1: We feel good. We’ve just finished making our sales presentation. We spent hours preparing. And we nailed it. Our audience now knows all the powerful and wonderful things our product and service can do.
The first question we get? Something negative: “What about . . . ?”
“If the first question someone asks is about a potential issue they need us to clarify, it means they’ve been thinking about that issue while we’ve been presenting,” Hollywood producer and author Brant Pinvidic writes in his book The 3-Minute Rule: Say Less to Get More from Any Pitch or Presentation.
Even worse, they have likely missed the value of what we presented.
“Today’s audience is overexposed to marketing and inherently skeptical,” Brant writes.
But “what about” questions aren’t a bad thing.
We can anticipate them. We can use them to our advantage. We can “incorporate it into the fabric of the pitch itself,” Brant suggests.
Instead of powering through and hoping no one asks about potential issues, we own it. So the issues don’t own us.
Part of Brant’s approach is to identify the biggest negative issues and incorporate them into our pitch. “If you were the buyer, why would you pass on this show?” he asks his teams.
Why does he ask this question? Because doing so changes the chemistry of the meeting. “I decided I was going to be the one to bring up the potential issues or questions,” he writes. “I wanted the network buyers to be the ones defending the merits of the idea, not me.”
2: Brant once pitched a television show to ABC called Celebrity Splash. The idea was to have “celebrities learning to dive off an Olympic diving tower,” he writes.
“Go ahead and laugh. Believe me, it sounded just as ridiculous then as it does now. But I knew that when we were pitching it. So, I embraced it in the pitch.
‘We’ll try for a big-name celebrity cast,” he said during his pitch, “but there is no way A-list celebrities are going to do it, so we have to accept that. That’s going to mean there is a real chance the audience thinks this is as ridiculous as we do,” he said. “It may just be too silly.”
Brant paused.
“Yes, but I think that’s the appeal of it,” said John Saade, the head of ABC. “We have to play into the absurdity and camp of it. That’s what makes it a spectacle. I think that’s why it worked so well in Europe.”
What just happened?
Brant’s audience was “starting to solve my problem for me,” he writes. Rather “than trying to hide the problem and having the buyers at ABC saying after the pitch, ‘I can’t imagine we’ll get real celebrities.’ I was able to reinforce what a hit show it was in Europe without simply stating it again.”
3: So, how do we do this?
We start by identifying the potential problems. We ask:
o What do we hope our audience doesn’t start thinking?
o What conclusion would we want them to stay away from?
o What issue will they think we’ve overlooked?
o What’s the last thing we want them to ask about?
o If someone says no, what would be their best reason?
o If our competitors were here, what would they say about it?
o If this were a debate, what would the other side be saying?
We identify the issue that stands out the most.
Next, we look at our value statements to identify the ones that could validate why this problem isn’t such a problem.
In other words, what elements of the pitch would we use to defend ourselves?
We look for facts, figures, logic, and reason. Here is “the perfect opportunity to address those issues that we will show are not actually issues,” Brant writes.
We then work the negatives into our pitch. We say: “We were surprised to learn,” or “I still struggle with,” or “What we are trying to avoid,” or “The problem we’re working through,” or “My initial concerns were.”
Brant’s recommendation: “It’s an easy and effective tool. Don’t be afraid to use it.”
More tomorrow.
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Reflection: How do I deal with potential negatives when preparing a presentation? What are the benefits of being proactive about raising these issues?
Action: Discuss with my team or with a colleague.
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