Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal (24 page)

“Social factors.
Everyone is tired of investment bankers getting fat off these deals with no risk, so we have to be more transparent on fees.

“Economic factors.
For deals that are transparent, where the bankers and consultants are wil ing to risk alongside investors, there’s a glut of investor money in the market now. $5 bil ion more than last quarter.

“Technology factors.
If we go green and make the buildings LEED-certified, I know a government agency that wil get us a 10 percent reduction in taxes.

“I know this is news to you, but this is how the market is moving, and these three forces are important to our strategy. Again, we have a short market window to step through. If we fight against these forces, we wil struggle. If we hit it right, though, we’l be one of the few deals that gets through this smal market window.”

This was the three-market-forces pattern that I had long endorsed. Simple and straightforward. I wasn’t going to start sel ing and promoting before I was done framing. That would be a mistake. By doing it this way, I would show the targets how the market was moving. This would work because the mind is not a camera; it is a machine dedicated to observing motion and predicting what wil happen next. I continued:

“Before going into my plan in any detail, let me tel you what we recognized some time ago. This project is more than an airport upgrade or an airport relaunch.
It is a legacy you will leave behind.
You wil have your names written in history, and you we wil be judged by generations to come by what you build here.”

I had issued a chal enge to the committee. Done this way, it creates a dopamine and norepinephrine kick at the same time. In other words, they would feel the twin pul of desire and tension.

“Simon, Jeff, Jim [I addressed the committee by their first names], I know you need to find investors for this airport as fast as possible, and I appreciate how questioning conventional wisdom is hard to do when time is tight. But today we are going to ask you to question how things have always been done because lately, the ‘usual’ way of doing these deals turns out to be wrong or wide off the mark or both.

“There are too many similar, me-too deals in this market. Right now, unless you are different in your approach from al the others, you wil be wasting time and money.

“That’s why our big idea is different from al the other plans, as you’l see.

[I flipped around a few big posterboards with the theme and logotype boldly printed.]

“As you can see, our theme is ‘Invest in an American Legacy.’

“Our plan gives plenty of profit to investors but also gives them a chance to be part of an amazing story. Unlike the other bidders here today, who wil just be tel ing the potential investors a profit-and-loss story, we plan to tel the investors a wonderful story about an airport that has a rich aviation history.

“The combination of the ‘American Legacy’ theme with our financial plan wil work best in the market. Our approach wil raise $1 bil ion faster and more easily. Our big idea delivers a better velocity of capital and more certainty that you wil get the money you need. We are going to set our sights high, to literal y become heroes by protecting—not destroying—a piece of aviation history and get $1 bil ion at the same time.”

This was my classic
big idea introduction pattern
. Why would this kind of introduction for the big idea work here? There are three basic truths about the brain and decision making that went into it.
First,
the most basic working principle of the brain is: Decisions of
wanting something
are not conscious.
Second,
the opportunity to gain a social reward, such as becoming a “hero,” is
even more enticing than making money. Third,
you can flood the target’s brain with dopamine by focusing on three ideas: (1) the idea of social rewards, (2) the idea of becoming a “hero,” and (3) the idea of making a lot of money. The purpose? Ignite desire.

Now, at this point of the pitch, I’d served the committee’s crocodile brains the right cocktail of dopamine (desire) and norepinephrine (tension), and I was free to proceed with the boring stuff: the numbers.

By creating a frame that focused the attention of the targets on what we were good at, I’d put some distance between ourselves and Goldhammer. Being different also creates novelty. And that gets the dopamine injectors in the brain flowing. Traditional pitches often start out, “We worked real y hard to come up with a great plan. …”

But my approach takes two steps back and then goes three steps forward. It begins by saying: “Things have changed out there in the market [and the normal approach isn’t going to work],” and it ends up by saying, “There is a better way that is different from the others,” and “It’s different because it isn’t just cold, hard numbers. It has a human story to it.”

The other groups probably would do precisely the wrong thing: Focus a huge amount of time on their wonderful résumés. They would al be using the same theme, only the details would be different, relying on clichés, framing themselves as a “ful -service firm” that caters to clients and provides the “highest levels of integrity, service, and quality.” There is nothing gained with that old, ineffective way, so why waste the time? Doesn’t everyone just assume that you’re going to provide service and quality?

Over the next five minutes, I gave highlights of the budget and what timeline I could deliver on. If I could not pitch the ful plan in five minutes, then the last two months would become a very expensive waste of time and money.

In preparing for this day, the difficulty was knowing what to take out of the pitch without stripping away the richness and complexity of the idea. But I felt that I would have a better chance of success with fewer cold, hard details, the kind that switch the brains of the targets into analytical mode.

The length of the Pitch also was of paramount importance. During a rehearsal a month earlier, the pitch came in at more than 55 minutes. Too long. So I started hacking. I edited three minutes from the total, then another two minutes, and so on. With each new rehearsal, I removed details that lacked intrigue or hot cognition. As recently as one week before the presentation, I was stil working on making the pitch hotter, shaving away distracting details while keeping the core message.

So now, here I was, pushing through the budget and the financing details in about five minutes. It was the coldest part of the pitch. Soon, I would deliver the
four-frame hot cognition stack—
which would heat things up. But first a quick push/pul :

“Is this plan bold? Wel , we can certainly debate if my numbers are 5 percent too high or 3 percent too low, but there is no doubt the big idea
is
bold. We think that boldness is important. And if you don’t like bold plans, then there’s a real possibility that we are not right for each other because my team would always be working quickly in an entrepreneurial way, and you always would be responding like a big corporation—slow and methodical. And how could that ever work? So I’m okay with the notion that our plan is too bold and that we aren’t right for each other.”

I was employing the classic push part of the push/pul pattern, which chal enged the targets and amplified tension. Now it was time to back off. I had a lot going on here, drawing on the techniques and research that had consumed me for more than a decade. No matter what kind of soft touch I had, this was stil a form of sel ing, I was trying to get the targets to decide in my favor, trying to take control. And to my targets, this was a form of stress and pressure. Humans behave a certain way when they are put under this kind of pressure. At a basic level, in a target’s croc brain, there’s a feeling that you are taking away his or her automony. A threat response could be triggered.

The push would counter this problem, giving the targets the opportunity to make a pressure-free decision.

Because the human brain evolved in response to stressors over thousands of years, humans are constantly attuned, at the level of the croc brain, to the ways social encounters threaten their capacity for choice. This is one of my guiding theories: The slightest perception that you are taking away free wil (scientists cal this
reducing the autonomy of choice
) wil trigger a threat response.

After letting the croc brain know that it didn’t have its back against the wal , it was time to complete the other half of the push/pul pattern:

“But then again, if this did work out, our forces could combine to become something great. Imagine, your aviation experience and passion combined with our strategy and financial know-how. Almost like some kind of superpower, when we focus our gaze on any individual investor, he would just explode with desire!”

I then returned to the idea of status. The brain is always assessing how social encounters either enhance or diminish its status. Yet, at this point, al the competitors had higher global status than we did. There was no way around that. They had more wealth, more popularity, and more power—

the three measures of status. So I needed some local star power, and I needed it fast.

“Look, in al seriousness, we love this project.”

I started flipping over heavy posterboards that were set around the room. These were big, physical, real-world boards, about ½ inch thick each.

Unlike a PowerPoint slide, which would just disappear, these would remain, adding a certain concrete feeling of reality to the whole pitch.

“And I know how difficult it is not to choose Goldhammer or the London team, sitting here with us. How great are those guys? Is there anything they can’t do with al that youthful energy and those amazing bespoke suits? But one thing I would have to ask them: How much do they know about Spring Hil pickup footbal ?”

This was a novelty play that would keep attention high. But it was risky, because if you are going to go off on a tangent—it had better be good.

“There’s a reason I ask, because the ful story of Davis Field and why the previous attempts to build a new airport here failed cannot be ful y told until you meet Joe Ramirez.”

I had indeed met an auto mechanic named Joe Ramirez while doing my research on the airport deal. He was tal , with wavy hair and a prematurely graying goatee. Now, here he was, striding across the room dressed as if he was going to church. You can imagine how a mechanic would have been received by the committee, in the middle of a pitch for a $1 bil ion contract. Nobody expected this. Clearly, he was not here to explain financial plans or flight intervals. I urged him to take his time and speak from the heart.

The clock was ticking, but this moment was too rich to be rushed. Joe moved in front of the lectern and pul ed from his pocket a folded piece of notebook paper. He read aloud his prepared comments:

“I grew up in Spring Hil . It’s been my home since my father came here from Dal as, Texas. As a kid, there wasn’t much to do. We didn’t have the mal and the theaters and the skateboard park. But what we did have was a footbal field. It was at the airport, here [he pointed to a place on the map, just adjacent the runway]. Every Saturday and Sunday we played footbal there. Two or three games would be going al the time. This place was easy for everyone to get to, and some of my best memories growing up happened right here. But in 1997, nobody knows why, the city paved the field. It’s been an empty parking lot since that day. If there’s anything you can do. …”

You could clearly see the emotion in Joe’s face; you’d have to have been either a robot or from an alien planet not to be moved yourself. When Joe said that the city had paved his footbal field into an unused parking lot, there was a certain heaviness in the room.

Heightened states of emotion create strong memories.
Where were you when such-and-such famous person died?
It’s easy to remember. The parts of the brain where memories are stored needs to distinguish between significant experiences and those which carry less importance. This was one such moment. While it is hard to define emotion specifical y, what is not hard is to show its effect on cognition and decision making.

Emotions are how we encode things of value and how we link events to our memory. If it is true that emotional intensity creates a moment where attention is high and encoding is high and where desire could be created,
I would not get a better opportunity to create “wanting” from the
committee.

I thanked Ramirez and stepped back to the front of the room.

“Simon, committee … You see, we can look at the numbers behind this deal al day long: 24 percent of this, 15 percent of that, $100 mil ion for solar panels, $100 mil ion for construction of just one terminal. One bil ion dol ars. It’s al just numbers. We have al been thinking of this airport as if it is a purely financial transaction. As if this is a 7,000-foot runway in some kind of cyberspace. What I realized just 30 days ago, and what has been forgotten in al our desire to design it and build it and profit from it, is that this airport isn’t in cyberspace and it’s no longer 1948 when this runway was in the middle of nowhere. What I’m saying is, 50 years ago, Spring Hil was populated by fewer than 1,000 people, who were probably outnumbered by the jackrabbits. Now, 115,000 people live here. Think about that. We are deciding in this room, 50 miles away from the site, what wil be done with 1,000 acres of land in the middle of a community.”

With this, I put the morality frame into play. It would be hard for the other groups to find a higher set of values to champion than protecting a community of more than 100,000 souls. This frame is so basic, so tied to the workings of the social animal, that it had to be deployed. This was the right moment. Next, the time frame would be used:

“I have to finish in five minutes, so I don’t have the time right now to introduce you to the 37 other friends of mine who live in Spring Hil . You see, I’ve been living there for the last few weeks in a cool little hotel on Main and 19th Street. I’ve played pickup footbal in a dirt field outside town. That’s where I met Joe. So I can tel you that this is an amazing community that wil support us if we play fair and support them as wel .”