Pitch Anything

Pitch Anything relies on tactics and strategies from a field called neuroeconomics to give you an entirely new way of presenting, pitching and convincing other people of your ideas and offers.

Our brains as they are today have evolved in three stages, leaving us with three levels to process stuff on.

The oldest one is what Oren calls the croc brain (short for crocodile), which is stupid, but efficient at keeping us alive. It reacts to new, exciting and potentially threatening cues in our environment and can trigger strong emotions. Seth Godin calls this lizard brain. If you have a freeze, fight or flight response to something, your croc brain is in charge.

The midbrain developed next, which helps process more complex visual and auditory information, enabling us to have social interactions with others. It also regulates complicated bodily functions like sleep and temperature.

Our neocortex was the very last part to develop and it’s what’s made the tremendous progress of civilization of the past 100 years possible. This part of your brain is in charge of abstract thinking, analyzing complex situations and logical reasoning.

When you’re pitching someone, you usually try to explain all these awesome, but complex features of what you’re selling. You’re using your neocortex to communicate – but this isn’t where your message first lands. Your target will first pick up whatever you’re presenting with their croc brain, which is why what you say must first of all be simple.

If you’ve ever been hit with a 180 page slide deck starting with complicated graphs and instantly zoned out, you know this is true. Instead, make sure you bring something new, exciting and positive to the table, so the croc brain will pass on the new inputs to system 2.

Once you have attention, it’s time to convince. And do you know what’s the most convincing? Someone who doesn’t try to convince us. If you can position yourself as the prize instead of the contestant, you’ve already won (pun intended). This means showing your audience that while you want to work with them, you’re not desperate to sell and don’t depend on anyone. Part of this is to qualify your customers – why should you do business with them? What do they have to offer to you in exchange for your awesome product or service? Manufacturers of luxury goods often do this by limiting units of handbags, or serving only a very small group of people. Car makers do a good job at this too. For example, even if you have the cash you can’t just walk into your local dealership and buy a Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1, or even an M4 GTS. You need a…