Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal (2 page)

That’s because a great pitch is not about procedure. It’s about getting and keeping attention. And that means you have to own the room with
frame
control
, drive emotions with
intrigue pings
, and get to a
hookpoint
fairly quickly. (Details on those last two in a second.) I reminded myself of these steps in the face of Jonathan’s interruptions. Then I swal owed hard and hoped my nervousness wasn’t showing. I went back to my pitch, concentrating on my three objectives. I was determined. When he deframed, I reframed. When he looked disinterested, I delivered an
intrigue ping
(this is a short but provocative piece of information that arouses curiosity): “By the way, an NFL quarterback is also an investor.”

And final y, I got him to the
hookpoint
, the place in the presentation where your listeners become emotional y engaged. Instead of you giving them information, they are asking you for more on their own. At the hookpoint, they go beyond interested to being involved and then committed.

At the end of the 21 minutes, my pitch was complete. I knew Jonathan was
in
. He leaned forward and whispered, “Forget the deal for a moment.

What in the hel was that? Nobody pitches like that but
me
.”

I tried to show no emotion as I told him, “
That
, in general terms, is cal ed
neurofinance
, an idea that combines neuroscience—how the brain works—with economics. I have taken it a step further and have broken it down into five parts” (the method we talked about above).

Now, even though Jonathan has MENSA-level intel igence, he doesn’t have much interest in concepts like neuroscience. He—maybe like you—

had always believed that the ability to pitch was a natural talent. But given what he had just seen me do in 21 minutes—it changed his mind. It was clear my pitching was a learned skil and not naked, natural talent like his.

“You can do that al the time?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “It’s based on research about how the brain receives new ideas. And I’m raising a lot of money with it.”

Jonathan hears a lot of big claims. When you listen to three or four pitches a day, your “BS detector” becomes finely tuned. So he asked, “How many hours do you have working on this neuro-whatever-it’s-cal ed?”

He was sure my answer was going to be 20 hours. Maybe 50.

I shocked him when I said, “Over 10,000 hours.”

He looked at me with a wry half-smile. Giving up al pretense of being disinterested, he said, “I need you on my team. Come do this for my deals, and you’l make a lot of money.”

I had never been more flattered. Not only had Jonathan, a guy who had been on magazine covers, offered me a partnership, he had given me an even higher compliment—validation that my method worked in high-stakes situations.

I turned him down. He had a reputation for being difficult to work for, and no amount of money is worth that. But his reaction persuaded me to try my approach as part of an investment company. I joined Geyser Holdings in Beverly Hil s, the most profitable venture firm you have never heard of.

Even as the economy cooled down (and then frosted over), I helped take Geyser from $100 mil ion to $400 mil ion in about four years. How I did that can serve as your blueprint for success. As you wil see, it’s possible to use the PITCH method in any presentation where you need to be truly convincing. What worked for me wil work for you—no matter what you do for a living.

The Need for a New Method

If ever there is a time to learn to pitch effectively, it is now. Funding is tight. Competition is more aggressive. On a good day, your customers are distracted by text messages, e-mails, and phone cal s, and on a bad day, they are impossible to reach. If you’ve been in business for more than 10

minutes, you have figured this much out: The better you are at keeping someone’s attention, the more likely that person wil be to go for your idea.

But what kind of advice is this real y? Tel ing someone, “Keep the audience’s attention” is like tel ing someone learning to play tennis to “hit the bal with topspin when it comes.”
They know that
! What they don’t know is how to do it. But it’s worth figuring out. If you have to sel anything as part of your job—a product, a service, an idea, and we al do at some point—you know how the right pitch can make a project go forward and the wrong pitch can kil it. You also understand how difficult it can be to pitch to a skeptical audience that is paying attention to you one minute and distracted by a phone cal the next. But we al have to go through this because we al have to pitch if we need something. And though most of us spend less than 1 percent of our time doing it, pitching may be the most important thing we do. When we have to raise money, or sel a complicated idea, or get a promotion, we have to do it. And yet we do it incredibly badly.

One reason is that we are our own worst coach. We know way too much about our own subject to be able to understand how another person wil experience it in our pitch, so we tend to overwhelm that person. (We wil deal with this in Chapter 4.) But the biggest reason we fail is not our fault.

As you wil see in the pages that fol ow, we don’t pitch wel because there is an evolutionary flaw in our brain—a wiring kluge in our hardware—that we must understand and learn to deal with if we are ever going to pitch successful y.

Dealing with the Crocodile Brain

A brief history of how the brain developed wil show

1. How the kluge got there.

2. Why pitching is so much more complicated than we first thought.

3. Why, as with any high-order skil , such as physics, mathematics, or medicine, pitching must be learned.

The three basic parts of the brain are shown in Figure 1.1.

First, the history. Recent breakthroughs in neuroscience show that our brain developed in three separate stages. First came the old brain, or

“crocodile brain”—we’l cal it the “croc brain” for short. It’s responsible for the initial filtering of al incoming messages, it generates most survival fight-or-flight responses, and it produces strong, basic emotions, too. But when it comes to decision making, the croc brain’s reasoning power is . .

. wel , primitive. It simply doesn’t have a lot of capacity, and most of what it does have is devoted primarily to the things it takes to keep us alive.

When I am referring to the croc brain, I am referring to this level.

The midbrain, which came next, determines the meaning of things and social situations. And final y, the neocortex evolved with a problem-solving ability and is able to think about complex issues and produce answers using reason.

Openmirrors.com

Figure 1.1
Three parts of the brain.

The Disconnect Between Message and Receiver

I learned from molecular biologist Craig Smucker that when we pitch something—an idea, product, deal, or whatever—the highest level of our brain, the neocortex, is doing the work. It’s the neocortex that is forming ideas, putting them into language, and presenting them. This is fairly intuitive.

Three Brains Working Independently and Together

You can actual y sense how the three parts of your brain work separately from each other.

When you are walking to your car and are surprised by someone shouting, you wil first act reflexively with some fear. (This is the old crocodile/survival brain at work.)

Then, you wil try to make meaning from the situation by identifying the person doing the yel ing and placing him or her in a social context.

This is your midbrain trying to determine if it is a friendly coworker, an angry parking attendant, or something worse.

Final y, you wil process the situation in the neocortex, the problem-solving brain (which figures it out: “It’s okay. It’s just some guy yel ing out to his buddy across the street.”)

Our thought process exactly matches our evolution: First, survival. Then, social relationships. Final y, problem solving.

Pitching anything means explaining abstract concepts—so it didn’t surprise me that ideas would be formed by the most modern, problem-solving part of the brain.

But this is exactly where my thinking—and probably yours—went off track. I assumed that if my idea-making abilities were
located in the
neocortex (as they are), then that’s where the people listening to my pitch were processing what I had to say.

It’s not.

Messages that are composed and sent by your young neocortex are received and processed by the other person’s old crocodile brain.

You may be where I was about 10 years ago. Back then, I subscribed to “the brain is like a computer” metaphor. With a computer, if I send you an Excel spreadsheet file, you open it and read it in Excel. This is how I thought the brain worked. If I created a message in
my
smart neocortex and

“sent” it over to you (by tel ing you about it), I figured that you’d be opening that message in
your
neocortex.

But no pitch or message is going to get to the logic center of the other person’s brain without passing through the survival filters of the crocodile brain system first. And because of the way we evolved, those filters make pitching anything extremely difficult.

So instead of communicating with people, my best ideas were bouncing off their croc brains and crashing back into my face in the form of objections, disruptive behaviors, and lack of interest.

Ultimately, if they are successful, your pitches
do
work their way up to their neocortex eventual y. And certainly by the time the other person is ready to say “Yes, we have a deal,” he is dealing with the information at the highest logic center of his brain. But that is not where the other person initial y hears what you have to say.

Let me explain further. Because we are a soft, weak, slow species compared with just about everything else out there, we survived for mil ions of years by viewing everything in the universe as potential y dangerous. And because very few situations we faced back then were safe, we learned to err on the side of extreme caution. And that continues (unconsciously) to this day every time we encounter something new. It happens whenever we encounter a pitch from someone who wants us to do something.

We are hardwired to be bad at pitching. It is caused by the way our brains have evolved.

The fact that you are pitching your idea from the neocortex but it is being received by the other person’s croc brain is a serious problem.

It’s the kluge we talked about earlier. The gap between the lower and upper brain is not measured in the two inches that separate them physical y. It must be measured in mil ions of years (the five mil ion years or so that it took for the neocortex to evolve, to be more precise). Why?

Because while you are talking about “profit potential,” “project synergy,” “return on investment,” and “why we should move forward now”—concepts your upper brain is comfortable with—the brain of the person on the other side of the desk isn’t reacting to any of those highly evolved, relatively complicated ideas. It is reacting exactly as it should. It is trying to determine whether the information coming in is a threat to the person’s immediate survival and, if it isn’t, whether it can be ignored without consequence.

The Croc Brain at Work

As you are pitching your idea, the croc brain of the person sitting across from you isn’t “listening” and thinking, “Hmmm, is this a good deal or not?” Its reaction to your pitch basical y goes like this: “Since this is not an emergency, how can I ignore this or spend the least amount of time possible on it?”

This filtering system of the crocodile brain has a very short-sighted view of the world. Anything that is not a crisis it tries to mark as “spam.”

If you got a chance to look at the croc brain’s filtering instructions, it would look something like this: 1. If it’s not dangerous, ignore it.

2. If it’s not new and exciting, ignore it.

3. If it is new, summarize it as quickly as possible—and forget about the details.

And final y there is this specific instruction:

4.
Do not
send anything up to the neocortex for problem solving unless you have a situation that is real y unexpected and out of the ordinary.

These are the basic operating policies and procedures of our brains. No wonder pitching is so difficult.

Sure, after initial filtering, parts of your message move quickly through the midbrain and on to the neocortex—business meetings would be very odd otherwise—but the damage to your message and your pitch has already been done.

First, given the limited focus and capacity of the croc brain, up to 90 percent of your message is discarded before it’s passed on up to the midbrain and then on to the neocortex. The crocodile brain just doesn’t process details wel , and it only passes along big, obvious chunks of concrete data.

Second, unless your message is presented in such a way that the crocodile brain views it to be new and exciting—
it is going to be ignored.