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You Master the Two Laws of Effective Pitch Theater
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You leave your comfortable marketing job with reliable benefits to launch an agency passion project but you call it a business. You do this just before the economy collapses. You are forced to survive and do so by learning the difference between a passion project and a business. You always loved to pitch but now you pitch business to survive. Bravo, it works, so your agency celebrates its 7-year mark. You made it. You understand certain inalienable facts that have kept your communications firm healthy. You uncover the simple truth that sales cures all when it comes to survival. In this business, you know firsthand sales means pitching prospects on creative concepts to turn them into new customers.
You master the two laws of effective pitch theater:
Law 1: No “About Us” Information. Nobody gives a shit. You save the classic About Us stuff for thumb drives and email links. Your only goal now is to shut up and listen. Even in a full-capabilities presentation, each capability must be tailored to the prospect’s needs. You know their needs because you understand the value of homework for your pitch to replace the About Us information. You learned this valuable law after pressing play on an About Us video in front of a Fortune 500 CEO who just leaves the room. You now refer to this as the worst 90 seconds of your professional career. You lost the deal but learned this valuable law: The only About Us that matters is how it will help the one listening to the pitch.
Law 2: Show Method. It’s the only way they will trust you with large budgets. Many marketing professionals can not evaluate your creative work, especially the engineer, MBA, Excel spreadsheet types. You spend years attempting to tell the truth of the creative process like a chaos theory where magic happens with the right people who look at more shit and think about it deeper. That truth you learn makes for snarky commentary but fails completely in multiple pitch meetings. As a creative professional, you are at a crossroads of the right and left sides of the brain. You believed method too often had a stranglehold on the real ineffable creative magic. Now you know that sharing method is not to sell creativity. The portfolio of samples does this smartly. Showing method is about sharing reliability in a process that meets business culture, budget and timeline. For your customers, you now see, there is plenty at risk. They want to have faith in their decision. All people who must evaluate a budget want a trustworthy, proven method.
You know these laws as pitch physics. You know their simplicity is not so easily achieved. You learn advanced nuances of keeping it simple. You follow these laws to land phenomenal marketing partnerships. You improve your sales close-ratio 20% over two years. You share these two laws so that others might avoid the mistakes you made to earn this knowledge.
Image Notes: A lucky shot I grabbed of our aikido master, Jaff Raji, taking ukemi for my older brother, Michael Selin, in our Dojo.