THE PITCH

The Pitch gets us over a hurdle. To change the audience’s actions. Give money or support, buy something new, or do something different.

We make a pitch by establishing common ground with our audience, stating a common problem that we all recognise, and then providing a new solution that fixes, eliminates, or leaps past the problem. If our pitch is convincing, our audience buys our idea and takes the action we recommend.

Old School was Hardball, New School is Softball

In the old days, pitching was viewed as a me-against-you proposition. Buyers and sellers playing on opposite sites, and only one could win. Works fine when problems are plenty and solutions are limited. Pitching today is a different world. Buyers and sellers both have so many options that it proves far more effective to work together. Softball pitching means we’re on the same team, working together to get the highest mutual score. When we’re done, everyone feels better.

All softball pitches contain a variation of the same essential parts.

Author explains these steps with a case study in the book. Here is how the final explanation deck shaped up after applying them.

The key to the softball pitch is to establish common ground with our audience. The essence of any pitch is to get our audience to try something new. But in most cases, something truly “new” is the last thing people really want. We first need to establish that there is a problem — and that it is a problem we share.

That is why it is almost impossible for someone unfamiliar with a problem to sell a solution: our audience can tell we’re not telling the truth. If we want to sell a solution, we first have to truly know the problem.

All our presentations make a “sale” of some kind. The report “sells” new information, the explanation “sells” new abilities, and the drama, as we’ll soon see, “sells” emotion. But it’s the pitch in which the “sale” is the point. And that’s okay. Why?

Because our audience knows when they’re being sold something. If we’re up front about it, they won’t mind. They’ll even pounce with us.