Good for saving the day in debates, stage performances, speeches, client presentations.
You were up to your eyebrows in note cards and Google searches, figuring out what to say, how to say it, and how to show up for your big pitch. But that’s it for the prep work. Now we start talking about how to pitch when you’re standing (or sitting) in front of someone who could, maybe, change your life.
I’d always known the power of making an entrance and commanding everyone’s attention with word pictures, gestures, and energy. That’s how we survived in the tough street markets of London and Wales. The reality is that nobody wants to be sold, but everybody wants to be spellbound. But I never understood how completely one person could take control, not just of a studio, but of an audience of millions until I saw Billy Mays do it on HSN.
It was 1995 and Billy was both a friend and a rival. I had been pitching products on the network and making a nice name for myself, so I wasn’t happy when I saw him come around the corner in the back hallways of HSN, charging ahead like a bull and grinning his thousand-watt grin. Turned out that the inventors of a carpet-cleaning product called Zap Off needed a pitchman to sell it, and they’d found Billy Mays. Shit. If the folks at HSN thought I was good, wait until they saw Billy in action.
Of course, since Billy was barging his way onto my turf in my town, I didn’t do anything to help him get acclimated at HSN. In fact, I did my best to sabotage him. The day he was going live, I stuck my head into the studio and saw him on his hands and knees on the set, sweating and nervous and trying to figure out how he was going to demo the product. Then, because this is just what friends do, I made him even more self-conscious by walking into the studio just before he went live. I did that because I knew it would drive him crazy.
I know how hard it is to create an effective pitch for a product that you’re selling for the first time on live television; I’ve done it and it’s one of the hardest things I’ve ever attempted. While there are tried-and-true pitching principles that we always use, coming up with a successful pitch involves a lot of trial and error, and HSN isn’t the place for that. After all, the network has that computer screen that displays live sales stats and can instantly show a host whether they’re killing it or bombing. If you’re going to make it on HSN, you need to get results.
But for Billy, ignorance was bliss: he didn’t know anything about the screen, which was good because it would’ve made him even more nervous. I thought about pointing it out to him, but even I’m not that sadistic.
Before he went on, we chatted in the greenroom. I told him his pitch seemed scattered and he gave me his patented “that was harder than it looks” glance. Then I settled into the chewed-up, coffee-stained blue couch and watched Billy walk onto the set in front of millions of viewers—and grow wings.
He tore into a pitch that was a combination of one-liners from the road and new stuff he came up with on the fly, in the moment. It was incredible to watch. He dominated the set with his physical presence from the moment he walked on. He invented the tagline “Just aim, spray, and walk away” on the spot, and the company still uses it today, more than twenty years later. He improvised more lines that it would take a marketing team weeks to come up with, including “I used to have a dog named Spot, now I don’t” and “If you’ve got a golden reliever—I mean golden retriever.” His pitching instincts were on full display and dialed up to eleven.
But the most amazing thing was that nobody could look away from Billy. He stood low in his pitching stance like a quarterback about to take a snap, beads of sweat running down his forehead, his voice booming so powerfully that he almost overloaded the microphones. He found his one-shot camera, and started to work right to the viewer and do what he did best: mesmerize. The hosts were completely irrelevant. Billy commanded the attention of every person watching, whether they were watching live in Florida or in homes around the country.
It was the making of a pitching superstar. Rival though I was, I couldn’t help but be impressed. The phone lines exploded. The graph that shows the number of calls went up and up until the tips of the bars started turning red. Hurricane Billy had made landfall at HSN. Neither he nor the company would ever be the same.
What Billy Mays did that day at HSN was demonstrate his world-class skill with an important Pitch Power:
Assume that 90 percent of the people who walk into the same pitching situation as you are going to do so meekly, apologetically, and haltingly. They’re going to be afraid to stand out and unwilling to seize control of the moment and own the room. That’s not what a pitching superhero does. If you watch a professional pitchman, he takes charge of the situation with boldness and confidence. He doesn’t wait for the audience to set the tone; he captures everyone’s attention by being charismatic, creative, and positive.
How do you make an entrance and take control of a situation where you’re clearly the one who wants something? Doesn’t that put the other person—the one with the power to say no—in the position of power? Only if you think of it that way. When I teach people about pitching, one of the first pieces of advice I offer is that you have to love your product, especially if your product is you. See what you’re offering as precious and desirable, whether it’s your time, your expertise, or your business. The other party—whether it’s a recruiter, customer, or someone you’re hitting on—should be so lucky to be the one you choose. That’s the attitude of the pitching superhero, a sort of “fake it ’til you make it” confidence.
If I make my entrance with that kind of vibe, I’m going to ask you a question to which I already know the answer. I might make some outlandish statement that I will then substantiate. I might offer you something or propose a deal that sounds too good to be true. By doing those things right off the bat, I dictate what’s going to happen in the next five minutes. You’re not in control, even though I let you think you are. I am.
Think about sales resistance not as a wall or barrier but as something like those Plexiglas riot shields that police use. When you encounter someone you don’t know who you think wants to persuade you to do something you don’t want to do, you raise your shield. Now, think about being someone who’s hearing pitches from a lot of strangers in succession: a director holding auditions, a woman from HR interviewing job candidates, an attractive woman sitting alone at a cafe. Each time he or she meets someone new, the shield goes up. As the new person becomes more familiar and everybody becomes more comfortable, the shield drops.
Each time someone new walks into the room, the interviewer or director or whoever needs to lift that shield all over again—and that sucker is heavy. People would rather not feel the need to put up their sales resistance all the time, because it’s hard work. Making an entrance, taking control, and getting the other person to feel instantly comfortable is all about giving him or her an excuse not to raise that heavy shield.
Psychology says there are three types of resistance that come into play when people find themselves in a sales situation:
1. Reactance. They object to the sales process itself, the idea of being sold at all.
2. Skepticism. They view you and your claims with suspicion, pretty sure that you’re throwing them a line of pure bullshit.
3. Inertia. They fear change and don’t want to commit to anything, even something that will benefit them.
Pitch Powers are designed to get you past all three kinds of resistance, and making an entrance and taking control is where that begins. By being funny and charming (“Hello, handsome!”) you make people forget about it being a sales situation. By being specific about your claims, you bypass their natural skepticism. By being the solution to their problems—showing an interviewer how valuable you could be by sharing information about his company that even he didn’t know, for example—you make your solution so compelling that it breaks through their inertia.
Say we have an enterprising waitress with a table of six cynical salesmen to wait on. These guys fancy themselves to be true hard-asses who’ve seen it all, heard it all, and sold it all. There’s no pitch they haven’t tried, and they’re expecting to be sold by a waitress trying to inflate their bill and her tip. But our pitch-savvy server decides that for these world-weary road warriors, she’s going to take control of the situation.
She greets and seats them, but when they tell her they’re ready to order, she says, “No. I’m not going to take your order.”
What? This gets their attention and gets past their reactance. One barrier down. They look around at each other. Not going to take their order? She continues, “I can see you gentlemen are tired at the end of a long business trip, right? Well, here’s what I want you to do. I want you to trust me. Let me surprise you with an order of our manager’s choosing, including cocktails. If you don’t love what I bring, it’s on the house. What do you say?”
By giving them a novel experience, this smart young woman has these gents smiling and nodding and has obliterated their skepticism. Two barriers down. Their fear that she’ll bring them the most expensive food and liquor on the menu is overcome by their delight and curiosity at such an unusual offer. Final barrier down. They agree and she disappears into the kitchen. Of course, she never speaks to the manager; she’s served guys like this a thousand times and knows exactly what they’ll like: a little filet, a little seafood, some appetizers, a lot of it off-menu stuff that most patrons don’t even know about.
What makes this a perfect pitching example is that the waitress keeps making entrances. Every time she comes back with a different course or a new cocktail to try, she has the chance to surprise and dazzle, so she does. She pairs food with unique cocktails and matches everything with funny patter. But here’s the key: the bill is quite reasonable. She hasn’t gouged her customers, which is what they expected. Now she’s given them two delightful surprises: the dining experience, and then the check.
Now these salesmen have no sales resistance left. They’ve been taken care of, and even more than the food, they love that their server took control of their experience so they didn’t have to do any work. But she saves the coup de grâce for the end: she asks them if they would like dessert and an after-dinner drink. Feeling cared for, celebratory, and generous, they order desserts and a bottle of Macallan 18 scotch, which, with this restaurant’s markup, runs about $400. The final tab is about $1,200, and our merry band, feeling they’ve had one of the best dining experiences of their lives, tips our waitress a cool $300. Not bad for three hours of work.
If you want to take control of any situation as soon as you walk in the room, and get what you want, try using these three next-level skills:
1. Create “sell lines.” This is the pitch, the patter, the spiel. I had a host of money lines with the Amazing Washmatik (the car washer I pitched in the UK), like “The faster you go, the faster it flows,” “As soon as you stop, it stops,” and “It’s like giving your car a shower instead of a bath.” Those are good lines, lines that paint pictures.
The waitress’s sell line was her refusal to take the salesmen’s order and her command for them to trust her. Whatever you’re trying to pitch and whoever you’re trying to pitch it to, come up with your own poetry—lines that make whatever you’re trying to pitch unforgettable. In a job interview, if you’re trying to highlight your dedication, you might try saying, “While you’re home sleeping, I’ll be here working. I’m overtime, all the time.”
A great sell line does three things: it communicates the value you offer, does it in a way that conveys total confidence, and surprises the listener so much that they stop in their tracks. What can you say in a pitching situation that will do that? I’ll tell you right now: it’s got nothing to do with features and benefits, prices, discounts, or any of that other rubbish. Your job is to intrigue, shock, and fascinate.
By the way, one of the best sell lines in any situation is to flat-out tell your listener that you don’t care about the result. You don’t need the sale; you just want to give the customer the honest information nobody else is giving them. You don’t care if you get the girl’s number; you just want to enjoy her company. You don’t care if you get the part or not; you just want to give the director something he’s never seen.
2. Appeal to greed. One quick way to get people’s instant buy-in is to appeal to their self-interest. Offer them something free, even if it’s cheap, or promise them extraordinary value. Timeshare companies go the first way by offering you a free weekend at a resort in return for you sitting through one of those high-pressure, daylong sell-a-thons. They bribe you into putting yourself in a sales situation where you wouldn’t normally be caught dead.
Could you use this in a work situation? Absolutely. Appealing to self-interest always works. For example, an employee at my production company wanted to ask me for a bigger bonus. Fine. I don’t have a problem with that. But she came into my office and the first words out of her mouth were “Boss, did I do anything wrong this year? My bonus was only $7,000.” Immediately, I was on the defensive. There were so many better ways she could have handled the situation.
She could have come in and said, “You know, I love working here. You’re a great boss, and I really enjoy my job. So I’m really afraid to ask you this, but I’m struggling financially and I’d love to make more money. But I don’t want to just make more money. I have some ideas on how to save the company money, so we can grow and everybody can make more. Would you like to hear them?” I’m not going to say no to that! Then maybe she’d say, “If we did this and this, I think I could save you 10 percent a year. If I could do that, do you think maybe we could talk about a raise? I’m a single mom and I’d really appreciate it.”
I would have said, “Come in on Monday, sit down and detail exactly what you’ll do. If it looks good to me, then do it. Report back to me in two months with the savings, and if you hit your goals, you’ve got your raise.” That’s taking control of the situation not only by appealing to my self-interest, but by being positive and honest. It’s pitching, not bitching.
3. Engage the senses. When you’re starting your pitch, your audience is going to have only two senses engaged: sight and hearing. The more senses you can engage, the better. When you engage a sense, you break through a barrier separating you from your audience. If you have an opportunity to engage someone in a physical manner that’s appropriate, do it. In a job interview, that might be your handshake. If you’re trying to meet someone new, maybe it’s your cologne or perfume, or the light touch of a finger on a forearm at the right time. Feel this, smell this. For a waitress, it might be “We’ve got samples today, would you like a free taste?” Yogurt shops do it all the time. Some restaurants give out free appetizers, compliments of the chef.
Our superhero server engaged her customers’ senses by offering them unique drinks and treats that they hadn’t had before with zero risk; if they hated them, they didn’t pay for them. Taste, smell, mouth feel: all five senses were involved. By the end of the meal, she had them right where she wanted them—and had her tip.
But in making an entrance and taking control, nothing is more important than confidence. You have to assert with total belief that whatever you bring to the room that day is so incredible that your audience won’t be able to resist. But don’t be too pushy or too soft. The goal is a comfortable conversation where you are in control. Where, even if you’re interrupted, you can say, “Let me finish,” and the listener submits because he or she is under your spell.
Sometimes, this just means walking into the room as though you’re the best thing that’s ever been in it. Not in an arrogant way, but with an attitude of “I’ve found something so wonderful and I have to share it with you!” I’ve had people come to me looking for their dream job, and I know when it’s a good interview because the candidate starts to talk and I think, You’re pitching me on why I should hire you. You’re making it impossible for me not to want to hire you. You can’t be timid. You can’t be afraid. You have to sell yourself so I see you as indispensable.
In the end, your goal is to make the other person practically beg to give you what you want. State your case with an “Of course you’re going to give me the outcome I want, duh!” confidence, drop the mic, and walk away with a handshake.
When you’re taking control of the encounter, you will start to see your audience’s defenses come down. Their body language will change. They’ll get comfortable because they’ve stopped being afraid that you’re going to make them do something that’s bad for them, like spending money on something they don’t want. You’ll see them nodding. You’re going to see the twinkle in somebody’s eye. They might even start sharing information or stories that are supposed to be confidential. Now you’re a co-conspirator.
At this point, tone it down. Don’t get flashy. Don’t close. This is not the time for that because you’re probably only a few minutes into your encounter. Give the situation space to breathe. You just walked into the big boss’s office and blew his socks off. There’s a time to stop pitching, and you’ll learn to recognize it.
Other essentials of this Pitch Power:
• Make your entrance strong. When I talk about making an entrance, I’m not necessarily talking about bursting into the room like you’re in a Las Vegas stage show. For one thing, an entrance isn’t always about a physical space (though to be fair, 90 percent of the time, it is). If you’re pitching a loan officer or credit card company, your “entrance” will be the first things you say on the phone call. However, for now, let’s assume you’re coming into a space, whether it’s a conference room for a client pitch, a car lot showroom, or an office for your annual performance review.
The strong entrance is a matter of three factors: pause, acknowledgment, and preamble. The pause is all about taking a second to get the lay of the land in an unfamiliar space. Where is the person or people you’re going to be pitching? Where’s the light? Is there a choice of seats? Is there water? You’re assessing the pitch environment in two seconds. Acknowledgment is all about recognizing people. Stop and thank the receptionist who brought you in, introduce yourself to other people in the room, and even compliment the people who made you feel welcome outside. This is about making yourself memorable and being generous to everyone.
Finally, the preamble. This can be when you make some power moves. Cross to the table, desk, or whatever and boldly shake the hands of everyone you’re pitching, introduce yourself, and tell them how great it is to be there and how you think you can be the answer to their prayers (or something to that effect). But the preamble doesn’t always end there. Is there a chair available at the head of the table? Take it. Total power move. I love to do that because (a) nobody has the balls to do it, and (b) it ensures that everyone will be looking at me when I speak. Also, if there’s bottled water, before you sit, grab yourself one without being asked and ask everybody else if they want one. Obviously, you’re doing these things sweetly and even self-deprecatingly (“Anybody mind if I sit at the end? Dad always did it at home and I’ve always wondered what it felt like”), but you’re making the space your own. Try it.
• No overt power plays. I’ve just given you some small power plays to try, but that’s it. Do not try to alpha your audience. No crushing handshakes, no being the last person to sit down, none of that crap. You’ll just waste people’s time and look like a douche.
• Don’t use fear. When you’re making the case that you’re the solution to someone’s problem, trying to scare them makes you look manipulative, and people hate to be manipulated. Fear doesn’t work. For instance, after years of pitching products, I can tell you that prevention doesn’t sell. Try selling a smoke detector to somebody based on the idea of keeping their family from dying in a fire; it’s almost impossible. Why do you think people who sell smoke detectors and home security systems talk about how much you can save on your homeowner’s insurance? Because people are motivated by greed, not by something that might happen. That’s the same reason people only buy life insurance after somebody they know dies.
Other scenarios where this Pitch Power can be the difference between success and failure:
• Blind dates. Making an entrance and taking control aren’t just useful for quickly impressing someone you’re meeting for the first time. That’s lovely if he or she is someone you want to spend time with, but what if the match is a mismatch? Well, by clearly and boldly communicating who you are and what you’re about, you also find out quickly if the two of you are compatible. Better that than wasting an evening, or several evenings, right?
• Customer service. If you’re stuck with the job of soothing an unhappy customer or making a bad situation right, there’s nothing worse than having to sit and listen to someone bitch for twenty minutes. It wastes everyone’s time and accomplishes nothing. Use these pitching techniques to take control and get the conversation going in the right direction and toward a quick resolution, which is what everybody wants.
• Teaching. Running a classroom is one of the hardest jobs there is, and good teachers have my highest respect. Make the job a bit easier by using these methods to catch students by surprise and have them hanging on your every word. Tricks like power words and power gestures (which I’ll cover below) work wonders in grabbing kids’ attention and getting them to shut up, listen, and learn.
You’re meeting with a small group of angel investors about funding your small start-up company and you want to impress them. You have your entrance choreographed: rather than walk in, awkwardly set up your PowerPoint presentation, and then stumble through it like so many entrepreneurs do, you’re going to walk up to each of the partners and hand each one a prototype of your product. Then you’re going to step back, deliver a concise monologue on why what you’ve invented is so wonderful, and then go into the facts and figures.
Sounds great… until you get into the room, reach into your messenger bag and to your horror, realize that in your haste you forgot your prototypes! How do you deal with the plot twist of blowing your entrance?
One thing you don’t do is cover and pretend everything’s all right. You admit your mistake and then move on. You don’t keep apologizing for it, either. The truth is that many people, from employers to investors to customers, will judge you more on how you recover from an error than they will on what you do when everything’s fine. Blowing your entrance doesn’t mean the play’s over; you still have lines to deliver and you can still put in one hell of a performance, even earn a standing ovation. Get on with it.
One quick note: don’t become dependent on PowerPoint. It’s a useful tool, but it’s not a substitute for knowing how to pitch.
In the movie Jerry Maguire, there’s a brief scene that’s stuck with me for years. The screen flashes to a smiling older guy in an office with a nameplate on his desk that reads DICKY FOX. He’s Jerry’s mentor. He says, “I love mornings! I clap my hands every morning and say, ‘This is gonna be a great day!’” I do the same thing every morning.
That’s the kind of attitude you need if you’re going to own the room and take control. Let me tell you what I’ve done for years: when I go around town, whether I’m at home in St. Petersburg or on the road, I greet everyone I meet and try to say something complimentary to them. I’ll do it with baristas at my favorite coffee place, the waiters at my regular breakfast restaurant, my cleaning lady, you name it. I make a conscious effort to bring some positive energy to everyone whose path crosses mine, and by now it’s a habit. It doesn’t take any effort, but it sets a tone. It sets me up for success. That positive energy builds and people respond.
People love to feel good. There’s this guy named Chris Ullman who in his career has been director of communications at the US Office of Management and Budget, public affairs director for the US Securities and Exchange Commission, and director of communications for the US House of Representatives Budget Committee. But you know what this guy is best known for? Being the four-time national and international whistling champion. That’s right. Despite all his accomplishments, what’s gotten Ullman on the stage at B.B. King’s, on The Tonight Show, and performing for the likes of Newt Gingrich, Dick Cheney, and George W. Bush is his world-class skill at whistling. Why? Because there’s nothing about whistling that’s not happy and cheerful! Even heads of state love to feel good and positive.
If you want to develop this Pitch Power, work on getting up and saying, “Today is going to be a beautiful day. It’s not going to rain today. I’m going to spread happiness.” If you walk around with your head down, how are you going to be ready to persuade anyone? You need to be a shining light in the room. When you walk into the room, you want people to say, “I want what that guy’s having.” We all know people like that, who make it feel like wherever they are is the only place worth being. Try to get in the habit of putting out positive energy all day, because it will come back to you.
That’s magnetism. Here’s how I know it works: most of the pitchmen I know have really good-looking girlfriends. They punch way above their weight, because most of them are very average-looking guys. But they make people laugh. They’re charming. They’re attractive, meaning their personality attracts people to them. If you have that quality, you will punch above your weight because people will want to be around you.
Everything else in this chapter is really mechanics, from power words and gestures to pausing to take stock of the room. You can practice them all and become more persuasive. But positivity needs to become part of who you are. The best way to practice this is to put the book down, get in your car, go somewhere public, and try this. Try being a beacon of positive energy—complimenting servers and cashiers, talking about how great a business is, talking about how terrific the day is—and see what kind of results you get from other people. Then try being walled off and standoffish and notice the difference.
If I was selling you, this is where I’d be offering you a guarantee. Because this works. Every time. If you fill up every place you go with positive energy, you will be so excited to get to the next chapter that you won’t be able to contain yourself.
SCENARIOS FOR USING THE “MAKE AN ENTRANCE AND TAKE CONTROL” PITCH POWER
Q: You try some alpha dog moves in a meeting and get serious pushback from someone who considers himself or herself the alpha dog. Back off or try to exert more control?
A: Back off the obvious power moves, but remember that there’s more than one way to take control of a situation. If someone is being aggressive, it’s usually because he or she is hiding a lack of preparation or knowledge. So relax and instead, be the one who’s hyper-knowledgeable, super prepared or makes everybody laugh.
Q: You’re feeling awful when you face a pitching situation. Maybe you’re sick, or maybe you’ve just had a horrible week. Fake positivity and risk people seeing right through you, admit that you’re having a rough go, or postpone?
A: Postponing is risky because you might not get another shot, but if you’re really sick, say so and reschedule. If it’s been a rough week, suck it up and get the room laughing. Never, ever complain that you feel tired or that it’s been a tough week; it looks like you’re making excuses. Once you’re on your joint, you’ll feel better.
Q: You’re smart enough to know that assistants make the world go ’round, so you want to compliment the assistant of a key client. But you’re worried that he/she will think you’re hitting on him/her. How do you handle this perilous situation?
A: Make it about what the other person does, not how she or he looks. “I just wanted to tell you how much I appreciate how professional you are about returning my calls and scheduling meetings. It really makes my work a lot easier.” That will always go over well, and a small token of appreciation like a gift card can’t hurt, either.