Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal (7 page)

Over the next few days, Dennis and I and some other victims worked with the authorities and Southwest Exchange was raided. I got Dennis’s $640,000 out just in time, thanks to my knowledge of framing. Not for a moment was it about threats or power plays.

Although it was Dennis’s money legal y, perhaps Jim and Don McGhan never should have given back that $640,000. It wasn’t in their best interests. If Jim McGhan real y thought I was going to cal the FBI, he should have wired that money to his attorney. It was clearly the last bit of cash Jim and Don could scratch together.

I had always respected the nature of frame control. But now, with Dennis’s $640,000 back in my escrow account, I was learning to rely on it more and more often.

Al told, the McGhans had bilked more than 130 investors out of more than $180 mil ion. Several people lost their life savings, and the case spawned numerous lawsuits. In 2009, Don McGhan, age 75, was sentenced to a 10-year prison sentence for wire fraud.

This is an example of owning the frame. There are stil more frames that you wil encounter that I haven’t discussed yet. Let’s take a look at
time-based frames
and how to respond to them.

The Time Frame

Frames involving
time
tend to occur later in the social exchange, after someone has already established frame control. Again, if you want to know who has the frame, it’s easy to observe.
When you are reacting to the other person, that person owns the frame. When the other person is
reacting to what you do and say, you own the frame.

Time frames are often used by your Target to rechal enge your frame by disrupting you and, in the moment of confusion, unwittingly take back control. As long as you are alert, time frames are easy to defeat.

You wil know that a time-frame col ision is about to occur when you see attention begin to wane. You’ve been pitching for a few minutes, and the temperature in the room is noticeably cooler. The game you initiated was fun at the beginning, and now the audience has cooled and might be a little bored. There are limits to the human attention span, which is why a pitch must be brief, concise, and interesting, as you wil read about in Chapter 4.

If you wait for someone in the audience to say (or give body language to the effect), “We only have a few minutes left, so let’s wrap this up,” you wil lose the frame because you now have to react to that person.

Instead, when you see attention begin to bottom out and expire, that’s it. You’re done. Stay in control of time, and start wrapping up.
Running
long or beyond the point of attention shows weakness, neediness, and desperation.

In Chapter 4, I explore attention extensively and you’l begin to understand that attention is an extremely rare cognitive phenomenon that is exceedingly difficult to create and manage. When attention is lacking, set your own time constraint, and bounce out of there:

“Hey, looks like time’s up. I’ve got to wrap this up and get to my next meeting.” If they are interested in you, they wil agree to a fol ow-up.

Ironical y, the mistake most people make when they see their audience becoming fatigued is to talk faster, to try to force their way through the rest of the pitch.
Instead of imparting more valuable information faster, however, they only succeed in helping the audience retain less of their
message.
Here is another example of an opposing time frame and how to respond to it. If you visit customers’ offices, you wil recognize this situation:

CUSTOMER: “Hi, yes, um, wel , I only have about 10 minutes to meet with you, but come on in.”

SALESPERSON: “I real y appreciate your time. Thanks for fitting me into your busy schedule.”

This is a common dialogue and form of business etiquette—
and it is exactly the wrong thing to do.
You are reinforcing your target’s power over you and confirming your target’s higher status. You are essential y handing your target your frame and saying, “Here, please, crush my frame, control me, and waste my time.”

When you encounter a time frame like this, quickly break it with a stronger prize frame of your own. Qualify your target on the spot.

YOU: “No. I don’t work like that. There’s no sense in rescheduling unless we like each other and trust each other. I need to know, are you good to work with, can you keep appointments, and stick to a schedule?”

YOUR TARGET: “Okay, you’re right about that. Yeah, sure I can. Let’s do this now. I have 30 minutes. That’s no problem. Come on in.”

You have just broken your target’s time frame, established that your time is important, and he is now giving you focused attention instead of treating your visit like an annoyance.

Another frame that you wil encounter is cal ed the
analyst frame
. Like the time frame, the analyst frame usual y appears after the initial frame col ision and can derail you just when you are about to reach a decision. It is a deadly frame that you must know how to repel using the
intrigue
frame
.

The Intrigue Frame

How many times have you been giving a presentation when suddenly one or more people in the room take a deep dive into technical details?

That’s the
analyst frame
coming at you. This is especial y common in industries that involve engineers and financial analysts. This frame wil kil your pitch.

The moment your audience does a “deep dril -down” into the minute details, you are losing control. The cognitive temperature of the audience, which was hot when things got started, natural y wil cool as audience members listen to your pitch. But once you give their neocortex(es) something to calculate, they wil go cold.
Problem solving, numerical calculations, statistics, and any sort of geometry are called
cold cognitions. Nothing wil freeze your pitch faster than al owing your audience to grind numbers or study details during the pitch.

As you wil learn in Chapter 4, the key to preventing this is to control access to details. Sometimes, however, a dril -down wil happen anyway, and you have to act—fast.

It is important to realize that
human beings are unable to have hot cognitions and cold cognitions simultaneously.
The brain is not wired that way.
Hot cognitions
are feelings like wanting or desire or excitement, and
cold cognitions
come from “cold” processes like analysis and problem solving. To maintain frame control and momentum, you must force your audience to be analytical on its own time. You do this by separating the technical and detailed material from your presentation.

Oh, for sure, audience members wil ask for details. They believe that they need them. So what should you do if someone demands details? You respond with summary data that you have prepared for this specific purpose.

You answer the question directly and with the highest-level information possible. Then you redirect their attention back to your pitch.

In financial deals, I respond with something like this:

“The revenue is $80 mil ion, expenses are $62 mil ion, the net is $18 mil ion. These and other facts you can verify later, but right now, what we need to focus on is this: Are we a good fit? Should we be doing business together? This is what I came here to work on.”

If you’re pitching a product and the dril -down is on price, don’t chase this conversation thread. Do answer fast, answer directly with high-level details only, and go straight back to the relationship question.

What this tel s the audience is that (1) I’m trying to decide if you are right for me; (2) if I decide to work with you, the numbers wil back up what I’m tel ing you, so let’s not worry about that now; and (3) I care about who I work with.

Keep the target focused on the business relationship at al times. Analysis comes later. This is the best and most reliable way to deal with a target who suddenly becomes bored and tries to entertain himself with the details of your deal.

Remember, when you own the frame, you control the agenda, and you determine the rules under which the game is played.

There wil be times when you are doing everything right, but for reasons beyond your understanding or control, the other person stops responding to you. The personal connection you had at one point seems to be fading.

When it no longer seems that communication is flowing back and forth, the other person is in something cal ed a
nonreactive state
. It’s like the other person’s mind is wandering or thinking about something else. This is a state of disinterest that you can correct for if you recognize it in time and act quickly.

You can tel that this is starting to happen when you notice remarks or body language that indicate that your presentation is not intriguing—when the target thinks he can easily predict what your idea is before you even explain it or when he feels that he can anticipate what you are going to say and how you’re going to say it.

Most intelligent people take great pleasure in being confronted with something new, novel, and intriguing.
Being able to figure it out is a form of entertainment, like solving the Sunday puzzle. Our brains are wired to look for these kinds of pleasurable chal enges.

When you described your idea initial y to your target, you were pul ing on a primal lever. When the target agreed to the meeting with you, what he or she real y was saying was, “This is a puzzle I am interested in solving.”

No one takes a meeting to hear about something they already know and understand.
It’s a fundamental concept driving every single presentation—it’s the hook that al ows you as the presenter to grab and hold attention by subconsciously saying, “I have a solution to one of your problems. I know something that you don’t.” This is why people agree to take meetings and to hear a pitch.

At the start of the meeting, you have the audience’s attention. It’s a rare moment, but not for the reason you may think. Audience members are, with ful concentration and at the most basic and primal level, trying to figure out the answer to this question:

“How similar is your idea to something I already know about or to a problem I have already solved?”

If audience members discover that the answer is close to what they had earlier guessed, they wil mental y check out on you. They wil experience a quick ping of self-satisfaction at the moment of realization, just before they mental y
check out
.

But
checking out
is not just a catch phrase to describe drifting attention or wandering minds. Checking out, in this context, refers to something very specific: an
extreme and nearly total loss of alertness
, and this is exactly what you need to avoid.

As your pitch moves along, at any time, some or al members of your audience wil solve the puzzle, see the solution, and
get
the whole story.

Then they check out. This is why you see presenters lose more and more of the audience as time goes on—
those who solve the puzzle drop out.

We generalize by saying, “Oh, they lost interest.” But what real y happened is that they learned enough about our idea to feel secure that they understand it—and there is nothing more to be gained by continuing to pay attention. They determined that there was no more value to be had by engaging with us on any level.

As I’ve said before, the brain is a cognitive miser. Unless it can get value for itself, it stops paying attention.
The analyst frame can devastate your pitch because it only values hard data and ignores the value of relationships and ideas. This frame is completely lacking in any kind of emotion or connection to the people in the room.

The most effective way to overcome the analyst frame is with an
intrigue frame
. Of the four frame types at your disposal, intrigue is the most powerful because it hijacks higher cognitive function to arouse the more primitive systems of the target’s brain.

Narrative and analytical information does not coexist.
It cannot; that’s simply impossible. The human brain is unable to be coldly analytical and warmly engaged in a narrative at the same time. This is the secret power of the intrigue frame.

When your target dril s down into technical material, you break that frame by tel ing a brief but relevant story that involves you. This is not a story that you make up on the spot; this is a personal story that you have prepared in advance and that you take to every meeting you have. Since al croc brains are pretty similar, you wil not need more than one story because the intrigue it wil contain wil have the same impact on every audience.

You need to be at the center of the story, which immediately redirects attention back to you. People wil pause, look up, and listen because you are sharing something personal.

As you share your story, there has to be some suspense to it because you are going to create intrigue in the tel ing of the story by
telling only part
of the story
. That’s right, you break the analyst frame by capturing audience attention with a provocative story of something that happened to you, and then you keep their attention by not tel ing them how it ends until you are ready.

This is much more powerful than you may imagine. Now I can’t give you a story to tel ; that has to come from you. But what I can do is tel you what your story should contain and then tel you my personal analyst frame crusher so you can see how the elements come together to recapture and hold audience attention.

The Intrigue Story

Your intrigue story needs the fol owing elements:

1. It must be brief, and the subject must be relevant to your pitch.

2. You need to be at the center of the story.

3. There should be risk, danger, and uncertainty.

4. There should be time pressure—a clock is ticking somewhere, and there are ominous consequences if action is not taken quickly.

5. There should be tension—you are trying to do something but are being blocked by some force.

6. There should be serious consequences—failure wil not be pretty.