Book review: PITCH ANYTHING
An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal
Genres:
- Sales
- Communications skills
Review posted on:
10.12.2016
The number of pages:
240 pages
Book rating:
4/5
Year the book was published:
First edition published 2011
Who should read this book:
- People in sales, Marketers, Startups, and Entrepreneurs.
Why did I pick up this book and what did I expect to get out of it:
Working in sales taught me that working on your own communication skills, be it presenting, negotiating, or working out an issue with your customer is a non-stop process that you need to keep improving. That is why I decided to pick up Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff. I read some good reviews about Pitch Anything and since I haven’t read any book about pitching I decided to give it a go. For this book to provide value I expect to read the real-life situations that Oren Klaff has been in and how he prepared for them and if everything didn’t go according to plan how he pivoted to save the situation. A bonus would be if he included advice on what to do when you see that you’re “done” and you’re not getting the deal. What are the right steps to walk away from a deal or sales pitch to not close your doors for the next time.
My thoughts about the book:
Oren Klaff’s main message in Pitch Anything is that one of the most important skills any person can have is the ability to instantly grab someone’s attention. Do you know how to do that? Honestly, I can say that I can do that in every situation. Also when there are “high stakes” deals I find myself not taking the same “chances” as I do with “lower stakes” deals in fear of ruining the opportunity. Have you ever caught yourself doing the same thing? If so don’t feel bad. After reading Pitch Anything I understand now why I did so, and I know what to do in the future so that I won’t be doing it again.
In the book Oren Klaff repeatedly emphasized that you should be aware of the evolution of your brain and always keep learning how it works. The trick is that when you pitch or explain something to someone you use the neocortex part of the brain, but the information in the other person’s brain is first being processed by the crocodile/lizard brain. Because of the different roles and ways of processing information of the mentioned brains, your great idea might not be accepted by your audience. It might not even get the audience’s attention. For your message to get through and make an impact in your audience’s mind, you must make sure you stimulate every stage of the brain – first the crocodile/lizard brain, then the midbrain, and last the neocortex. For that to happen in the right sequence Ken developed a formula of factors that helped him make million-dollar deals. You need to know when to have and express authority when to push the client away, when to pull him back, and how to frame your question and metaphors to get your audience’s attention and not trigger any subconscious warnings that will stop the deal before you can even start discussing it.
I liked Pitch Anything because Oren Klaff in it shared his mindset, and process of how he prepares for his pitches. He also shared some of his pitches so you get examples of how he got here where he is today. Also, I liked that he backed up his findings with studies from psychology and neuroscience and that the book is not only his guesses on why what he does works.
My notes from the book:
- When pitching frames create context and relevance. The person who owns the frame owns the conversation.
- When we are pitching something we are using the neocortex to form the ideas, putting them into language, and presenting them.
- Our thought process matches our evolution: First survival, then social relationships, and finally problem-solving.
- Messages that are composed and sent by your young neocortex are received and processed by the other person’s old crocodile/lizard brain.
- Unless your message is presented in such a way that the croc/lizard brain views it to be new and exciting it is going to be ignored.
- When pitching it is vitally important to make sure your message fulfills two objectives: You do not 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.
- The moment your frame makes contact with the frame of the person you are calling on, they clash, battle, and grapple for dominance. If your frame wins, you will enjoy frame control, where your ideas are accepted (and followed) by the others.
- Human beings are unable to have hot cognitions and cold cognitions simultaneously. Hot cognitions are feelings like wanting or desire or excitement, and cold cognitions come from “cold” processes like analysis and problem-solving. To maintain frame control and momentum, you must force your audience to be analytical on its own time. You do this by separating the technical and detailed material from your presentation.
- When asked about details, do answer fast, and 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. Being able to figure it out is a form of entertainment. Our brains are wired to look for these kinds of pleasurable challenges.
- When your target drills down into technical material, you break that frame by telling a brief but relevant story that involves you. People will pause, look up, and listen because you are sharing something personal.
- Consider three of the most fundamental behaviors of human beings: We chase that which moves away from us. We want what we cannot have. We only place value on things that are difficult to obtain.
- Framing money as the prize is a common error – often a fatal one. Money is never a prize. It’s a commodity, a means for getting things done.
- Your social value is fluid and changes with the environment you are in or create. If you wish to elevate your social value in any given situation you can do so by redirecting people into a domain where you are in charge.
- As a survival mechanism, the other person’s brain is making it a priority to understand where you fit in the social structure.
- Movement is a critical element in the “why now” frame. Your target needs to understand the forces that are pushing your deal and to understand that your success is inevitable and imminent as a consequence of these greater forces.
- Don’t show people a static picture of how the world would be if your plan were implemented, instead show them how your idea is moving away from the current standard to a new way of doing things.
- When you start your pitch you do not have to explain the big idea in great detail. Your target does not want the deal yet. Details will turn your pitch cold.
- It doesn’t matter how much information you give, what matters is how well you can tune your information to the other person’s mind.
- Curiosity derives from an information gap – the difference between what you know and what you want to know. That is the addictive quality of curiosity. It is only when the target feels that he knows enough to fully understand your big idea that the curiosity ends. At that point, the pitch is over.
- If you always pull the target toward you, he or she becomes cautious and anxious. Constantly pulling someone is a signal of neediness. A pitch narrative can be thought of as a series of tension loops. Push then pull. Create tension then resolve it.
- To hold your target’s attention, there must be tension guiding the interaction. If there’s no conflict, the target may be politely “listening” but there’s no real connection.
- When you’re offering the deal you have to in clear and concise terms, tell the audience exactly what you will be delivering to them, when it will be delivered, and how. If they play a part in this process, explain what their roles and responsibilities will be.
- Hot cognitions are primal. Whenever there’s a rush of excitement, it’s hard to get the neocortex to do any work at all. The croc/lizard brain hijacks the brain functions and no analysis gets done.
- People want what they can’t have. So when you finish your pitch, deny your audience. Start to pull away. In doing so, you banish insecurity and trigger a powerful prizing effect on your audience. They will come to you.
- Nothing will freeze your pitch faster than allowing your audience to grind numbers or study details during the pitch. The key to preventing this is to control access to details.
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Oren Klaff suggests we should stack the following four frames in a quick succession in the following manner to grab the most attention from your audience:
1. THE INTRIGUE FRAME
- Introduce something the target is sure to want but cannot get right now.
- No one is seriously going to go into business with you until they know something about how you conducted yourself in tough situations. People want to know you have faced obstacles and overcome them. They want to see you in situations that reveal your character.
- Tell your target how you solved a problem for a different client as in a narrative. When you tell your narrative, it’s not what happens to you that makes you interesting, but it’s what you do about the situation you are in.
2. THE PRIZE FRAME
- Position yourself as the most important party in the deal.
- Pitch the prize frame like: “Before things go any further here, I need to figure out who you people really are. We have to be cautious about who we bring on board. Can you tell me why we would enjoy working with you?”
- Over time you will see that the prize frame does not rely on words and explanations. It’s more about the strength of your convictions about who or what is the prize.
3. THE TIME FRAME
- Research shows that in nearly all instances, the addition of time pressure to a decision-making event reduces decision quality.
- Time pressure triggers a scarcity bias in the brain, and the potential loss of a deal triggers fear. But we can lose the trust of our clients if they see this just as a sales tactic.
- If you use time framing, use it so that you explain until when and why your clients have limited but a reasonable amount of time to decide.
4. THE MORAL AUTHORITY FRAME
- Point out that business with you adds value to them since you are an expert in your field. -
There is one more frame that we have to keep in mind. This one can make or break the whole pitching session if not done right, even though you got the previously mentioned sequence of frames right. We are talking about the:
1. THE POWER FRAME
- You will know that you are facing a power frame when you encounter arrogance, lack of interest, rudeness, and similar imperial behaviors.
- When you approach an opposite power frame, your first and most important objective is to avoid falling into the other person’s frame by reacting to it. And make sure you do nothing that strengthens the other person’s frame before your frames collide.
- Do not engage in meaningless small talk, or let yourself be told what to do. If you do anything of the previously mentioned you are reinforcing the alpha status of your target.
- You can take the power frame away if you as soon as you come into contact with your target perpetrate a small denial or act out some type of defiance.
- Defiance and light humor are the keys to seizing power and frame control. Keep it fun, do it with a grin on your face, and move the meeting forward in the direction you want.
