Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal (25 page)

Emotion in the room was peaking.

Simon Jeffries couldn’t hold off any longer. He was already leaning forward in his seat almost past the edge. “You lived there? You know al these people?” Jeffries asked. What had been a formal pitch was now becoming a casual conversation. “They’re your friends, and you know their names?”

“I’m good with names,” I said. “And those people al had something important to say about this project.”

“This is why our plan includes an athletic park to return to Joe and the community the footbal field he loved so much growing up. We also want a young aviators’ center added to the build. With $1 bil ion, this is a rich project, and we can afford it. We’l pay for it ourselves. Here are the plans.”

I flipped around another posterboard. Now it was becoming like a game show.

“Are you sure that you want to commit to these things?” Jeffries asked.

“How can we
not
do it?” I said. “You can’t just pul value out of a community. You have to put value back in.”

Fol owing the principles of seized status, I would now redistribute some of the alpha status and frame control I was holding to some of the other players:

“And the park plans with the restoration of the historic footbal field are complete. They’re not just part of my theory. These are real plans. We completed the engineering specifications, and I want them to be part of any plan that goes forward. Five minutes ago we e-mailed these plans to everyone in this room. No matter what happens with our bid, whether you choose us or not, we want the footbal field to be restored.”

I flipped around the final display boards with their beautiful, evocative visuals of aircraft overhead and kids playing footbal and proud community members holding their arms in an open embrace. These were al big-picture visuals meant to stoke the fires of hot cognitions. For a closing statement, I would bring it al together.
Time frame. Prize frame. Intrigue. Morality frame. Push. Pull. Desire. Tension
. It was a fireworks finale of frame col isions:

“Committee, the only thing worse than an idea you hate is an idea you just ‘like.’ When you only ‘like’ an idea, then you are stil unsure about it.

Imagine getting married to someone you only ‘liked.’ It would seem cold. If I were sitting where you are, what would be important to me? I might think, if we don’t love this idea of ‘American Legacy,’ then we have to throw these guys out of here right now.

“And that would be okay with me because it would be the right thing to do. And by the same measure, if you only ‘like’ us, then you also must throw us out. And I’m total y okay with that, too. Because we could not possible work with you if you didn’t love our big idea. We believe in the big idea that strongly.

“Right now, as we are sitting here, the terminal paint at Davis Field is peeling, the old observation deck is rotting, and a local park has been paved over. Almost everything about Davis Field Municipal Airport shows age and neglect. It is a place that by almost every appearance has been left behind in time.

“But time should not leave this place behind. The war in the Pacific was fought from this field. Bomber squadrons had thousands of movements here. Men left this field to fight for our country, and for some, it was the last patch of American soil they ever touched.

“So if you love the idea of an American Legacy and you want Joe Ramirez’s kids to be able to play on that field, and you want to be known as the capitalists who built a legacy for the ages, then we are the right team to pick today because we know how to do this better than anyone else. But we are not going to do this
for
you. We wil have to do it
together
with you. When you feel that the time is right,
I encourage you to come to our office
and talk over how we can make that happen.”

The prize frame can be boiled down to one thing: Withdrawal. At a crucial moment, when the committee was expecting me to come after them, I pul ed away.

I remembered what was once written in the
US Air Force Training Manual
, “It is general y inadvisable to eject directly over the area you have just bombed.” Strictly fol owing that advice, it was time to leave.

In the course of my many pitches, I discovered that people won’t do what you tel them to. They must feel as if they have free wil to make their own decisions. They won’t even know what to do unless you have created primary basic and inescapable emotions for them to react to. They can’t encode your pitch into their memory without strong rushes of dopamine and norepinephrine, resulting in the twin forces of desire and tension.

In that moment, everyone realized that Greenberg’s little company of six people (plus seven consultants) had a chance to win against the biggest and best in the financial industry. I had built from scratch a pitch that worked in a market where nothing worked. That’s when I realized that this was the most exciting 20 minutes in my career of pitching deals.

The Competition Strikes Back

Tim Chance was up next, and as expected, his presentation was polished, practiced, and predictable. He opened with a long explanation of the many large deals his firm, Goldhammer, had done in recent years, the amazing capability of his organization, and the respected name it held. The logo on his business card was known around the world, and he was using it to his best advantage.

There was a moment of unintentional comedy right away: While Tim was making his opening remarks, his team was fumbling with the laptop they had brought, trying to connect it to the conference room projector. Although we’ve al seen this happen before—it stil makes me laugh. With al that was at stake—
how could they burn five minutes this way?
We had worked for
two days
to cut just
three minutes
from our presentation. My question was soon answered: As his slide deck came into focus, I and several others in the room noticed the little number in the lower right corner of the screen: 42. Oh boy! There were 42 slides in his presentation.
This was going to take a while.

After the review of Goldhammer’s bona fides, information we al knew anyway, Chance launched into a lengthy and detailed opinion of current market conditions. I could feel the temperature of the room fal ing toward subzero as the cold cognitions he was flashing on the screen were sending our brains into a deep freeze. While he certainly looked good and sounded good from the podium, he was talking about data and not about what real y mattered, which should have been Why now? How? and the critical path for doing it.

Chance was banking on a tried-and-true method that Goliath-sized companies often use. Because they’re big and successful, they think that it implies that they are also capable, and therefore, they often do not speak directly to how they wil accomplish an objective. They believe that their audience assumes “it wil get done,” but
will it really?
We are left to wonder. In large companies, deal makers like Chance are rewarded for the business they bring to their firms, not necessarily the results.

Each of us had been granted up to one hour to present, and unbelievably, Chance used every minute he was al otted. After 40 minutes of this financial mumbo-jumbo, he was inducing a coma in me. Tim was the only member of his team to speak, and he dragged the audience through every single one of the words in every single one of his densely worded slides.
This is doing them no favors
, I thought, but it’s good for me.

Next up was the team from London, who,
mercifully
, did not speak for an hour. On the contrary, their presentation was the model of European efficiency—clean, slick, and heavy with emphasis on financial models. This team had the “Wow factor” on their side, too, using an animated three-dimensional digital presentation of their previous aviation projects. I was impressed. They had more experience in aviation than the rest of us combined.

Like Goldhammer, they eventual y succumbed to the temptation every presenter faces: taking a deep dive into complicated financial figures, and as their team commented on how they would manage the deal, it became clear that this was merely production work to them—no different than any other airport project they’ve ever worked on. If awarded, they’d stamp this project out cookie-cutter style. They expressed no interest in the local community and seemed to have no concern with the economic impact. They focused only on the project funding—how quickly they could get in, get it done, and get out.

I could not help but be impressed by their confidence and felt certain that they could do this deal—and do a great job. These guys could win it easily.

As they finished with a rich European flourish—puffed chests, thick Oxford accents, and broad smiles—the last thing they said was, “So we would be proud to work on this prestigious project and wil eagerly wait to hear your decision.”

Beta trapped!
After al that work, showing neediness was the wrong move. Simon Jeffries approached the podium to make some final remarks.

Simon is a class act. He graciously thanked the teams for their presentations, described the week-long deliberation process he would now preside over, and quickly brought the meeting to a close.

The Hour of Judgment

After it was al said and done, I sat there, looking out the window of Greenberg’s Los Angeles office. There were five others with me, waiting for a phone cal .
The
phone cal . Jeffries, meanwhile, had gathered several members of his selection committee at his office, presumably to discuss last-minute details.

As I looked out at Los Angeles, I reflected on the last few months, this pitch, and its repercussions. I’d boiled down two months of work into a lean and elegant pitch lasting 20 minutes and 52 seconds. Now it would al came down to this cal . This moment. The decision. The phone rang. I sat down at the table in the conference room, and Jeffries was put on speaker.

Jeffries began, “If you go down to Davis Field right now, as you pointed out to me, the terminal paint has worn off and the old observation deck is just rotting away. Almost everything has a hole in it, including important parts of the runway. Who would want to land a jet there, have it serviced there, or take a meeting there? Nobody.” This was becoming melodramatic. We just wanted
the decision
.

“This is why I am so passionate about the new Davis Field and excited about building a new entrance to the airport and al new facilities. This can be one of the best private airports in the world. But I have got to pick the right team. The Greenberg team was fantastic in last week’s pitch. There were some things that we felt you didn’t get right, but we real y enjoyed it. This is a hard decision, and of course, we can only pick one winner. . . .”

Jeffries let the moment linger for a torturous amount of time, and then he cleared his throat and said the word, “
Congratulations!
”

The office erupted into celebration.

For me, this journey back from the desert was complete, and my methods were validated. They weren’t just a personal col ection of pitching notes stuffed in my notebooks. It wasn’t just thousands of index cards in my office. It wasn’t just a bunch of academic notions or theories. And it wasn’t just a checklist of dos and don’ts. Much in the way that calculus is a system for solving math problems, or civil engineering is a system for building bridges, my STRONG method was now a system to get deals done, especial y when the stakes are high. It worked.

Learning to manage social dynamics is not an intuitive undertaking. Ten years ago, I found myself in many situations where I was the beta. I thought I had to accept this low social status and thought that there was almost nothing I could do to control the frame. I didn’t even know what a frame was.

And I cannot rational y describe to you why in those early days I disliked—even hated—traditional sales techniques.

I just knew what I wanted—a method that requires no blunt-force trauma. No beg-or-bash modalities that aggravate people and make them regret doing business with you. I wanted nothing to do with the anxiety and fear that accompany those beta-trapped, pushy methods.

Beta methods do not exist in my approach for the simple reason that you are not pushing—you are
interacting
with people using basic rules of social dynamics.

For years I’ve been doing this stuff around the country and the world, and part of what I’ve learned is that the crocodile brain is the same everywhere. There aren’t New York croc brains and California editions and special French ones. Every croc brain responds the same: When something is boring: Ignore it.

When something seems dangerous: Fight/run.

When something is complicated: Radical y summarize (causing information loss) and pass it on in severely truncated form.

With my approach, you are respecting the croc brain by introducing a game, and you are inviting others to play with you. It wil feel new and different to everyone involved—because
it is
. Instead of flogging people with canned responses and pressure tactics, frame-based interactions excite the senses and engage people in a much more social way. In a world of robotic sameness, this approach wil distinguish you from others.

I learned this alone, and it took me more than 10,000 hours of trial and error (and many patient and forgiving clients) to get it right. In the beginning, I seriously screwed up some important deals. I should have worked with a partner or a smal group, but everyone I talked to about my method was afraid of it. Most thought it was chaotic and unpredictable because I didn’t have the model worked out at that point. Today, the method isn’t chaotic or unpredictable at al . Frames are now easy to control, and local star power can be created in every situation.

In the most basic sense, what are the frames I have been talking about here? Frames are psychological referencing systems that al people use to gain a perspective and relevance on issues. Frames influence judgment. Frames change the meaning of human behavior. If a friend rapidly closes and opens her eyes, we wil respond differently depending on whether we think this is a physical frame (she blinked) or a social frame (she winked). Consider the words:
hit, bumped, collided
, and
smashed
. These words tel you the severity of an automobile accident.
Frames shape the
underlying meaning of every social interaction.