THE PROBLEM WITH QUICK FIXES IN PITCH COACHING

We’ve all read the posts. 10 ways to sharpen up your sales pitch. 20 tricks for creating a great sales deck. Top 30 rules for great pitching. 397 ways to speak like Cicero. Ok, I will admit I made the last one up, and I’d absolutely be its only reader, but nonetheless, you get the idea.

Lockdown seems to have given birth to new colonies of these kinds of advice articles. Last week the swarms of flying ants migrating around London were large enough to appear as rain on the weather maps, but even they would be drowned out by the number of “top tips and tricks” available on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Medium and so many other platforms.

One of the troubles with this kind of content is that it’s so tempting to believe in it. Psychologically we are programmed to want easy remedies, to believe that if only we can make one small tweak, one little amend, we will crack it. In fact, this is so ingrained that it’s often a problem for therapists, and leads to a high number of premature drop outs when people don’t feel that they have made sufficiently fast progress. In fitness, the same thing happens. New Year’s resolutionists flock to gyms in January, power through a couple of sessions and wonder why they haven’t turned into The Rock overnight.

Quick fixes are appealing because they make us believe that we were very close, and just needed a little push over the line. Sometimes that can be true with pitching, particularly when coaching happens in the final days before a pitch. Teams have often put immense effort into honing their ideas, and in many cases, coaching might focus on maximising the delivery, making small changes to the text, or on handling Q&A. However, sometimes there’s a need for greater intervention and much more teasing out. For those that do need this, confronting it, and accepting help, can be harder than being told there’s an easy fix.

Are there things that would help most people, absolutely. And do those things form part of any good pitch coaching. Also yes. But the simple truth is that there is no one size fits all solution, no simple set of guidelines that anyone can give you to guarantee that your start-up becomes a unicorn. I wish there was. All I’d have to do would be write a book of them and retire to a vineyard in the South of France and build myself a wood panelled library on the earnings.

Instead, I would argue that good pitch coaching means different pitch coaching every time. When I work with startups I don’t walk into a room with a carefully scripted plan for every moment of the next hours or days. Instead I walk in with lots of potential plans, and a willingness to throw each and every one of them out of the window. The result is that even if I’m coaching multiple groups in close proximity, I’m more likely to give them different advice than I am to tell them the same things.

Why? Because everyone has to tell their own story and it would be a dereliction of duty for me to try to make them all the same.

In a coaching session in Copenhagen earlier this year, I was working with two small groups on an exercise I often run, an exercise which is designed to draw out the emotions and values that people want to convey to the audience in their pitch. When each group had listed, and then narrowed down, the emotions that they hoped to conjure in the audience, I asked them to start thinking about the specifics of how they wanted to do that. What parts of their pitch would allow them to get that across? What physical cues would they use to complement that? At that point, one of the entrepreneurs asked a great question. “what’s the best emotion to convey?”. My answer is the same as it is here, that there is no one single emotion or value that’s the best, just as there’s no one single structure that’s the best, or one single method of introduction. There is only what’s best for your story, and how you are going to bring that value out. If you can’t communicate it appropriately, it’s probably the wrong choice. If it doesn’t allow you to express your and your team’s personality, it’s probably the wrong choice. Unless the way your business incorporates it is unique or fresh, it’s probably the wrong choice.

One of my favourite things about walking into a pitch coaching session is that is very much like Forrest Gump’s box of chocolates, you absolutely never know what you’re going to get. Everything from the structure of the pitch to the team or individuals’ backstory, to the user feedback they’ve received, and the way they respond to ideas needs to be taken into account and used in the upcoming session. As a coach, thinking on my feet and working out how to get the best out of the groups in front of me is the most enjoyable part, bar none.

Will that approach get me into trouble in the future? Probably. I’m sure that one day there will be a room I walk into where the attendees are not cooperative and where I get it wrong. But even though it might appear safer, and on that one day less embarrassing, to stick rigidly to a concrete plan and never deviate, I don’t believe that it would provide better results for the people I work with.

I’ve coached the good, the bad, and the ugly, often all in the same day, and I like to think that I’ve made the ugly decent, the bad good, and the good into an absolute knockout. One of the things that teams and their mentors often tell me that they value is that I didn’t try to preach at them, but rather worked with them to give them the best chance of creating a great pitch.

None of this is to say that you should ignore some of the brilliant advice coming your way on LinkedIn and other platforms. Read everything! There are lots of people being incredibly generous with some fantastic ideas, and it is absolutely worth reading, digesting, and working out whether that idea works for you, and if so, how you can apply. But do be mindful about how you learn.

Uncritical reading and indenturing yourself to a particular set of rules, or a set way of structuring your pitch is as likely to make your pitch worse as it is to make it better.