Why Your Pitch Doesn’t Work
In the age of AI, your pitch needs to be amazing to win.
💡On July 15th I’m teaching “Why Your Pitch Doesn’t Work” - a live, 45 min online class on crafting a great pitch! It’s completely free, and dives more deeply into why pitches fail and the ways to make sure yours succeeds. I’d love to see you there, sign up here. (Yes, there will be cartoons.)
Selling is hard. Whether you are pitching investors, potential customers or prospective employees you are one of many options they are considering. In almost every situation, the default answer is “No” and you are trying to turn that into a “Yes” with limited time.
It’s not surprising that most pitches don’t work.
With so much stacked against you, there is little room for error. Even so, most pitches fail before they even start by making a series of fundamental mistakes. These mistakes lead to constant rejection of the pitch and endless frustration.
I see these so often, I’ve compiled a list of these errors and how to avoid them. Here are a few:
Mistake #1: The Pitch Isn’t For You
By far the most common mistake is giving the pitch you want to give, instead of the one the audience wants to hear. The pitch is not for you, it’s for the audience! You need to put yourself in their shoes and think about what interests them. Who are they? What do they care about?
What does the audience want to hear?
This is easier if you have a lot in common with the audience, but that’s not always the case. More often you need to do the research to understand them and what kind of pitch will get and keep their attention. Often, it’s a very different pitch than you would give to yourself.
Mistake #2: No One Cares
It’s tempting to center your pitch on your strengths, all the things that you have worked so hard on to make your business work. Unfortunately, no one cares. It doesn’t matter how hard you’ve worked, what you’re most proud of or what you think is special.
All that matters is what makes you different.
Your audience has a lot of options, and your job is to make sure they understand what makes you different. Why is your company a better investment? Why is your product a better purchase? Why is your company a better place to work?
Don’t waste time explaining how you are similar to other options, even if you are better. Focus on what makes you stand out. That is what will make them care.
Mistake #3: Being Easy to Forget
Most people think the goal of a pitch is to get the audience to make a decision during the pitch. That never happens. Every audience will make a decision later, after the pitch is over and long after they spoke with you.
The goal of your pitch is for the audience to remember you.
Consider investors, who hear pitches all day long, every day. If you pitch an investor you are likely one of 5 or 6 they will hear that day, and only one of the 30 they will hear that week. To get them to invest, you need to be one of the few they remember at the end of the week!
To do that, you need to decide what you want them to remember about you and reinforce it multiple times during the pitch.
The Root Cause
These are just the top 3 mistakes I see, but as you can imagine there are countless others. They all boil down to one thing: pitches are not a form of education. You are not a professor teaching a class, you are an advertisement trying to get a person to buy.
Your pitch does not succeed by hitting all of your talking points, and checking off all your information boxes. It succeeds by connecting with the audience and giving them a reason to turn their “No” into a “Maybe” and then into a “Yes”.
I look forward to diving into this deeper, and answering all of your questions, in the free “Why Your Pitch Doesn’t Work” class in July. I hope to see you there!
If you can’t make the class on July 15th, you can register for the full-length course “Crafting the Perfect Pitch” that I’m teaching in August. That class will help you rebuild your pitch from the bottom up, step-by-step with my help.