We're Gonna Need a Bigger Bench
5 ways to thrive and grow in a perma-pitch world
This is one of the most frenzied periods of pitching we can remember. Today, we are revisiting some of our most popular thinking on pitch StoryTelling…
A year of a million pitches
For LookUP, this is the year of Three Stories. Our work in StoryTelling has taken us into all kinds of interesting places so far this year. We’ve been working with charities to redefine their Culture Stories, running sprints with scale-up tech businesses to find their Future Story and reposition their brands…and much, much more besides. The need for better story is everywhere.
But at the same time, simple requests to help people pitch better are never far away!
In particular, that’s because for our agency clients, this is the year of a million pitches.
They have rarely seemed more overwhelmed with the sheer pressure and breathlessness of the new business pitch process.
Pitches seem to more fragmented, more complex, and more competitive than ever.
When you are deeply immersed in them, it’s easy to think about a pitch as merely a draining process, like a marathon (or, it seems for some of our clients, a series of ultra-marathons, back-to-back).
But as we remind people in our training sessions, a good pitch is not really just a process: it’s the creation of a unique business case, wrapped in a compelling story.
So, if you are looking for the best and most efficient route towards winning more pitches (and staying sane in the process), StoryTelling is the one thing to focus on.
Today, we are going to re-surface 5 ways to elevate your pitch StoryTelling - and 5 pieces that we’ve previously published, to help you stop, look up, and win more.
It’s easy to think of a burst of heavy pitching activity as an aberration (even though, if you stop to think about it, you’ll know it happens all the time).
The truth is that we all live in a perma-pitch world, where our story needs to be told more and more often, to more and more people, in more and more different ways.
A successful pitching business can’t just rely on the super-human efforts of a small number of brilliant people.
And not just because it’s physically, and cognitively, impossible! The reality is that a successful business needs to be represented by an ever-greater diversity of different kinds of representatives; by a richness of skills, styles and backgrounds.
That’s why the smartest organisations are getting ahead of the curve, and creating a larger bench of people who can tell their story effectively.
Those people will need time, and development. And they will need the confidence to present brilliantly that can only come from understanding that they have a presenting superpower within them - they just need to find it, and sharpen it into a brilliant tool.
This is the heart of our Presenting You approach - which you can find an introduction to here…
Presenting You: How to identify your Communication SuperPowers
“Listing people’s weaknesses is often a dead end. When someone holds a spotlight on weaknesses it often shifts the person’s confidence and focus from where their talent lies. This is counterproductive as you need to build skills and and encourage self-belief, not undermine someone at a time of critical development”
If a pitch is a business case wrapped in a story, then that story is always in some way about a promised land - a future state of riches, comfort, victory, or influence.
The ending of our story is fundamental, but incredibly often we get so focused on the journey that we forget about the destination.
If you are providing the strategic thread of a pitch, it falls to you to be the StoryTeller of the future. And as humans, we need it to feel tangible, not theoretical.
We delved into this topic at our event earlier this year, and even more deeply in our Big Reset topic last year. Here it is framed through the lens of annual planning…but everything here is relevant to a pitch vision too….
The Big Reset
“So, I’m about to start my annual planning process for the year. But I already know what the plan is going to be. Do absolutely everything we did this year, but better, with less resources…and add three or four slightly random new things on top.”
Pitching is complex, pressurised, and emotionally fraught. There are an almost infinite number of ways that it can go wrong, and most great pitches go wrong at some point.
The trick, is to see that coming, before things go off the rails. To understand the reasons why things might go awry, and to make the right intervention at the right time.
We did a whole series on pitch panic late last year…if that’s something on your mind, the place to start is here…
At LookUP, we are passionate advocates of editing - in entertainment, in life, and certainly in pitching.
The danger can be that because we approach business pitching with our logical brains so firmly attached to our bodies, that we include an endless quantity of rationale and operational detail, but remove all the character.
The reality is that a) we should always assume that our brilliant ideas look much more similar to everyone else’s than we think, and b) that people are strange, and are much more likely to remember something odd than they are something much more useful.
If we want people to think a certain way about out agency, a lot of it is about how we make them feel, and that is all about projecting a clear (and authentic) sense of who we are, and demonstrating that in our behaviour.
This is encapsulated in this great interview with Tracy de Groose, CEO of William Reed Group. A brilliant watch…
Why do Brilliant Misfits tell the best stories?
“Understanding who you are brings such authenticity and such power and such energy, that your story will be more powerful, because there will be conviction and energy and credibility and belief with it”
When the moment of truth of a pitch day comes, it’s easy to be so obsessed with what you are saying, that you totally forget that the most important thing you are doing is giving someone a chance to get to know you.
Hopefully, you’ll get a chance to explain who you are, why you are there - and what people need to know about you that makes you an important minor character in the story of their lives.
Yet strangely, despite the thousands of hours that go into pitch presentation, people barely even think about how they are going to introduce themselves!
For experienced people, this can be super-difficult, because it combines the ‘ick’ factor of saying nice things about yourself, and the processing problem of turning a lifetime of achievement into a couple of sentences.
Don’t try and do it on the spot! StoryBoard yourself. Our Be the Director approach to Personal Brand is a brilliant way to prepare yourself for this surprisingly important moment…
Be The Director: Build your StoryBoard
Wouldn’t it be great if you just knew the best way to pitch yourself in 30 seconds, in any scenario? Better than that, to feel natural in doing so, without any of the ‘ick’ factor?
If you are really up against it pitch-wise, LookUP is here to help you!
Here’s five things we are doing to help right now…
Building training programmes to help agencies build a bigger bench
Running 1-to-1 mentoring with pitch leaders and presenters to build confidence
Leading pitch kick-off sessions to help you lock story early
Acting as story coaches to teams that are lost in the woods
Helping agencies to evolve their stories, so pitches aren’t made from scratch
If that’s something you need, just get in touch with Matthew or Caroline today…
Coming up…our eagerly awaited guide to telling your story on LinkedIn. Back soon!