Book Review-Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal

I’m not a fan of competition. Some folks are energized by it. Some folks live for that particular challenge. Not me. I want to go do something new. I want to climb a new hill. I don’t want to see if I can climb this particular hill faster than someone else. When a friend recommended that I read Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal, I didn’t realize how much I was going to be confronted by my desire to not be in competition with others. (You can see Who Am I? for more on different value systems that people hold.)

Whether I’m a fan of competition or not, it comes at me from time to time. I wouldn’t say that I avoid it. It’s more accurate to say that I don’t pursue it. Because I’m not avoiding it: I do find that there are times when I’m face-to-face with a competitive situation, where I need to prepare a pitch that presents the things that I’ve done in a way that makes sense to the prospect. Ultimately, that’s what pitching is all about.

Neuro-finance

Did you know that economics isn’t the study of money? It’s the study of how people react to money. (I first talked about this in my review of Drive.) Oren Klaff describes his perspective in Pitch Anything as Neuro-finance. That is, it’s highly influenced by the way that people think – and how they think about money.

He speaks of the “croc” brain and the amygdala, and how it filters what we get to evaluate through our “primate” brain. Khaneman called these System 1 and System 2 in Thinking, Fast and Slow. The key point of Klaff’s discussion is that everything that we process in our executive function, primate, system 2 brain is filtered – and altered – by our amygdala, croc, System 1 brain. (You may want to see The Heretic’s Guide to Management for more detail on these concepts and further refinement of system 2.)

The idea is that we often deliver pitches that never make it past the croc brain. Said differently, our reticular activating system (RAS) regulates our level of attention and our sleep-awake cycle. (See Change or Die for more about RAS.) Basically, the croc brain gets the opportunity to decide how much attention we pay. I often tell folks that they probably don’t remember which lights were red when they drove home last – but they probably do remember the last time they saw the red flashing lights of a fire truck. This is due in part to the novelty that triggers the RAS to signal that greater “awakeness” is required.

Because of some neurological shortcuts, the amygdala gets signals before the rest of the consciousness, so it quite literally gets to make decisions about what to do with information prior to executive function involvement. (See The Inner Game of Dialogue post spawned by my reading of Dialogue.) Add to that the lies that our croc brain feeds our primate brain, and you’ve got behaviors which are driven by delusions. (See Incognito for more about how our brains fool us.)

STRONG Process

Klaff describes his strategy pitching as STRONG:

• Setting the frame
• Telling the story
• Revealing the intrigue
• Offering the prize
• Nailing the hookpoint
• Getting a decision

We’ll look at these in detail in a moment. However, he then lays out a proposed template for how a pitch should go – which he believes should be no more than 20 minutes due to attention span issues. The template he suggests is:

1. Introduce yourself and the big idea: 5 minutes.
2. Explain the budget and secret sauce: 10 minutes.
3. Offer the deal: 2 minutes.
4. Stack frames for a hot cognition: 3 minutes.

Setting a Frame

A frame is a point of view or a structure for an interaction. It’s all our perspective. Our frame structures the way that we think. Klaff is, however, most frequently speaking of psychological triggers. (See Fascinate for more on psychological triggers.) While I agree that these triggers are powerful, I don’t know that I’d label them as “frames” since, with the exception of the first two examples, they aren’t really structural in nature.

• Power – In any situation or relationship there are multiple parties with different power and authority in different areas. When you walk in front of a judge, they own the power. The president may command a great deal of power but situationally so does his doctor. Klaff spends a great deal of time talking about the traps in business situations that reduce the power of the person who is pitching – and what to do about it.
• Time -In my home state of Indiana there’s a law that allows for the reversal of sales that happen at someone’s home. That law is, in part, in response to the fact that, as humans, we react to time pressure and often make decisions that aren’t the best. Creating a time limit to offers has shown up in marketing books as a way to create the perception of scarcity.
• Intrigue – Intrigue is at the heart of creating wanting. As humans, we have an instinctive belief that we may not be getting everything or the best. Intrigue doesn’t reveal the actual end, but instead just hints at it. (Fascinate calls intrigue by the name “mystique”.)
• Prizing – We all love to win. We love to get something. It’s surprising to me how effective the technique of giving away small trinkets during my talks is. People start to interact because they want the prize. In any relationship, none, one, or both of the people can be perceived as the prize. In sales situations it’s typically the buyer that is the prize. By reversing this – or making yourself a prize too – you can change the way that the buyer sees you.
• Moral Authority – Since time began, righteousness has been used to justify a great many sins. Having a moral authority frame means that your position is unquestionable.

Klaff makes the point that frames don’t merge or coexist. They conflict and one overtakes another. That is, one frame will overpower a weaker frame. Obviously, the ability to create a solid frame gives the frame power – but you can also break a frame by disrupting it.

Telling a Story

Nancy Dwarte made a passionate argument for storytelling in Slide:ology – and in her book Resonate, which I’ve not yet reviewed. Klaff sees the power of storytelling as well, and recommends that folks consider how they tell the story of what they’re pitching more than just focusing on the numbers and details of the deal. It turns out that we’ve evolved to learn from and feel emotionally connected to stories. So while data is nice, it doesn’t have an emotional component to it – and may not engage the targeted person because it’s not sufficiently interesting. (See The Happiness Hypothesis for the Rider-Elephant-Path model and the implications for the need to engage people emotionally.)

Revealing the Intrigue

We want to know the ending of the stories that we listen to. The most annoying movies that you’ve watched have left loose ends that they didn’t tie up. You didn’t get the end of the story – and because the movie ended, you know you won’t get the answer unless you’re willing to watch the sequel. The trick in intrigue is to explain the story only up to a point. Get the person to the edge of the jungle, but not out of it.

Comedy taught me the beautiful art of misdirection. The trick is to allow someone to form their own bad conclusion – or leap to conclusions – without them feeling like they have been intentionally misled. Done correctly, it inspires humor. (See Inside Jokes for more.)

Completing the Pitch

Obviously at some point you have to get to the meat of the deal and present the “give-get” in the situation. What is it you’re looking for out of the buyer, and what will they get in return? Klaff recommends that you follow this with emotional stacking – placing frames one after the other on the emotions of the buyer – to move them towards a decision.

Pitching Barriers

Just as important as the steps that you do to make your pitch successful is how you avoid traps that can make your pitch ineffective. They are:

• Neediness – Not only does neediness signal that you’re in a weaker power position but it also disrupts the buyer’s psyche. They wonder, if you’re the prize, how is it that you’re needy?
• Too Much Talking– You’re doing too much talking and not enough listening.
• Too Vague/Fuzzy – What you’re pitching doesn’t form a clear idea of its value in the mind of the buyer. (but not necessarily how.)
• Too Slow – Moving too slowly, by sharing too much background or sharing things that the buyer already knows, may kill the deal.
• Too Similar – If you can’t clearly articulate why your pitch is different than others, you won’t be able to maintain the attention that is necessary.

Pitching Without Pitching

One of the challenges with Pitch Anything for a guy that’s not pitching million dollar deals is how the approach applies to me and what I’m doing. My perspective is that it both does and doesn’t apply. In most cases, I don’t have to pitch hard. I’m there to help the customer if they want it. I’m also fine walking away from the deal if the buyer doesn’t need – or doesn’t value – the service that I provide.

I rarely pitch against other folks. When I do, the outcomes are typically pre-decided. Either they’ve already bought into the experience and insight I bring, or they’re asking me to pitch because they’ve already made up their mind and are fulfilling a set of requirements to get other bids. So in most cases, when I’m pitching I’m not competing with anyone. I’m competing against “Do Nothing”.

However, the core of the approach is knowing how people respond when you present them with any information, and that I have to do all the time. So while I can’t directly use the advice to pitch, I’ve learned how to Pitch Anything – even when it’s not a pitch.

Book Review-Leading Successful Change: 8 Keys to Making Change Work

If somewhere between half and three quarters of all organizational change initiatives fail, why do we keep trying to do them? We do them because in today’s ever-changing world, we know that we don’t have any choice but to try to evolve our organizations. Sometimes those changes can be slow, evolutionary changes, and other times it’s necessary to do much faster, revolutionary changes.

If we have to do change, then how do we become more successful at it? This is the fundamental question that Leading Successful Change: 8 Keys to Making Change Work seeks to answer.

Levers

The fundamental premise of Leading Successful Change is that there are eight key “levers” that you can use to drive organizational change. Pulling one isn’t likely to cause change but changing four or more can increase your chances of success. Here are the eight levers:

• Organization – Changing the organizational chart by changing reporting structures.
  
• Workplace Design – The physical and virtual arrangement of the workplace. (See the concept of Ba in Dialogue, Theory U, and Leading from the Emerging Future.)
• Task – Work processes, protocols, and pathways
  
• People – Selection of people, learning, orientation, and focus
  
• Rewards – “Carrots and Sticks,” Rewards and Punishments
  
• Measurement – Metrics and scorecards
  
• Information Distribution – Who knows what, when, and how
  
• Decision Allocation – Who participates when, in what way, in which decisions
  

In most organizations, there’s one or two levers that someone is comfortable with that they try to hang the entire cultural change process off of. Generally speaking, this isn’t enough to make the change work.

Leadership Ideas

John Kotter may be the most recognized name in organizational change. His books Leading Change and The Heart of Change lay out his 8-step process for creating change in an organization. They revolve around urgency, coallation, communication, and execution. From my point of view, these revolve around the process component of leading change. It’s the structure about the steps that you go through. Leading Successful Change isn’t about the steps and structure as much as it’s about how you motivate people towards the change. While Kotter starts with the need for urgency and emphasizes the need for excellent communication, he deals very little with motivating individual employees.

I don’t view Leading Successful Change as a competitive model as much as I view it as a complementary one. It’s a model that takes a different perspective of the problem and tries to move things forward from a different lens.

Changing Culture

Most folks view culture as something that has its own ethos – it is in and of itself something. However, culture is built on the foundation of the people and the environment, including the policies and the procedures that have been instituted in the organization and the “norms” that have developed. (See my post on Organizational Chemistry for more on this topic.)

Behavior is the connection between strategy and action. To change a culture, we have to change the behavior of individuals. To change the behavior of people, we have to either change them or their environment. The person’s behavior in turn influences the environment and creates a cyclical system of interaction – a recursive function. (See Fractal Along the Edges for a bit about recursive functions and Thinking in Systems for more on systems theory.)

Where Are We Going

There’s an interesting tension in leadership about defining the vision and strategy well enough that the organization can follow, and not so tightly that it makes it impossible for the people in the organization to buy into it as their own and adapt it to fit reality. This is the same tension I’ve encountered as a software development architect. You have to communicate the big picture and how things fit together – without all the detailed knowledge of how everything exactly works. You’re balancing the completeness of the vision (and the details provided) against the recognition that you don’t know everything.

On the one hand, given an infinite amount of time and resources, the leadership could fully articulate the change, complete with posters, diagrams, and beautifully written prose. On the other hand, that articulation probably wouldn’t work well with the organization as they would have felt that it was being forced on them from “on high.”

At the other end of the spectrum is the leadership team that says the flowery equivalent of “do more faster and better with less.” This isn’t a strategy. This isn’t leading change. This is simply stating operational excellence or continuous improvement. Without any form, the organization doesn’t know which direction to head, or can’t get a clear enough picture for people to identify with.

The trick about creating a vision for the change is to spell out some of the key behaviors and attitudes that the organization would like to see; and at the same time, leave some gaps into which the rest of the organization can breathe in the details – and be clear that they’re expected to add these details and not wait for someone else to figure them out.

Sociotechnical Systems

Kurt Lewin described behavior as a function of both person and environment. It’s a recursive function, as people influence the environment. As a result, the behaviors of each party influences the environment, which influences their behavior. One way to think about this is that air pressure in a balloon makes it expand. It’s not the behavior of a single molecule of air that is causing the balloon to expand, but the sum total of all of the molecules bouncing around that keeps the balloon large.

All organizations are collections of people and are therefore sociotechnical systems. That is, organizations are systems which include people. There are policies and procedures which create structure and flow for the system. There are also the personal whims and concerns of the parties which makes the systems sometimes behave in some erratic or seemingly erratic ways.

The levers for leading successful change are not focused exclusively on either the systematic or personal components, but are instead diffused across the aspects of the sociotechnical system in an attempt to drive the change. I do strongly recommend Thinking in Systems for how best to move the systematic levers that Leading Successful Change recommends, because it has great coverage of how to make changes in a system.

Connecting Strategy and Action

Behaviors are the connection between strategy and action. One of the largest barriers for me in life is this character, “Do Nothing”. I can’t tell you know many times he’s gotten in the way of the things I want to do. He’s my chief competitor in business. My services are optional. If you want to improve your success you can hire me to help, but if you’re comfortable or complacent you certainly don’t have to.

One of the challenges of leading a change initiative is the possibility of Do Nothing creeping in and fouling things up. That’s why Kotter emphasized creating a sense of urgency. Strategies that are converted into tactics and even actions die because they’re not done. People are too busy doing real work or listening to Do Nothing to actually getting around to those things that lead to behaviors that drive action.

If you’re ready to tell Do Nothing to take a hike, maybe you’re ready to learn about Leading Successful Change.