The Art of the Pitch Persuasion and Presentation Skills That Win Business Online Free
"We sell ideas in presentations – whether those presentations take place in a boardroom or a coworker'south cubicle – which ways that presentations course the very building blocks of our careers." — Sally Hogshead
What good is a slap-up book if nobody reads it and spreads the ideas inside?
What practiced is your product if I don't know how it will improve my life?
Here'due south a universal truth: You can have the best idea, the most innovative product, or the nearly beautiful piece of work, but it'southward rarely going to sell itself.
Peter Coughter has coached executives from Crispin Porter + Bogusky, GSD&M, BBDO, and more than. His book, "The Art of the Pitch," will assist you sell your ideas.
Though the book is written from the perspective of an advertising agency executive, the principles within are broadly applicable to anyone selling their idea to someone else who can help bring it to life. There'southward too some bully first-person stories from famous ad execs on their all-time (and worst) presentations.
Below are more than 50 of my favorite takeaways from the book. Don't be intimidated how many in that location are; just think of them as your cliff notes.
Everything is a Presentation
i. What is a Presentation?
The proffering or giving of something to someone — like a gift.
We could say that our ideas are the gift, but I adopt to think of it in another manner — nosotros are the gift. We are giving ourselves to our audience. We're giving them the product of our thoughts, efforts and personality. We're giving them who nosotros are. Nosotros're telling them our truth. That'southward out gift to them.
A presentation isn't public speaking. It'south a chat. Only you're doing about of the talking.
2. Everything is a Presentation
It's all a presentation. Y'all're e'er beingness judged. People are forming opinions of y'all, opinions that are hard to change.
three. Presentations are Opportunities
Think about presenting as an opportunity. An opportunity to share your thoughts with your audition — to give them the gift of you.
4. Share Your Best Idea Commencement
If you're dependent upon a client someone blessing your ideas, the offset one you show them is the 1 that has a adventure to be great.
five. On Disarming the Client That Your Ideas are Right:
Do an ad for your ads.It just doesn't matter how practiced the idea is unless you tin persuade the person on the other side of the table to feel the same way. Take some fourth dimension and effigy out how to sell it.
6. What Makes An Effective Presentation?
- Is a conversation:
- A lot of people want to appear "professional person." What they terminate upward accomplishing is being boring. Forget about being "professional," and start being yourself.
- Exist yourself
- Since we're trying for a conversational style, there probably SHOULD be some mistakes.
- Presenters who are too slick, too adept, too polished, too sure of themselves come off as something less than sincere. Audiences want authenticity, not a game prove host.
- Tell stories
- Get in a story. Go far fun. Make information technology human. Brand information technology conversational. Make it personal. Arrive affair.
- Know Your Stuff
- Great presenters are and so in melody with their audience that they know exactly how they are responding.
- Make it personal
- If a speaker recounts a personal anecdote, the audition often feels a kinship with the presenter because they relate the story to something that happened in their own life.
- Presenting is the art of seduction, not fence. People make decisions emotionally.
- Your bulletin has to be crystal clear.
It's Non About You
7. The most important gene:
The near important factor in the equation of presenting is the audience. Without the audience there, at that place is no presentation.
8. On Putting Yourself in the Audience'due south Seat:
Most people notice presentations boring. Ask yourself, would I notice this interesting? Would this concord my interest?
9. On Ruthless Exclusion:
The audition does not care about how much we know. The audience cares about how interesting what we tell them nearly what we know is. The audience's ability to digest and retain information is limited. You're but going to exist able to make ii or 3 key points.
You're not going to bludgeon the audience into submission with a blitzkrieg of facts. It's not rug bombing, it'south a surgical strike.
The audience will not think the vast bulk of what y'all say. But they will think what they thought about what you said. And what they felt about you said.
10. On the Gift of Fourth dimension
"I apologize for the length of this letter, only I didn't accept time to make information technology shorter." — Mark Twain
The meeting should be as long as you need information technology to be to say what you need to stay in order to go what y'all desire. No longer and no shorter. Use one-half the time and requite them back an 60 minutes of their lives. They will love you for it. Fourth dimension is the rarest of currencies these days and valuable across belief to today's overworked, stressed-out executives.
eleven. On the Presentation as a Trip the light fantastic:
Think of a presentation as a dance. You're leading the audition, only they're participating. And having fun.
It has to be a testify. It has to be time that they consider well spent. It cannot be wearisome.
12. Don't Talk to Strangers
Notice out everything you possibly tin about who they are. You never know what nugget you may be able to mine that leads to a major breakthrough or helps you make a warm connection with frosty project.
Why are they coming to the presentation and what exercise they await to hear? You've got to know why they're in that location and what they expect. You lot can't interruption the rules until you know the rules.
Even when you lot're supposed to exist talking nearly yourself, you lot should be talking nearly the client.
How We Connect
13. On What You Say vs. How You Say It:
The audience does non recall a lot about what we actually say. In fact, the average audience fellow member will only remember well-nigh 7% from the actual words you speak, (Mehrabian, 1967).
The way nosotros say something is more important than what nosotros say. The audience is deciding, "Do I similar this person? Practice I trust her? Practise I want to practise business organisation with her?"
14. Tell Your Audience What to Think:
Most audiences don't know what they like or dislike and have to exist "told" what to think.
15. On Your Slides:
- Simplify, simplify, simplify.
- Employ visuals, not words.
- Do not read the slides.
16. Why It's Disquisitional to Connect:
For every 10 "great" pieces of advertising that get created, peradventure one is produced.
17. Information technology is Cool to exist a Good Presenter:
There's ane immutable truth to the advertising business: the best presenter usually wins.
The Power of Emotion
eighteen. On Being Yourself:
Who y'all really are is far more interesting than who you think they want to believe you are. Being someone else (or the kind of person who gives a "presentation") doesn't work. This isn't acting, this is business.
nineteen. The Essence of Selling is Emotion:
Your audience will choose you (and consequently your idea) not because of what you lot said you would do, but considering of how you made them feel. Nigh nil is sold on the rational, analytical level.
Ken burns does non describe himself as a filmmaker, historian, author or director. He calls himself "an emotional archaeologist." Whatever the subject affair, at that place is a way to make it meaningful and relevant to our audience. There is a way to capture our audience's imagination, and persuade them to our point of view. That way is through the use of emotion.
20. Peachy work has to be sold.
And it isn't like shooting fish in a barrel to do so, because great work is unexpected. It's often unlike annihilation the client has seen before. It's risky, bold, and daring. It's easy to sell mediocre work. Mediocre piece of work is expected, looks just like most of the other work in the category, won't become anyone fired (at least not right away), and is, most of all, safe.
21. The cloak-and-dagger to selling creative is framing:
Frame your argument in a such a style that you eliminate possible solutions until the just solution possible is yours.
Eliminate the obvious solutions(s) and take the audition by the hand, leading them to a indicate where the simply possible solution has to be yours. Sell the idea of the piece of work, then sell the work.
How To Be
22. On the Physiological Differences Between Fear and Excitement:
The way we experience and the way we appear to the audience are exactly the same when we're agape and when nosotros're excited.
The feelings of nervousness that we are experiencing simply practice non transmit to the audience to anywhere near the degree with which we feel them.
23. On Knowing Anybody'due south "Stuff":
Not just your role of the presentation. If yous're presenting with teammates–and that's the mode the vast majority of presentations go down today–know everybody'southward part; the entire presentation. You lot never know when you might accept to bond a teammate out.
"Know it." Do not memorize.
24. On Showcasing the Artistic Procedure:
"Showing photos of the messy creative procedure can build empathy and showcase difficult work before presenting central ideas." – Chris Jacobs
25. On Telling Jokes (As Part of Your Presentation):
Being funny is great, but what we should not do, under any circumstances, is tell jokes.
26. The Importance of Thoughtfulness:
Thoughtfulness is i of the well-nigh important attributes we can possess. This is extremely important for immature people.
Choose your language carefully. Accept your time and answer in measured sentences.
27. The Four Things Clients Desire the Most:
Insight, Conviction, Wisdom and Courage.
(RIP Mike Hughes)
28. The Way Nosotros Say Things:
No one knows if 1 idea is meliorate than another if information technology isn't presented in a such a way that information technology is articulate to the audition the idea is better.
Retrieve: They will call up what they idea about what you said.
Authenticity
29. On Using Technology:
"We told stories, and to paraphrase David Ogilvy, nosotros didn't lean on technology like a boozer leans on a lamppost, for back up rather than illumination." – Gareth Kay
thirty. On Presenting Authentically:
Don't impersonate someone giving a "presentation." Call back nigh "having a conversation" versus "giving a presentation."
31. On Knowing Who You Are:
By challenge to stand for then many things, they didn't stand up for any. My clients unanimously liked the people who knew who they were. The people who had a bespeak of view and could articulate it with clarity, confidence and grace. You have to have a point of view.
Decease past Deck
32. A deck is not a presentation.
There is no story. No drama. No entertainment.
33. The words on the screen are a distraction.
You are the message.
34. On the power of simple, articulate visual aids:
You must define the well-nigh concise fashion to communicate that message and that the most concise way may be for y'all to talk about the truly important material while information that supports your argument is on the screen.
35. On Solving Someone's Business Problem:
The deck is the last thing you practice, not the first.
All of that information doesn't belong in the presentation — it belongs in the leave backside. Assemble all the information, information, facts, figures, and anything else you need to explain and justify your argument. Write it upward as a leave behind. So go through that document and create a deck that but, clearly, and –dare I say?–elegantly presents your argument.
36. Audiences Crave Expert Endings:
Thank you is a crutch. (Don't use it on your final slide).
Organizing the Presentation
37. What is Your Presentation Trying to Accomplishing?
Practise not begin to organize the presentation until you have unanimous agreement on what you lot're trying to attain and how you'll do information technology.
38. Formulate Your Statement with Support Points to Make Your Example:
1 first-class way to wrestle the presentation to the ground is to lay information technology out on a series of Post-it notes, in the way of a storyboard.
Ideally, each of these frames representing i idea builds on the last frame and foreshadows the next frame.
39. On The Exception:
Reading a quote off the screen is one of the very few times that it'south adequate to read the words that are on the screen.
The Activeness format:
- A = Attention
- C = Capsule
- T = Theme
- I = Information
- O = Open up to listen
- N = Adjacent Steps
Start with the adjacent steps. Earlier you do anything, establish what it is that you want out of the presentation.
The capsule is two or iii sentences that sum up the entire presentation. They should fit on an index card.
A probable scenario could be that once y'all've agreed on what yous want, the Next Steps, you then then begin to assemble all of the Information you lot will need to make your argument. And so, you lot establish a Theme that will hold it all together and create an Attention-getting device. Past the manner, this device may very well foreshadow the ultimate purpose of the presentation. Toward the end of the procedure, you should exist able to write the Capsule, and you must e'er be Open to listen.
40. Only utilize as much time equally you need to nowadays your thinking.
Give them back half an hour and they will honey y'all for it. Almost all presentations are too long anyhow. Remember the concept of ruthless exclusion.
"I always endeavor to finish earlier than expected," says Anne Bologna.
41. On clarity:
"Tell'em what you're going to tell'em, tell'em, and and then tell'em what you lot told'em."
Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse
42. On the Importance of Rehearsing:
Not rehearsing isn't merely setting yourself up for failure, it's idiotic.
43. Virtually all presentations are new business presentations:
Even existing clients are evaluating the purchase determination they've fabricated, no affair how long ago. And don't remember for a minute that your competitors aren't actively courting all of your existing clients.
44. On Rehearsing as a Team:
Past rehearsing together, you will make the presentation ameliorate. You've got four or five smart people in a room listening to everything and critiquing as they become. That'due south how it gets ameliorate.
Punctuation
45. On the Importance of Punctuation:
Listening to anyone more than a few minutes is hard, and damn almost impossible if they don't punctuate effectively.
46. On Pausing:
Silence will make you announced to exist confident and in control.
People tend to call back the last thing we say before we become quiet. So, make one of your fundamental points, and be quiet.
47. Ask Questions. Get People Involved.
One technique that I continually apply is to start with a question. The very start matter I say, the affair I want to apply to get their attention is a question. "Why are we here today" "Why is it important we practise this" These kinds of questions become their attention correct away and crusade them to brainstorm to recall, which is good.
48. On visual aids and props:
"Simply it'southward the work that'due south the star," people often say. Not really. Selling the work may in fact be why we're doing the presentation, but in guild to buy the work, they're going to have to buy you.
49. On Middle Contact:
When you have something important to say, you lot must exist looking at someone.
You lot volition encounter that by making effective eye contact, y'all are causing your audition to pay closer attending.
50. Invest in a Remote.
Without a remote, you must look down and push the buttons. This breaks center contact with the audience at the two well-nigh important parts of your slide–the first sentence and the last.
51. Java is for Closers:
Agencies that win a lot have a closer. Who's yours? If you don't know, discover ane.
You Never Know
52. On Surprise and Delight:
If you do what the client, or new business prospect expects you to do — they will be disappointed.
53. Learn From Every Presentation:
Each presentation, win or lose, is a renewable resource that should be built upon.
54. A Swell Story Can Move a Tough Audience:
Storytelling is one of the keys to winning over an audience.
55. In summary:
- Work hard
- Question yourself
- Exclude the extraneous
- Have meticulous training
- Catch the audience's attention right from the beginning
- Have the courage to stand up and express your point of view
And do yourself a favor even if you don't check out the book. Visit your local library or book store, pick upward the book, and read the afterword.
Many people choose to settle. It'south besides scary to exist really good. It causes one to stand out from the crowd, and nigh people really merely want to blend in.
Public speaking is scary. Opening ourselves upwards to scrutiny by pitching our ideas is scary. Standing up and taking activity is scary.
When I encounter that fear, I remind myself of a quote my wife has on our bathroom mirror: "Only expressionless fish go with the menses."
If y'all're interested, here are my other volume reviews. Apologies for the chronological listing. That page has grown significantly and is in desperate need of re-organizing.
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