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

by Oren Klaff

If you’ve been in business for more than 10 minutes, you have figured this much out: The better you are at keeping someone’s attention, the more likely that person will be to go for your idea.

Our thought process exactly matches our evolution: First, survival. Then, social relationships. Finally, problem solving.

Messages that are composed and sent by your young neocortex are received and processed by the other person’s old crocodile brain.

Everything in the recent research points to the same conclusion: Nine out of 10 messages that enter the crocodile brain—and remember, every single pitch starts by going through the crocodile brain—end up being coded. • Boring: Ignore it. • Dangerous: Fight/run. • Complicated: Radically summarize (invariably causing a lot to be lost in the process) and pass it in severely truncated form.

First, you don’t want your message to trigger fear alarms. And second, you want to make sure it gets recognized as something positive, unexpected, and out of the ordinary—a pleasant novelty.

To make this process easier to remember, I use the acronym STRONG: Setting the frame Telling the story Revealing the intrigue Offering the prize Nailing the hookpoint Getting a decision

If you have to explain your authority, power, position, leverage, and advantage, you do not hold the stronger frame. Rational appeals to higher order, logical thinking never win frame collisions or gain frame control.

For example, if I know the person I’m meeting is a hard-charging, type A personality, I will go in with a power-busting frame. If that person is an analytical, dollars-and-cents type, I will choose an intrigue frame. If I’m outnumbered and outgunned and the deck is stacked against me, time frames and prize frames are essential.

To instigate a power frame collision, use a mildly shocking but not unfriendly act to cause it. Use defiance and light humor. This captures attention and elevates your status by creating something called “local star power.”

Defiance and light humor are the keys to seizing power and frame control.

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.

Ironically, 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.

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 especially common in industries that involve engineers and financial analysts. This frame will kill your pitch.

Oh, for sure, audience members will 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.

If you’re pitching a product and the drill-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.

Most intelligent people take great pleasure in being confronted with something new, novel, and intriguing.

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 drills down into technical material, you break that frame by telling 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 all croc brains are pretty similar, you will not need more tha...

Your intrigue story needs the following 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 will not be pretty.

You don’t earn status by being polite, by obeying the established power rituals of business, or by engaging in friendly small talk before a meeting starts. What these behaviors might earn you is a reputation for being “nice.” They do nothing for your social position—except reduce it.

The first thing you do when you meet with a target is to establish local star power. If your meeting happens to be on your turf, like the golf pro or the French waiter, use your domain expertise and locational knowledge to quickly take the high-status position. If you are meeting in the target’s domain—his (or her) office or at an off-site location—you must neutralize the person holding high status, temporarily capture his star power, and redistribute some of his status to others in the room who will support your frame.

One of the best ways to get a customer to confirm your alpha status is to make him defend himself in a light-hearted way. Not only does this let you know that you are still in control, but more important, it also reminds the customer that he holds a subordinate position. The customer then will defer to you, even in front of his underlings. I may say something like, “Remind me again why in the world I want to do business with you?” This usually elicits a few guffaws—and a serious response amid the laughter: “Because we’re the largest bank in California, Oren.” To which I say, “Yeah, that’s good, I’ll keep that in mind.”

To put them at ease, I have a simple solution: It’s called the time-constraint pattern. This is what you say, exactly, to let the target know he isn’t trapped in the typical hour-long-meeting: “Guys, let’s get started. I’ve only got about 20 minutes to give you the big idea, which will leave us some time to talk it over before I have to get out of here.”

You’re going to make the pitch in four sections or phases: 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.

Many times I’ve seen people spend 15 minutes or longer on their background. Absurd. No one is that fantastic. Yet people often think that if some background biography is good, then more is better. But people’s brains do not work that way. Research has shown that your impression of someone is generally based on the average of the available information about them, not the sum. So telling people one great thing about yourself will leave them with a better impression of you than telling than one great thing and one pretty good one.

What I have discovered over time is that in every business there are three market forces that together triangulate to answer the “Why?” question, and you can use these forces to create a strong “Why now?” frame. Three-Market-Forces Pattern: Trendcasting When you describe your idea, project, or product, first give it context by framing it against these three market forces or trending patterns that you believe are important.

Because the brain pays attention to things that are in motion, you paint a picture of the idea moving out of an old market into a new one. Doing it this way, you don’t trigger change blindness, which would make your deal easy to neglect.

Attention will be given when information novelty is high and will drift away when information novelty is low.

Dopamine is the neurotransmitter of desire. Norepinephrine is the neurotransmitter of tension. Together they add up to attention.

To give a dopamine kick and create desire, offer a reward. To give a norepinephrine kick and create tension, take something away. You’re going to learn the patterns for triggering the desire and tension right now.

The two parts of the attention cocktail are novelty and tension, which in a pitch work together in a feedback loop for about 20 minutes until—no matter what you do or how hard you try—they get out of balance and then stop working altogether.

But in narrative- and frame-based pitching, you can’t be afraid of tension. In fact, you have to create it.

A pitch narrative can be thought of as a series of tension loops. Push then pull. Create tension. Then resolve it.

If we stop to think about it, most major decisions are not made by cold cognitive processes such as evaluation and analysis but instead by hot cognition. We quickly realize that there probably are very few decisions in our lives that aren’t “hot.”

To make it work, you just implement the frames you are already familiar with from Chapter 2. All you have to do is learn how to stack them up one after the other to generate a hot cognition—in other words, to create what cognitive scientists call a wanting.

Here are the four frames we’re going to stack in quick succession. (Doing this correctly will move you quickly into the last part of the pitch—the hookpoint.) Hot cognition 1: the intrigue frame. Hot cognition 2: the prize frame. Hot cognition 3: the time frame. Hot cognition 4: the moral authority frame.

Here’s another example of the pattern, where I built an intrigue frame with a compelling narrative. I was taught this pattern by a Hollywood screenwriter. It’s called the “ticking time bomb”:

That’s the important fourth step to the narrative pattern building the intrigue frame: Get the man to the edge of the jungle, but don’t get him out of it. In other words, the intrigue is created by the fact that there’s no final resolution. To hold intrigue and make it work as an emotional event, a hot cognition, I don’t complete the story (although it has a truly great ending, and it will always come up later) and instead move to the next frame in the stack: the prize frame.

As I mentioned in Chapter 2, the prize frame—or prizing—let’s you position yourself as the most important party in the deal, not the people on the other side of the table. Successful prizing flips the frame. Even though you are pitching the deal—it results in the target chasing you, trying to win your attention.

The effect of time on decision making has been researched for 100 years, and nothing has changed about human nature in that time: In nearly all instances, the addition of time pressure to a decision-making event reduces decision quality.

Robert Zajonc, the thought leader on hot cognitions, once wrote, “We evaluate each other constantly, we evaluate each others’ behaviors and we evaluate the motives and consequences of that behavior.” And this, of course, is the key to the reason we stack frames. Because we are going to be evaluated no matter what happens and what we do, let’s get the evaluation we want, something Zajonc calls wanting.

Showing signs of neediness is about the worst thing you can do to your pitch. It’s incredibly bad for frame control. It erodes status. It freezes your hot cognitions. It topples your frame stacks.

Plain and simple, neediness equals weakness. Broadcasting weakness by seeking validation is often a death sentence. This may sound harsh, but it is true. Neediness—displaying so-called validation-seeking behaviors—will affect all social interactions dramatically.

But this is just a part of a broader, more comprehensive solution to eradicating neediness. Here’s the basic formula: 1. Want nothing. 2. Focus only on things you do well. 3. Announce your intention to leave the social encounter.

Eliminate your desires. It’s not necessary to want things. Sometimes you have to let them come to you. Be excellent in the presence of others. Show people one thing that you are very good at. Withdraw. At a crucial moment, when people are expecting you to come after them, pull away.

I believe that if two equally skilled people pitch the same idea and one tunes it to the neocortex and the other tunes it to the crocodile brain, you have two very different results. I had tuned my pitch for the targets’ croc brains and was ready to start.

For a closing statement, I would bring it all together. Time frame. Prize frame. Intrigue. Morality frame. Push. Pull. Desire. Tension.

Every croc brain responds the same: • When something is boring: Ignore it. • When something seems dangerous: Fight/run. • When something is complicated: Radically summarize (causing information loss) and pass it on in severely truncated form.

I mention this because most buyers/customers/investors will try to use the power frame on you. You’ll see it frequently. Don’t worry. It’s a clumsy frame that is easy to disrupt using power-busting, intrigue, prizing, and time frames.