How to rescue a pitch
A practical framework for turning panic into victory...
When asked about past pitch successes, we often claim to have been absolutely certain we were going to win.
But that’s classic hindsight bias.
In 1995 my favourite band (Oasis) suddenly became the biggest band in the world, my favourite football team (Everton, at the time) won the FA Cup, and my political party of the time (Labour) shifted from also-rans to dead certs.
But in reality, my fifteen-year-old self was dead certain that major record companies, the Referees’ Association and the Conservative establishment would never let any of these things happen.
Pitches are similar. If we are really honest, almost every amazing pitch win contains a moment of absolute certainty that you are going to lose.
A pitch can feel like a runaway train, and it’s easy to get fatalistic about the destination. But there is always something we can do.
Performing a rescue, mid-pitch
In our last piece, we talked about 5 different bubbles of Pitch Panic…
Leaving nothing undone that could be done
Being happy to come second, rather than first or last
Getting lost in the mirror
Saving yourself for a big reveal
Not dealing with the elephant in the room
Today we are going to talk about how to deal with that mid-way panic.
When you spot the bubble emerging, what do you do about it?
We’re going to share some of the mindsets to bring into a pitch rescue situation; and then a checklist of 4 Techniques that you can use to get things back on the rails.
Pitch Rescue Mindsets
Pitch panic isn’t generally about individuals, but collective dynamics gone wrong.
The long-term solutions to this problem are preventative: better proess, positive culture, story clarity. But the mid-pitch moment is not the moment to fix root causes.
It’s a moment that demands someone to grab the reins, run towards the danger, and provide leadership.
Our LookUP Expert, immersive theatre director Philip Kingston Jon, deals extensively with a related problem of Stage Panic, when a live show goes off the rails. A much scarier and more exposed experience than a pitch process gone awry…
If you're there, and you realise it's going wrong, and you realise that nobody else is equipped to deal with it, or nobody else knows what to do, then it's your opportunity to be decisive. And to just trust in yourself, and then trust in your colleagues and your comrades as well to pick up your lead.
Philip Kingslan John, theatre director
For a mid-pitch panic, what the situation needs most is for someone to take the reins, and reduce the pressure on everyone else.
To provide calm, safety and clarity – often leavened with humour.
To get everyone’s heads out from the analysis of what went wrong (for now).
To get everyone focused on the rescue mission.
If you see panic set in, there’s no point trying to keep sailing on as if everything is fine.
As with all forms of crisis management, you can’t start the rescue operation unless you acknowledge the difficulties, and know where you stand.
As a team you need a collective amnesty, realising collectively what’s gone wrong, and what needs to be fixed. But you also need a good reason to be cheerful.
One of the StoryTelling examples we use most often, in particular for global audiences, is Jaws - a story that was famously saved in the edit.
But it’s also notable for the clarity of its pivot. The initial movie was foreseen as a technical masterclass, centred on a mechanical shark. When the shark failed to operate, the solution was suspense.
“What you don't see is generally scarier than what you do see. The script was filled with: shark, shark here, shark there, shark everywhere. The movie doesn't have very much shark in it.”
Steven Spielberg
Movie crews who don’t believe they are on track to make a good movie will struggle to make a good movie, and pitch teams that cannot see a path to victory don’t win. Someone has to show the path, and help people to get back on it.
It’s inevitable that when you stand back and look at your pitch, you’ll see holes everywhere where a compelling offering should be.
But the most sure-fire way to make the pitch panic worse is to load even more content on top of a structure and a story that is already creaking.
It’s extremely likely that you’ll need to remove ideas that people love, things that they want to say, examples that they are proud of.
To do that, you need to reduce people’s emotional attachment to the work they’ve done, and the material you’ve created.
You need to reframe the things you don’t need not as waste, but as essential exploration on the path to the right thing. Then, to reduce ruthlessly.
There are many mythologised stories about business turnarounds, and lots of them involve Steve Jobs. But the moment where we radically reduced the proposed Apple product range to just 4 priorities is probably the most powerful.
Perhaps it’s another example of hindsight bias, and it’s worth noting that some of the priorities Jobs chose turned out to be turkeys (he must have been pretty grateful for the iMac). But the momentum shift was real, and it undoubtedly shifted the body language of a team in panic mode.
4 Techniques to rescue a pitch
In the heat of battle, you need techniques in your locker to get you to a better place.
With that in mind, here is our Framework of 4 Techniques to rescue a pitch.
Like any big move, each one involves risk, and sacrifice, so our Framework at the end will prompt you to think about that, and whether each one will work for you.
At LookUP, we see a lot of pitches, and the most commonly occurring piece of feedback we give is undoubtedly this:
“What you are saying is more compelling than what you’ve put down on paper.”
In many, many cases, the expert team you’ve assembled has a pretty good idea of what have to should say that is genuinely compelling.
The problem is that it’s submerged in a bunch of other stuff, and everyone has lost the wood for the trees. And that often manifests itself in a lot of small conflicts that can’t be resolved at pace.
The quickest shortcut to resolution is often to:
Interview your core team 1-2-1
Capture what they think is most powerful
Isolate and resolve key conflicts
Create a synthesis that brings it all together
Not only will this lead to a clearer, simpler story, but it should also be a story that people can still see their fingerprints on – helping you to re-inject momentum rapidly.
Most pitch panic bubbles are forms of introversion. Taking an external view is almost always the shortest path to enlightenment.
The biggest service you can offer your team is to go back to basics, and to an audience mapping exercise that is often conducted at the start, and then forgotten on the road…
The shortcut to this is a blank page exercise where you:
Map out your key pitch audiences
Capture one thing they need, and one thing they want
Re-check your hypotheses with them, if possible
Plan which interaction you can land it in (document, presentation, chat)
It might be late in the day to totally shift direction, but having you and your team deeply embedded in audience needs will make a much better final straight.
The best time to start building a clear StoryBoard for your pitch is the very start. But if you don’t have one, the second-best moment is right now.
It’s an incredibly powerful tool to help you reconsider how you want to come across, and also to get your own team on the same page.
There is a real art to StoryBoarding, and training people in this skill and consulting with them when the chips are down is a big part of what we do at LookUP.
But there are also simple questions that you can ask at any moment to clarify your story flow and structure:
What’s the point of jeopardy we are solving?
How do we want to come across differently?
What’s the core structure of our story? (ideally just 3 components)
What’s the end result of everything for them?
This is a crucially important tool for a tough edit. The question becomes not whether a piece of content is good, or even whether it’s something the audience might be interested in, but whether it moves your story forwards.
In an ideal world you’d want a brilliant ensemble cast and Emmy-winning production values, but if there’s a trade-off, it’s not even a question.
Pitches can be won by brilliantly engaging people with simple prompts and materials. Pitches are never won by brilliant materials and under-confident people.
Try to clear away the mess of half-finished presentation sections, abandoned video assets and outlandish theatre, and focus on the human-to-human experience.
This is one of those areas where less work can equal better work, if you:
Consolidate down to your core team
Be prepared to show work in progress
Create an interaction, not a presentation
Be single-minded about your strengths
This might lead to a different kind of pitch to the one you are used to, and the one the client expected. But that can be a really good thing. You are less likely to come second – but you’ll increase your chances of winning.
Here is your framework – 4 Techniques to rescue a pitch. In case of fire, break glass!
One more thing
There is one more strategy you might want to bear in mind. If your back is against the wall, don’t be afraid to call for backup.
Sometimes what you really need is fresh legs and minds, with less baggage, more experience, and some objectivity.
This is a core part of the work we do at LookUP. If you are knee-deep in a pitch, or looking ahead to a busy pitch period, please get us involved if:
You need inspiration. Whether it’s at the start of a process, or in the heat of battle, we can help your teams to look up and think differently.
You need a turnaround. We’ve recently worked on several one-week turnaround projects on must-win pitches, and the results have been universally positive.
You need to build your squad. We work with teams on their collaborative storytelling capability, from new processes to StoryBoarding.
Get in touch at stayahead@wearelookup.com
