what it is, who it’s for, who you compete with, and what your idea does better than the competition’s. This simple pattern makes sure that your idea is easy to grasp and focuses on what is real. This strategy works so wel because it avoids triggering a threat response.

However, this method should not imply that everything in your pitch must be simplified and reduced—you’l be delivering plenty of complex and detail-oriented information soon.

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Phase 2: Explain the Budget and Secret Sauce

It’s been easy to maintain the target’s attention so far. In phase 1, al you had to do was introduce yourself and the big idea in about 5 minutes (or less.) In phase 2, it gets harder to hold the target’s attention. Now you have to explain what problems the big idea real y solves and how it actual y works.
The opportunities to scare the croc brain seriously multiply when you start to explain how stuff works.

Over the years, an enormous amount of pressure has been put on businesspeople to make their complex ideas more simple—but few gurus have come up with methods to do this that translate into real-world success. At least I haven’t seen them—and I’ve been looking for 10 years.

The frustrating thing about simplicity is that it’s
supposed
to work wonders in a presentation. Summarize your information, make it supereasy to understand, rol the concepts into an “executive summary”—the target wil love you for it.

I realize that what comes next goes against conventional wisdom, but what I’ve discovered is that
simplicity doesn’t really matter.
If it real y worked, everyone would be doing it. But it doesn’t, and they aren’t. Simplicity can make you seem naive or unsophisticated. You can underwhelm the target with too little information just as easily as you can overwhelm him with too much information.

What you really want to do is tune the message to the mind of the target.

Think about the way you have to talk to a child. You don’t just make the thing you want to say simple. For example, if you want to say, “There’s no dessert being served before dinner is eaten,” you don’t make it
more
simple and say, “No dessert before dinner.” In fact, you might have to make it even longer and more complex, explaining the reasons. Again, what’s important is that a child’s mind is different from your own, and you have to understand how that mind reasons. This is why it’s so important to understand how the croc brain reasons. I’ve concluded that
ideas you come up
with
using your problem-solving brain—the neocortex—must be intentionally retuned for the croc brain that will receive them.

Early in my work to figure this stuff out, I stumbled onto something cognitive psychologists cal ed “theory of mind” that supports this.
When you
have a working theory of mind, you are able to understand how thoughts, desires, and intentions of others cause them to act.
When someone can only see a situation one way, their theory of mind is weak. When you have a strong theory of mind, you recognize how other people have different perspectives—and that they know different things about the situation, and that their desires are not always the same as your desires. A strong theory of mind also wil let you know that anything involving statistics needs to be highly simplified.
The croc brain hates thinking about
probabilities.
Our advanced society had to invent complex formulas and equations for statistics exactly because our brains are not wired to think about statistics on their own. While there’s ongoing debate about what “complexity” the average audience wil like and dislike, one thing is certain:
If
you’re describing relationships between people, you can provide plenty of detail.
The brain is real y good at understanding complex human relationships.

As I look back on my experiences, two giant realizations tower above al others:
Realization 1:
It doesn’t matter how much information you give, a lot or a little, but instead how good your theory of mind is. In other words, it’s important how wel you can tune your information to the other person’s mind.

Realization 2:
Al the important stuff must fit into the audience’s limits of attention, which for most people is about 20 minutes.

Get Their Attention

Earlier I said that one of the things that can go wrong is that your pitch is boring. In a large majority of presentations, this is the problem. In fact, virtual y everyone is long-winded when they present. Yet there is absolutely no doubt among either executives or academics that audience attention fades out fast once a presentation has started. Studies of vigilance show that the targets general y can’t focus on an idea for more than a few minutes. Some believe that it is a few seconds. Either way, why quibble? Attention wavers almost uncontrol ably. People’s minds wander.

Distractions, from inside the person and the outside world, are constantly competing with your pitch. And anyway, even if there were no distractions,
the brain is still a cognitive miser—it wants to exert as little energy as possible figuring out you and your idea.

What grabs the target’s attention, and once attention is grabbed, what holds it there?

Attention will be given when information novelty is high and will drift away when information novelty is low.
You already know this. If your stuff looks boring, if it has no visual stimulus, is a bunch of cold, hard facts and involves spaghetti-like complexity—no one is going to offer you much attention.

Yet there’s nothing more important than attention. Oh, we can vigorously debate whether attention accounts for 70 percent of the reason someone succeeds with a pitch or 50 percent, but no one can seriously question that getting and holding attention are the biggest reasons a pitch either connects with the target and succeeds or misses the target and fails.

Looking at it another way, if the target were wil ing to pay attention to you for a few hours, then just about any pitch—good or bad—would work.

But you don’t have hours.
More likely, you’ve got those 20 minutes we’ve been talking about. And maybe, if you’re just winging it, you only have five minutes before your pitch wanders into a mental no-man’s land.

What Is Attention?

To control attention, I have always felt that it’s important to know what it’s made of. Attention
is a sort of vague, al -encompassing term that seems to just
define itself
. But who would ever try to make a martini without knowing what’s in it first? I phrase the question this way because you’l see in a moment that attention is just that—a cocktail of chemicals served up to the brain as a lubricant for social interaction. You need to know how to blend this perfect cocktail and when to serve it.

How did I find what the ingredients are? I didn’t have to. Researchers with brain scanners and hardcore neuroscience chops did the work. What they’ve worked out is that
when a person is feeling both desire and tension, that person is paying serious attention to what’s in front of him or her.

The critical lesson of brain scans is that attention is always a delicate and unstable balancing act between desire and tension. It comes down to the presence of two neurotransmitters: dopamine and norepinephrine.

Dopamine
is the neurotransmitter of
desire
.

Norepinephrine
is the neurotransmitter of
tension
.

Together they add up to
attention
.

If you want someone’s undivided, ful y engaged attention, you have to provide these two neurotransmitters. These two chemicals work together

—you need them both to be coursing through the crocodile brain of the target. But each has a different triggering mechanism.

To give a dopamine kick and create desire,
offer a reward.

To give a norepinephrine kick and create tension,
take something away
.

You’re going to learn the patterns for triggering the desire and tension right now.

What Does Dopamine Do?
Dopamine is the chemical in the brain that chases rewards. It takes about 1/20 of a second for dopamine to guide humans toward some kind of action. Dopamine levels rise in the brain when you see or hear about something you want. When you see a person acting curious, open-minded, and interested in something—it’s dopamine that’s motivating them. A strong cup of coffee, Yohimbe root, cocaine, and the cold medication sudafed al increase dopamine levels in the brain. In most people, so does the thought of winning a large gamble or of even buying what’s known as an
ornament
—like a Rolex watch or some other status-enhancing product.

Dopamine release in the brain is connected to
pleasure activities
, such things as food, sex, and drugs. But now brain scans show that dopamine isn’t exactly the chemical of experiencing pleasure. Instead, it’s the chemical of
anticipating a reward.
In his book,
Satisfaction
, Dr. Greg Berns explains this: “How do you get more dopamine flowing in your brain? NOVELTY. A raft of brain imaging experiments has demonstrated that novel events … are highly effective at releasing dopamine. Your brain is stimulated by surprise because our world is fundamental y unpredictable.” He adds, “You may not always like novelty, but your brain does.”

You create novelty by violating the target’s expectations in a pleasing way.

Let’s review. When you introduce something novel to the target’s brain, a release of dopamine occurs. This triggers desire. For example: A short product demo provides novelty.

A new idea provides novelty.

Good metaphors for otherwise complex subjects provide novelty.

Bright objects, moving objects, and unique shapes, sizes, and configurations al provide novelty.

You want the audience’s ful attention, and you want to erase everything else audience members are paying attention to, so introduce novelty.

How Dopamine Leads the Feeling of Novelty.
Until now, I’ve talked about the raw amount of information that comes into the brain and how it al can’t be processed at once. Al this information and data from the senses col ect in one smal part of the brain. There has to be some way of selecting what to ignore and what to act on. Dopamine motivates the human body to act on some things and ignore others.

Research done at the University Col ege London, written about by
Wall Street Journal
reporter Jason Zweig, suggests that getting what you expected to get produces no dopamine kick, but a novelty in the form of an unexpected gain gives the brain a blast of dopamine. On the other hand, if a reward you expected fails to materialize, then dopamine dries up, and negative feelings start happening.

Just like the martini making we talked about earlier, the amount of dopamine in the cocktail has to be just right.
Not enough, and there is no
interest in your or your ideas; too much, and there is fear or anxiety.