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

by Oren Klaff

I didn’t realize this at the start, however, so, I began, as I always do, by framing (frames create context and relevance; as we will see, the person who owns the frame owns the conversation).

He was really making it difficult. You can imagine how hard it was to use all the right techniques: setting the frame, telling the story, revealing the intrigue, offering the prize, nailing the hookpoint, and getting the decision.

That’s because a great pitch is not about procedure. It’s about getting and keeping attention. And that means you have to own the room with frame control, drive emotions with intrigue pings, and get to a hookpoint fairly quickly.

And finally, I got him to the hookpoint, the place in the presentation where your listeners become emotionally engaged. Instead of you giving them information, they are asking you for more on their own. At the hookpoint, they go beyond interested to being involved and then committed.

First come the old brain, or “crocodile brain”—we’ll call it the “croc brain” for short. It’s responsible for the initial filtering of all incoming messages, it generates most survival fight-or-flight responses, and it produces strong, basic emotions, too.

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

First, given the limited focus and capacity of the croc brain, up to 90 percent of your message is discarded before it’s passed on up to the midbrain and then on to the neocortex.

Second, unless your message is presented in such a way that the crocodile brain views it to be new and exciting—it is going to be ignored.

Third, if your pitch is complicated—if it contains abstract language and lacks visual cues—then it is perceived as a threat.

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.

• Going to ignore you if possible. • Only focused on the big picture (and needs high-contrast and well-differentiated options to choose between). • Emotional, in the sense it will respond emotionally to what it sees and hears, but most of the time that emotional response is fear. • Focused on the here and now with a short attention span that craves novelty. • In need of concrete facts—it looks for verified evidence and doesn’t like abstract concepts.

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

Only one frame will dominate after the exchange, and the other frames will be subordinate to the winner. This is what happens below the surface of every business meeting you attend, every sales call you make, and every person-to-person business communication you have.

Understanding how to harness and apply the power of frames is the most important thing you will ever learn.

When you are responding ineffectively to things the other person is saying and doing, that person owns the frame, and you are being frame-controlled.

If you have to explain your authority, power, position, leverage, and advantage, you do not hold the stronger frame.

Every social interaction is a collision of frames, and the stronger frame always wins. Frame collisions are primal. They freeze out the neocortex and bring the crocodile brain in to make decisions and determine actions.

Going into most business situations, there are three major types of opposing frames that you will encounter: 1. Power frame 2. Time frame 3. Analyst frame

You have three major response frame types that you can use to meet these oncoming frames, win the initial collision, and control the agenda: 1. Power-busting frame 2. Time constraining frame 3. Intrigue frame There is a fourth frame you can deploy. It’s useful against all three of the opposing frames and many others you will encounter: 4. Prize frame

When you abide by the rituals of power instead of establishing your own, you reinforce the opposing power frame.

As soon as you come in contact with your target, look for the first opportunity to 1. Perpetrate a small denial, or 2. Act out some type of defiance.

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

When you are defiant and funny at the same time, he is pleasantly challenged by you and instinctively knows that he is in the presence of a pro.

What prizing subconsciously says to your audience is, “You are trying to win my attention. I am the prize, not you. I can find a thousand buyers (audiences, investors, or clients) like you. There is only one me.”

When you rotate the circle of social power 180 degrees, it changes everything.

As I mentioned before, no situation has real meaning until you frame it. Frames are mental structures that shape the way we see the world and put relationships in context. The frame you put around a situation completely and totally controls its meaning. But you aren’t the only one framing. People are always trying to impose frames on each other. The frame is like a picture of what you want the interaction to be about. And the most powerful thing about frames? There can be only one dominant frame during any interaction between two people.

But rational explanations will never override a moral authority frame.

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.

Running long or beyond the point of attention shows weakness, neediness, and desperation.

Problem solving, numerical calculations, statistics, and any sort of geometry are called cold cognitions. Nothing will freeze your pitch faster than allowing your audience to grind numbers or study details during the pitch.

Remember, when you own the frame, you control the agenda, and you determine the rules under which the game is played.

Most intelligent people take great pleasure in being confronted with something new, novel, and intriguing. Being able to figure it out is a form of entertainment, like solving the Sunday puzzle. Our brains are wired to look for these kinds of pleasurable challenges.

No one takes a meeting to hear about something they already know and understand. It’s a fundamental concept driving every single presentation—it’s the hook that allows you as the presenter to grab and hold attention by subconsciously saying, “I have a solution to one of your problems. I know something that you don’t.” This is why people agree to take meetings and to hear a pitch.

As I’ve said before, the brain is a cognitive miser. Unless it can get value for itself, it stops paying attention.

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.

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.

A short, personal narrative like this is important to your audience because it reveals something about you, your character, and your life.

Use the elements of surprise and tension, and as you approach the most interesting part of the story, move away from it and leave the audience intrigued—until you are ready to reveal.

Consider the way people talk about a presentation—they often call it a “dog and pony show.” This label evokes self-defeating imagery of you riding around in a circle on a pony. The only thing missing is rainbow suspenders and a clown nose.

But if you are dynamic enough—giving new and novel information—you will capture the croc’s attention. Once that happens, the croc is going to have one of two primal reactions: • Curiosity and desire, or • Fear and dislike. Breaking it down into such simple terms helped me to understand a crucial concept: If you trigger curiosity and desire, the croc sees you as something it wants to chase. You become the prize.

Let’s consider three of the most fundamental behaviors of human beings: 1. We chase that which moves away from us. 2. We want what we cannot have. 3. We only place value on things that are difficult to obtain.

Framing money as the prize is a common error—and often a fatal one.

1. Make the buyer qualify himself back to you. Do this by asking such questions as, “Why do I want to do business with you?” 2. Protect your status. Don’t let the buyer change the agenda, the meeting time, or who will attend. Withdraw if the buyer wants to force this kind of change.

As you are now starting to realize, pitching any kind of idea or deal involves playing a complex and tricky status game.

Deciding that you like something before you fully understand it—that’s a hot cognition.

When Jack Welch eventually wrote his biography, it wasn’t called Intense Analysis; it was titled, Straight from the Gut. And when George Soros updates his next edition of The Alchemy of Finance, he’s going to include the research of Dr. Flavia Cymbalista, who believes that we feel decisions in our body, not our mind.

Do you still think that your decisions are postconscious, in other words, that you rationally think about things and make decisions afterwards? The peer group is shrinking of people who think like that.

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.

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.