Pitching Ideas Is Theatre
Posted on September 1, 2008 - Filed Under Pitching Ideas
Amateur theatre is campy. It tells the story in an awkward fashion that leaves you with the core ideas. Good professional theatre is inspiring. It draws you into the drama. It invokes emotions. You leave the playhouse elated. The same happens with pitches. Too often, people pitch in campy fashion hoping that the ideas themselves will inspire. But that is not the case. The ideas need to be supported by a good story and an excellent delivery.
All pitches have one thing in common. You are trying to get someone else to do what you want them to do - to hire you, to sleep with you, to invest a million dollars in your idea. People always assume that the key to these moments of persuasion is to present the information which should make people change their minds. These encounters actually depend much more on emotion than logical information.
When someone is asked to invest a million dollars in an idea, they are really asking one question: will this be profitable? This isn’t a logical question, because it’s asking to know the future. There is no logic that describes what is going to happen a few years from now. You can pour over the information, put it into forecasting models and graphs, but what you are really doing is guessing the future.
An investor doesn’t’ know whether your idea will be a billion dollar hit; a date doesn’t know whether what lies ahead is three hours of boredom or thirty years of partnership. So, when you’re pitching to someone, you’re asking them to judge the future. Since knowing the future is beyond logic, their judgment won’t be based on logical factors but on emotional factors: trust, confidence, hope, ambition and desire. These factors aren’t rational, they are instinctive. They are not of the head, they are of the heart.
Of course, logical arguments play an important part in a successful pitch. This is because they underpin emotional instinct with reassurance. But logic in a pitch is never an end in itself. it’s only a means to an end. So to pitch successfully, you have to understand that it’s not about widening someone’s knowledge base, it’s about giving them a jolting emotional surge.
A pitch does not take place in the library of the mind, it takes place in the theatre of the heart.
- Christian
Source: Life’s A Pitch
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