Pitch Anything
How can you design a pitch that will grasp your audience's attention?
Author(s): Oren Klaff
Publisher: McGraw-Hill
Date of publication: 2011
Manageris opinion
Why is it so difficult to make successful pitches? Specialized in fundraising, Oren Klaff relies both on his personal experience and advances in neuroscience to explain the pitfalls that await those who must sell their projects in a few brief minutes.
The central argument of this book revolves around a great misunderstanding, namely, to capture the attention of an audience, we think that it is necessary to hone every fact, figure and argument—factors that speak to the rational brain, or neocortex. However, our much more basic reptilian brain intercepts these messages first, and eliminates 90 %! It’s this gap between a message developed by the analytical brain on the one hand, and received in the first instants by the reptilian brain, on the other, that makes the pitch so difficult. Moreover, we have limited information processing and memorization capacity: even the 10 % of messages that reach our neocortex suffer from analytical distortion!
Oren Klaff proposes a pitch method based on these research findings. He explains, for example, how to create temporarily higher personal status than that of the audience to benefit from the credibility effect. He also presents an “ideal” pitch structure to take account of people’s limited attention span.
An original and lively book, even if author’s audacity sometimes seems a bit difficult to replicate.
