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Mad Men is one of the greatest TV series ever written and at the very end the finale of season we see one of the greatest pitches ever shown on TV. I’m going to show you why I love this pitch so much.

Let’s set the scene we have Don Draper faced with what is otherwise known as a slide projector. Two executives from the company in question are sat there and they say to Don, Don what have you come up with for our wheel?Client: “So have you figured out a way to work the wheel into it?

The first thing Don does is it gives us a master class in marketing and that is never talk about the function, talk about the benefits of the product.
Don Draper: “That you have technology is a glittering lure but there’s the rare occasion when the public can be engaged on a level beyond flash. If they have a sentimental bond with the product.
Don Draper describes how the product will benefit the people using it rather than going through its function as a slide projector.

Don Draper: “This device isn’t a spaceship it’s a time machine. Goes backwards forwards. Takes us to a place where we all want to go again.
Take for example a Ferrari versus a Nissan Micra. They perform the same function getting an individual or more than one individual from A to B but, Ferrari is something that drives people’s ambitions it’s what many people dream about. It’s much more than a means of transport. It is a status symbol which is something that says; I have arrived. I have achieved something in life. Let alone all the exhilaration that it gives you.

Asterix I’ve actually owned a Nissan Micra and they’re not all that bad.

The second thing that Don Draper does is he talks about the product being new. N, E, W. It intrigues us because we haven’t worked out what it’s quite easy yet.
Don Draper: “He told me the most important idea in advertising is new.

He actually says no this is not about something new; this is about nostalgia, the opposite of new. He’s using an antithesis. He’s turning a normal concept on its head and making it sound rather positive.

Don Draper: “Nostalgia, it’s delicate.

Don Draper really isn’t talking about something new or the opposite of new. Really he is talking about the fear of loss.

Third, and finally the thing which Don Draper does very best here is he generates a huge sense of emotion. He drops the lights and he shows us the slides and he talks in a very soft steady tone about memories.
Don Draper: “It’s not called the wheel, it’s called the carousel. Lets us travel the way the child travels around and around back home again. To a place where we know we are loved.
And the memories it brings up happen to be photographs of him and his wife who happens to be two very beautiful people showing them with children showing them getting married showing them being extremely happy and having tremendous joy. All of these things the audience can connect with because these are universal experiences which we will all have probably at one time or another in our lives. he draws straight into the audience’s emotions.

What’s the effect of this? Just take a look at what happens to Don Draper’s colleague [tears].

I love madmen and I love this pitch we’re taught three valuable lessons by Don Draper.
1) Number one, don’t talk about functions talk about the benefits.
2) Number two think about the fear of loss. Think about our natural desire to acquire things and how painful it is should those things be taken away from us.
3) Number three, the most powerful element in any pitch is emotion drive up the sense of emotion, get people thinking in a hot cognitive state and life becomes a lot easier.

Indeed this is the effect that Don Draper’s pitch has on his audience.

The post My Love: Mad Men Carousel Pitch Video Podcast appeared first on Andrew Tollinton.

What happens when a great pitch goes really, really, bad? So bad you have boiling hot black coffee poured directly into your lap. So bad you you’re told you’re banned and indeed a security officer comes in and escorts you off the premises. What do you do when your pitch goes severely wrong?

Anything could happen in a pitch. I’m going to look at the UK Houses of Parliament for an example of when things go wrong. Here is a scene with John Bercow, Speaker of the House of Commons trying to control an unruly member.

John Bercow: “Resume your seat Mr. Blackford”.

Now and he cries ‘order, order’ up to 20 times over a three minute period.

John Bercow: “The house will have heard very clear, order.

John Bercow does a number of things. To begin with he asks for some advice from the people that he’s with.

You see how ridiculous things get as MPs file out and they actually wave and say to John Bercow ‘bye-bye; this is childish

What do we do then in a pitch if people go one step further than in this example? What if in the Houses of Parliament there the particular MP in question started to be abusive personally to John Bercow?

I don’t like people that talk about pitching an actual fact I think you’re dirt, imagine!

In this situation we must remember two things. One, we have a role to perform as a person pitching and two, we’re human beings. If we feel so violated as humans that the audience is being so offensive to us we should remove ourselves in that situation by simply saying, ladies and gentlemen, I think we’ve gone as far as we possibly can, let’s reconvene and speak again when we are more levelheaded. Gather your things together and exit.

Alternatively, if you wish to carry on and you don’t find it personally offensive we must always think about maintaining our sense of self-respect. People don’t buy from others they do not respect. They might not even like you but they should always respect you.

The post Pitches Going Wrong Video / Podcast appeared first on Andrew Tollinton.

President Donald Trump regardless of what he says many people say he does appear somewhat believable and we need to be believable in a pitch. How does Donald Trump appear to be so very convincing?

Before we look at what Donald Trump does so well first things first let’s dispel the myth that Donald Trump has somehow become a different person once he has become the president of the United States just take a look at this clip going back thirty years and see how similar Donald Trump is from then to now.

President Donald Trump: “Everybody’s taken advantage of the United States people know that if certain people are running a country that it won’t happen. I mean when you look at Japan not paying for the defense we’re defending Japan we’re losing billions and billions of dollars, we’re fighting for aids help and for farmers and for this and that and, it’s a shame and the Japanese folks who I respect greatly but, they’re not they’re not treating us fairly they’re really not treating us fairly.

“Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, they’re not paying us anything for the services we’re rendering and I think it’s a disgrace and I think people look at certain people and maybe me. If that if I were in a position this country believe me would not be ripped off like it is and it is just being ripped off so badly by our so called allies.

You’ll see then that President Donald Trump thirty years ago sounds very similar to how he sounds today all that success of thirty years ago when he was a massively popular and successful businessman. He hasn’t been changed by now he being a massively popular super successful politician and the most powerful man on planet earth. He stayed true to his roots he still delivers words in the same manner.

What is it then that President Donald Trump does to be so very, very, very, believable? Amazingly believable? I’ve put together two clips that hopefully illustrate what I’m talking about:

Yes, they are two different contexts, one is a foreign policy speech and one is a speech to his supporters but you can tell the difference, very marked. In one speech, in the first speech he is reading just like any other politician making sure that every single word that he says is correct.

And in the second clip he’s completely come to life right. He’s starting to use all kinds of gestures and really talking like a normal human being. Donald Trump comes across first as a human being, second as the president of the United States and the majority of a time he never once comes across as a politician.

Hence why he sounds so convincing and very, very, believable. There are lots of advantages to this approach by Donald Trump. Of course it’s a nightmare for anyone trying to write a speech for him because you never know where he’s going to deviate to. But when you speak like Donald Trump when you speak as though you’re talking a normal conversation and you’ve internalized the content which we should always do in a pitch. When you’re like that you can start to control the room.

Just say in a pitch you get an interruption by somebody?

Someone comes into the room or perhaps someone really starts to fire some hard tough questions at you? Even if you’ve asked them not to come up to you with any questions until the end of the pitch they could still do that, what do you do? Well here’s a good example of how well you can control the room and how badly you can control the room depending on whether or not you are reading from the script or not.

The first clip I’m going to show you is of Prime Minister Theresa May giving a speech and being interrupted by a heckler who  approaches her at the front of the stage

Prime Minister Theresa May: “While our opponents flirt with a foreign policy of neutrality and prepare for a run on the ground some people say we spent too much time talking about Jeremy Corbyn’s past you may not have heard me say that so some  people say we’ve spent too much time talking about Jeremy Corbyn’s past.

Now we’ll take a look at how President Donald Trump treats a similar scenario

President Donald Trump: “Thank you. How did he get in here Matt? Okay just for the media, the fake dudes back there, they took very good care of them, they were very gentle, he was very obnoxious.

You’ll see in the second clip President Donald Trump treats it as all a bit of a joke. He’s in complete control. He’s relaxed and that’s what we look for in a leader and that’s also what we look for in an individual who is pitching to us. Because they are going to potentially be leading a company to great fame and fortune.

In conclusion ladies in gentlemen, when it comes to pitching we should not read from a script, we should know our pitch so well we can internalize it so we can slow down, be amusing, be less amusing, all depending on the room.

Remember the spoken word is not the written word. We are not writing a contract ladies and gentlemen. No, we are not building a wall of contracts, We are speaking and the audience are more forgiving. When we speak we can use hyperbole, we can exaggerate and, we can quite frankly get things wrong. Listen to any interview on the radio and you’ll often hear politicians screw up their lines. It’s forgivable, it’s the spoken word. The written word is not the spoken word. Take advantage of that fact when you pitch, internalize the information and go out there and be believable.

The post Pitching The Truth & Trump: Why He Sounds So Convincing Video / Podcast appeared first on Andrew Tollinton.

Should we prepare for… I haven’t prepared for this video and I’m trying to show you as a result what happens. Because this is exactly like what happens when we don’t prepare for a pitch. When we don’t prepare for a pitch we need to think in our heads about what we’re going to say. As a result I will say needless words, I’ll just speak for the sake of speaking, which means I’m verbose and I’m not concise and my mission is lost.

You will see that my body language is kind of shrunken, a bit refrained. I will ‘um’ I will ‘er’ I’ll speak less clearly. My tone of voice will be a bit more quivering and I’ll probably use things like props and slides. That ladies and gentleman is an example of me speaking directly to a camera without :any preparation whatsoever.

The question we’re trying to address here is whether or not we should prepare for our pitches or whether or not we should winging a pitch. Why on earth would you want to wing a pitch? Good question. Answer two reasons.

The very first reason why you will not want to prepare for a pitch and you’ll want to wing it is because preparation equals hard work that’s obvious. But the second reason that we like to think that we can wing pitches is because when we wing it we tell people ‘we just wing it’.

That means we suggest that we’re pretty cool and it comes naturally to us and everyone thinks that we’re something special. Well guess what ladies and gentlemen there’s no such thing you need to prepare, everybody needs to prepare.

I recently watched a television episode from Amazon, Grand Tour with Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear fame and in that they videoed him not preparing for a clip at all and what happened? You saw him sat in a car and trying to think about words to describe the car. He said something like ‘this car is like….’ and he was lost. He needed time to prepare to think about the way he was going to describe that word he’s the Prince of puns and metaphors but only when he has prepared.

Now I am guilty of not, preparing in the past but not in pitches, in best man speeches. The very first time I was asked to give a best man speech I was and I gave a five minute speech and after that speech I got lots of thumbs up from the audience and pats on the back. People bought me beer. I felt pretty good about that and as a result for the next six times that I was a best man I’ve been best man seven times in total for the next six times I never once prepared my speech.

The thing is as I got older I started to see the thumbs disappearing and the pats no longer arriving. I discovered that people’s expectations had risen and at the age of 32, I really needed to be pretty good at delivering a speech because I I was a grown adult. People thought ‘why isn’t Andrew doing his friend a good service and describing him and his nature and all the good things that you should bring up in a best man speech’. I’m not going to attempt it now.

After seven speeches in total with seven best man speeches I now realize what a golden opportunity it is to have all of those people in the room listening to you and how much I wasted every single one of those opportunities. It’s not to  say that we don’t say some good things it’s just that we don’t say enough good things about that person. In a pitch what will happen if you wing your pitch you will say some things that are good. But, I guarantee every time that you leave that room you can look back on that pitch and say to yourself ‘oh wish I said or I should have said I remember I should have said next time I’ll say that’. But if you wing it next time you won’t say that. We must always prepare our pitches.

I have one exception where I actually do not prepare my pitches and that’s when I’m doing something called pitch hack London. I have a big group of people in the room and I’m helping them with their pitches. When I’m doing something like a guest lecture I’ll go into that room and I’ll ask people anyone in the audience to throw at me a product or a service and I will pitch it back to you within seconds. Sure enough pretty much without fail I will always get a spontaneous round of applause but that round of applause is not because the pitch is of a high quality. It’s because the audience appreciates that I can actually form a pitch within that period of time, they know it’s spontaneous.

When you go to see an investor, when you go to see a prospect, when you go to see a client and you pitch in to them they do not expect you to improvise. They expect you to have prepared. So do yourself a good service and do your audience the good service of preparing your pitch. Remember the saying of the special forces: proper preparation prevents, poor performance.

The post When to Wing a Pitch Video / Podcast appeared first on Andrew Tollinton.

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Have you ever been ripped off? Have you ever seen other people being ripped off and wondered how on earth did it happen to them? Don’t worry it’s been happening all our lives; in the past there’s been big scandals like the tulips and shares and most recently it’s been in cryptocurrency. I’m going to use The Wolf of Wall Street to show you three ways that people can use to influence you to part with your money.

The first trick is to come across as credible, take a look at this clip:

Wolf: ‘Gentlemen, welcome to Stratton Oakmont!’

You’ll see a lion’s head in the logo and you hear the word Oakmont, oak, strong all around positioning that the company and the person representing that company is credible. The first thing you need to influence somebody is to be credible otherwise the person listening to you will not believe a word that passes your lips.

Wolf: ‘We’re a new company with a new name a company that our clients can believe in, a company that our clients can trust.’

Number two Trust. Trust me. When you establish trust then you really begin to manipulate your audience.

Wolf: ‘What we’re gonna do is this first we pitch him Disney AT&T IBM blue chip stocks exclusively companies these people know. Once we sucker them in we unload the dog shit the Pink Sheets the penny stocks where we make the money fifty percent commission baby!

A great example of where trust can be used to take advantage of you and take your money away from you is a boiler room scam. I get you to trust me over a period of time by giving me some money. Say I ask you to give me five pounds, many of you will say no, a few of you will you’ll say yeah it’s not the end of the world to lose five pounds. So you give me five pounds on the promise that I will next week give you ten pounds back. I duly do so.

After two weeks time you’re five pounds better off the following week I’ll make another request for money perhaps for six pounds the next week you double your money. I’ll give you twelve pounds back so it continues for a few weeks and I am down but after week five or six I say to you okay let’s step things up this time you give me £1,000 pounds. Because previously I’ve always done what I said I’ll do you trust me, Many of you buy into me you give me that £1,000 pounds and the following week you get nothing back because of hot tailed it and I’ve left the country!

Number three it’s time to bring out the big guns, it’s time for time!

Wolf: ‘Now the key to making money in a situation like this is to position yourself now before the settlement. Because by the time we read about it in the Wall Street Journal it’s already too late.

Time in this case used in a sense of scarcity. We have an ever reducing window of opportunity which is going to eventually close if we don’t buy it right there and then. What happens when we see that ever reducing opportunity is that we become emotional. We move from cold deeply logical, thoughtful, reflective mode to a really exciting mode because we’re chasing after something we’ve really got to get it.

Victim Kevin: ‘Yeah, I am impressed.

Wolf: ‘You give me one shot here on a blue chip stock like Kodak and believe me Kevin the only problem you’re gonna have is that you didn’t buy more, sound fair enough?

Victim Kevin: ‘My wife might divorce me but yeah let’s do it!

Wolf: ‘Excellent choice Kevin, how much you want to go for this time?

Victim ‘Kevin: $5,000

Wolf: ‘Why not try $8,000, Kevin.

Victim Kevin: ‘Lets do $10,000.

Wolf: ‘Excellent choice Kevin. Let me lock in that trade right now and get back to you in five minutes with an exact confirmation Kevin and, welcome to Stratton Oakmont!

Victim Kevin: ‘Thanks man, I’m gonna have a beer!

Wolf: ‘Take it easy Kevin.

Imagine going to a day where you see a really inspirational speaker you can’t believe that individual, who’s famous, is giving you all that information for free. You’re so thankful and then at the end of a day there’s a promise made. There’s a promise made that for some of you, that lucky few will be given the opportunity to get even more access to better information given by that speaker if you sign up on that day. If you sign up on that day you will get access perhaps at 25% off, you’ll get access to even more. Now the take-up rate is so high, why?

Because we are in a hot cognitive state, we are all emotional. We’re no longer using logic, we’re using intuition, we’re using our feelings to make a buying decision. Watch out when people are saying to you, you must do this now instantly. Say to yourself this is somebody trying to take advantage of me. It could well be it’s true that opportunity is going to be missed but a lot of the time the individual telling you that is using time, a lot of a time, to take advantage of you. They’re trying to trick you into a hot cognitive state. Stop, be skeptical. Ask yourself would you normally buy this if you were sat at home having a cup of tea or a lovely coffee in the cold light of day?

In conclusion ladies and gentlemen: it’s not these three influential techniques that are bad but the ends for which they are used.

In this Wolf of Wall Street they’re used to exploit people and take advantage of them. Today we have something called the Internet which means realistically if we’re doubtful we go online and check it out. But still be careful. If you see these three things being used to persuade you of something ask yourself a question. Did Andrew talk about this and perhaps you need to check out the proposition before you buy?

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When we think about our pitch for the very first time where should our starting point be? Should it be our solution? Should it be us the people that are pitching?

The answer is it should be you our audience. We should begin with knowing our audience how they think and then shaping our pitch accordingly. But it is tricky to climb inside the heads of our audience to understand how they think and feel. I therefore sought out expert advice and I got to interview an individual called Jonathan Marshall. He’s a psychologist and a psychotherapist. An individual that knows a thing or two about how our brains work. He was an officer in the military and one one of the founders of a company that went on to be called Yahoo Mail.

I begin my interview by asking Jonathan how do we begin understanding how people’s minds work?

Andrew: “Thank you very much for taking this time to speak to me today.

“One of the questions I have for you is around empathy. Because particularly people like myself one of the things I realized is not everyone thinks like me. I was talking to individual who’s starting a FinTech company, he has a very quantitative background and he said salespeople who know the customers are often the most successful people. I think he had just seen the film The Founder with that story about the starting of McDonalds. Sales people are able to interpret the needs and wants of other people. 

In one of your blogs you talk about speaking to Kofi Annan the former Secretary General of the United Nations and you asked him about the threats to mankind. He said to you the one thing which we need to build to stop mankind being threatened is empathy. I agree. How do you build that sense of empathy?

Say you’re talking to someone who’s in their early twenties and they never really had that front facing role. How do they quickly get to know the audience and resonate with them, build trust and, build up that sense of empathy? How would you suggest people do that?

Jonathan Marshall: “If you can’t feel your emotions it’s very hard to feel somebody else’s emotions.

What I’ll often work on is what’s going on right now. So let’s say we were working together I’d say what are you feeling right now? You’re like ‘nothing’. I’m like well, can you feel the pressure of your seat against the chair right? ‘Yeah’.Sso get really even to the very concrete and then getting more and more subtle where people may become more familiar with their emotions.

“Often you’ll find where people have a real lack of empathy is they may be carrying trauma. There’s something internal that has meant that I don’t want to feel my emotions. Something bad happened, bad motions locked up in there. I don’t want to go there and so I help them work through whatever resistance there may be, whatever bruising it could. You know, neglectful parents is a traumatic experience and it’s sometimes stuff which as a child who might feel was terribly painful. But as an adult we look back and go come on that’s not a big deal! How could how could that be so such caused such an effect?

“Nevertheless we’ve stored it, we’ve encoded it in our minds. The first thing is often becoming more sensitive to oneself, I’ll then sometimes work with them to become sensitive to me. I’ll describe what I’m feeling and they might go ‘oh, really feel that’ and then sometimes I ask them ‘what do you what do you think I’m feeling?’

“So we’re practicing, they’re practicing. Sometimes I’ll interview their peers, their superiors or subordinates. I’ll show them the reports ‘did you know that people felt this way about you? Is any of this a surprise?’ You think you’re a draconian manager but here are five of your direct reports all describing you as a softy. And so really trying to get very specific so I don’t use any kind of big theory or overarching formula, getting very concrete and very specific as soon as possible.

Andrew: “So you begin with one’s own feelings to think about one’s own feelings and recognize those. Then move rapidly for example, I think you are thinking X and in actual fact you’re thinking Y. 

Jonathan Marshall: “And the modeling’s is part of that. For example, I think especially this is where being a guy can be an advantage because I think a lot of men know maybe three emotions. Anger, jealousy maybe one other. In terms of monetary and social power we definitely have advantages but when it comes to emotional expression and experience we are definitely way behind women. So in showing that I am able to describe what I’m feeling including feelings of vulnerability: ‘oh why should I feel a bit intimidated right now’ and the client might go ‘what you’re intimidated?! You’re the doctor, you’re the one I’m paying!’

“The way you say that, it makes me feel kind of inadequate. Often I have them go: ‘hmm okay, maybe I’m also allowed to feel vulnerable or weak, at least with this guy.’

“And that can help unpack some of the blockages that a person has.

Andrew: “Right okay so exposing you own vulnerabilities helps the other person feel more human. They can reveal their own.

“Whenever I ask a big group of people a question I recognize that because there are other people around them I’m not going to necessarily get an honest answer; say several hundred people. In the moment I ask a question of them only a few people typically will raise their hands and proclaim any issue.

“When I speak to people about their fear of public speaking, multiple people have different reasons about why they might fear it.

“For me it was just a matter of building a skill so I can become good at pitching but for some people when I speak to them particularly after the event they’ll approach me and they’ll speak to me one-on-one. They’ll say ‘actually a lot changes for me; I have real issues and it’s holding me back in my job or whatever’. Those people who seem to have a more deep rooted challenge with public speaking: do you ever come across people that have that kind of fear and if so what do you say to them?

Jonathan Marshall: “The fear of public speaking by the way is rated as evoking more anxiety than death. For me it very much depends, I tailor the work I do to specific individuals.

“For example, one client I had a long time ago suddenly out of the blue developed an extremely debilitating fear of public speaking. He was a suddenly terrified of it having not had a problem for all his career. There he was in his and this late 20s, early 30s and it was absolutely debilitating and causing him difficulty to hold his bladder. It was really bad news for him.

“Part of what I do is I work a lot with trance tanks and we used some hypnosis. What became quite quickly apparent was that this new experience had been triggered by an event that happened a long time before in a hostile union negotiation.

“There he was in a room alone with multiple very aggressive union representatives that regarded him as the ambassador of the evil corporate world. So he was facing a lot of aggression, he was afraid for his physical well being and somehow that just got trapped inside him. He went on like a machine.

“He continued to work on for a couple of years and then suddenly kaboom! This anxiety exploded. That’s not as uncommon as it seems sometimes. When people get the opportunity to relax into what’s really going on inside these bubbles of anxiety, pain can come to the surface. Actually it was one of my my first experiences treating public speaking through hypnosis and we had about five sessions together and then it was the I think I was relocating so we couldn’t continue our work.

“I got an email from him about two months later and he said I just want to let you know I am almost recovered.

by Andrew Tollinton

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Andrew: “We need belief. Why do we need belief? Because if we do not believe in our pitch other people will not.

“We as an audience are naturally super, uber, skeptical about anything anyone says to us when we do not know that person.  We start out from a high level of skepticism, therefore any signal when we’re pitching sent out to other people suggesting that we don’t believe in what we’re talking about means that our audience keep an arm’s length approach.

“They maintain analytical and logical approach which means they can never relax and get into the narrative that we’re trying to sell them. In other words; they’re super logical, super analytical, super cold and they don’t get and buy into us during the pitch. Doesn’t mean you will fail when you’re pitching but it’s so much easier if our audience believes in us.

“Question is; Mark Zuckerberg had to persuade a bunch of senators that he was the right man to lead Facebook in the future, billions riding on this right Matt, did Mark come across as a person that was believable?

Matt: “I think when you say believable I think you’re talking about belief and about passion. I think naturally Mark in his delivery is very monotone and it gives him an incongruence between the words that are coming out of his mouth, his body language and his tone, they just don’t match.

Andrew: “So you were talking to me earlier about this about he says how much he is loving his passion for Facebook right?

Matt: “Okay Facebook is his only real passion and you know that from the fact that that he was offered a hundred million from an investor years ago and he said no; I want turn this into something cool. There was a lifechanging amount of money that he would never have to work again you know here he is saying no, I want to build this. Yet when he talks about the mission of Facebook in the Senate hearing there’s none of that passion there.

Matt “And had you not known him you wouldn’t have believed that he could have built what he’s actually built.

Andrew: “Here’s an example of what Matt’s talking about.

Mark Zuckerberg: “Facebook is an idealistic and optimistic company. For most of our existence we focused on all the good that connecting people can do and as Facebook has grown, people everywhere have gotten a powerful new tool for staying connected to the people they love, for making their voices heard and for building communities and businesses. Just recently we’ve seen the ‘me too’ movement and the march for our lives organized at least in part on Facebook. After hurricane Harvey people came together to raise more than million dollars for relief and more than 70 million small businesses use Facebook to create jobs and grow.

Matt: “We can see he has been coached within an inch of his life for this this inquiry. He had so much running on it to the point where when you actually watch it on the Internet it shows the share price going up and down based on like the worm on the on a political debate. Because he had so much riding on it and because this looked the best he could do.

Matt: “You do question as to had he had he not been the CEO of Facebook whether he would have been the best person to actually go in front of the Senate. This is a double-edged sword with being the face of a company in that had he not turned up to the Senate hearing he would have been seen as evading questioning. Yet out of the thousand people that actually work for Facebook he’s not in the top eleven who you would actually put in front of the Senate hearing.

Matt: “So we’re saying then that perhaps we need to be selective about the people that we get to go out in front and pitch our business. Often we see people come to us and are looking for pitching advise and sometimes looking for pitching advice and sometimes the best people have an incredible passion but don’t convey that in a pitch. To a certain extent you can teach it but for some people this just doesn’t come naturally and so when you are pitching you need to decide as to who’s actually going to front; whether the founder is in fact the best person to actually go forward.

Andrew: “And really what we’re talking about here, what I’ve read into this is that it’s about people showing their expression. They don’t just say that they love what they’re doing, they actually emotionally display that .

“It depends culturally where you come from. I’m English or your Australian right so you’re a bit wilder with your moves and stuff like that but us British are quite controlled. Nonetheless, if we don’t show any emotion and we speak monotone just like this and we do not move our heads or anything else or even our eyes we don’t even blink then perhaps I can sound really will have a boring and not passionate at all.

Matt: “Yeah but the problem that you actually have in effect is your natural stance. Then you risk the chance of actually being inauthentic which is even worse actually the conversation that you have where you deliver it in a monotone voice.

Andrew: “So we’re quite prejudice here then. We have our preconceived ideas about what we think someone should look like and be like, particularlyif it’s the first time we’re seeing that person. If I knew you from years ago and I knew you were an individual who just didn’t show any kind of level of passion when I saw you and you said you’re passionate about something, I could believe you. But first time we want to see that individual displaying a level an expression about how much they care for that idea right?

Matt: “It saddens me sometimes when I see people that come to us that that have a fantastic idea yet are deadpan in their delivery. I’ve seen pitches where with they’ve gone out and got funding and the business model behind it is a bit ropey but their delivery is first class because they show their passion.

Andrew: “So Matt question was he believable? I believe, that he believes in what he was saying but, did he come across to the rest of the Senators as an individual that was believable? As a CEO of a global super influential company, yay or nay?

Matt: “I think he was authentic, which is far more important than being overly passionate. Being himself, belief trumps exuberance.  Okay. I think he was very believable.

Andrew: “Okay Mark, you were believable!

by Andrew Tollinton

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Andrew: “Was Mark Zuckerberg persuasive when he got in front of a bunch of senators why is it important? Because we can learn things from his performance which we can transfer into our pitch; so let’s get on and analyze Mark Zuckerberg’s persuasiveness in front of his senators.

“Today I have helping me to analySe Zuckerberg’s performance Matt Smith. He happens to have had a career in finance, he is a Sloan Fellow of London Business School and he is now a strategy and finance advisor to scaling up startups. Matt, question for you then, was Mark Zuckerberg overall a success, was he persuasive when he was in front of those sensors?

Matt: “Okay, I think Mark was persuasive but I think he had a number of challenges that when we pitches that we don’t actually have. When we go into a room by-and-large we are generally unknown so it’s a clean slate, when he goes in every single person that was in the Senate room had a perception of Mark already.

Andrew: “Right, so he had to overcome that preconception?

Matt: “You know most of the preconception, preconceived ideas about Mark are negative, he’s unlikable right. Being unlikable certainly effects your ability to persuade and there’s a number of reasons for that. A lot of people focus on the fact that he’s quite robotic in his delivery, without showing any real passion. But, that doesn’t hold true when you actually compare it to a number the other contemporaries that work in tech, they also have a fairly stilted delivery. The difference with Mark is that there’s no congruence between the words that come out of his mouth, body language and his delivery.

Andrew: “Okay, but there is one question which I think is pretty telling and it’s a good question, about him staying in a hotel.

Senator: “Thank you very much Mr Chairman, Mr Zuckerberg would you be comfortable sharing with us the name of the hotel you stayed in last night? 

Zuckerberg: “No.

Senator: :If you messaged anybody this week would you share with us the names of the people you’ve messaged?

Zuckerberg: “Senator no I would probably not choose to do that publicly here.

Senator: “I think that maybe what this is all about.

Andrew: “Often to make yourself likeable you can crack a joke. If you’re humorous what it shows is you’re in command then you’re in control and I don’t think any time did Mark comes across as particularly a man with a sense of humour.

Matt: “Sure. I think it’s a it’s a lever that he can’t pull because if he shows some humour it diminishes the rest of what he has to say and it belittles the seriousness of the situation. He really does need to impress on them the seriousness that he takes that and what he’s actually going to do about it.

Senator: “Well if so how do you sustain a business model in which users don’t pay for your service? S

Zuckerberg: “Senator we run ads…

Andrew: “Matt, credibility is important. We need credibility for the pitch, doesn’t matter what we say if people don’t believe us they will ignore or discount what we say. Just like with the boy that cried wolf he says the same thing so many times that actually when there is a wolf people do not believe him and he gets eaten by a big wolf. So question is: was Mark Zuckerberg a credible person and before you answer that question I’ll tell you what I think are his problems. His problems are this:

Here he is a man in charge of a hugely influential organisation, is he in touch with reality or has he lost the plot? Did he come across as credible Matt?

Matt: “I think there’s two parts of this question. Credibility for him coming from being a billionaire and being a founder and establishing sort of a massive company gives it an awful lot of credibility.

The challenge that he has is that he’s renowned for being a disrupter and for breaking things. Now what he has to actually do here is he actually persuade the Senators that he is a responsible custodian of people’s data.

Andrew: “Previously you comply or die, so now he is a comply or die guy, previously maker and breaker.

Matt: “And you can see in the in the clip where he talks about the changing in the motto from being one of ‘look we break things’ to ‘we are now compliant’.

Senator: “I know up until the mantra or motto of Facebook was ‘move fast and break things’ is that correct?

Zuckerberg: “I don’t know when we changed it but the mantra is currently ‘move fast with stable infrastructure’. Which is a much less sexy mantra…

Andrew: “So one of the other things you to do about your credibility is your appearance. I was talking earlier all about the age what does he do to try and show that in actual fact he is a man of authority a credible individual?

Matt: “I have never seen Mark Zuckerberg in a suit before. He is somebody that wears t-shirt and jeans and whilst Facebook has grown and all the stories are positive the market and the government are embracing of that. Here is a change, it’s all over once things start to come into crisis mode. They’re now looking for somebody with all authority that can come in and actually demonstrate that he can actually affect change.

Andrew: “Okay so he wears this suit so that’s a positive thing.

Matt: “Yeah, sure. A suit in this environment is like a uniform, it gives the authority and also it actually makes him more akin to who he’s addressing, people in their sixties. Yeah, wear the suit absolutely and it makes them conform to their expectations as to what they expect from a CEO.

Andrew: “Yeah, okay. He’s wearing a suit, on that point he wears a good suit in the sense that he’s wearing block colours: no different patterns, no flakes, all just one colour. Each item one colour, one colour tie, one colour shirt, one colour jacket which I like. And he wears a white shirt. A white shirt particularly is a clever move because it suggests that you’re fresh, new and innocent and telling the truth.

Andrew: “So what else is there about his appearance?

Matt: “One of my favourite parts of the Senate hearing is this cushion that he sits on.

Andrew: “Matt, finally overall was Mark Zuckerberg a persuasive speaker when he was in front of these Senators yay or nay, do we like or not him?

Matt: “I think I think he did an awesome job. With the skills that he’s been given.

Andrew: “So do we like or dislike?

Matt: “I give it a like.

Andrew: “It’s a like Mark.

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Tay and Val are two spiritual consultants. They help some of the most powerful people become the best version of themselves: “You’ll meet the hidden story you have been telling yourself for many, many years. (Hint: this story is so powerful, it’s running your business right now.) Most importantly, you’ll swap out the old story and old agreements for ones with more horsepower​. Yes!

So when you come back up to the ground level of strategy and action, you’ll find yourself totally aligned with your most powerful​, most knowing​, and wisest ​self, with your proverbial runway cleared for takeoff.”

In this video we discuss how Yay & Val help people move forward in their live. They reveal some of their hacks to quickly onboard their clients – aromatherapy being one of them.

Insights include how to think about pitching in front of hundreds and thousands of people and possibly the best narrative I’ve heard for a long time.

This is a video for the incurably curious.

The post Spiritual Persuasion: Tay & Val Interview appeared first on Andrew Tollinton.

All people that are successful at pitching have one superpower. I’m not talking about the kind of superpower that Superman has where he can fly and beam lasers from his eyes. Or the Hulk being muscular or Spiderman, with his webs coming out of his wrists. Or Wonder Woman with her blasts from her wrists. No, this is a very terrestrial normal human power that we all have to a lesser or greater degree and all great pitching princes and pitching princesses have it fully developed. And you too can develop this superpower but what is it?

What then is this pitching superpower? It is empathy or being empathetic. Not pathetic, empathetic. How do we get empathy and why do we want it? Empathy is important if we are going to appreciate how others think and feel. Whenever we pitch to an audience we should always adjust our pitch to take into account exactly how they see the world. There are two ways of looking at empathy.

If you think this is an agonizing, excruciating post and you can’t wait for it to finish you might be right now crying. In which case I am able to well up a lot of tears that come pouring down my cheeks – that’s one way of having empathy.

Another way is to be able to view the world through the same lens as others. Perhaps I see the world as really positive but my audience are  negative. I’m able to lift myself up and view the world through their lens and then accordingly change my pitch.

Now pitching with empathy is really important but not everybody wants to have empathy.

Indeed not everybody can have it. People that are autistic are often said to have very low levels of empathy and unable to develop empathy. Surgeons and doctors, people that do things which potentially could compromise them if they feel what they’re doing, they don’t want empathy. Often if you speak to a surgeon or doctor they might seem somewhat off hand at times. That’s often because they try and reduce down their empathy so that their judgment and their decision making is not clouded by the way that their patients feel. But for us in pitching we need empathy.

How do we develop empathy? There’s a couple of things that Jonathan Marshall the psychologist said to me are good ways of developing empathy.

Instead of thinking about how we feel about other people or other people’s feelings we must first get in contact with our own feelings. In other words right now how do I feel? My hands on this table, it is real wood, it’s not too cold. My feet are on the floor but then actually when I start to think about me how do I feel right now? I have a bright light shining into my face that’s kind of making things a bit difficult for me. Really I want to get through this process as quickly as possible because I have a life to lead but nonetheless I think it’s important to shoot make these posts. So these are my feelings right now.

Jonathan suggests that as soon as we get down how we feel will get better at feeling how other people feel. The other way that he describes we can develop a sense of empathy is by talking to others about how they view us. For example, I always think that I am viewed as ABC but actually if I go and ask other people I know that some people do not see me as ABC. They see me as XYZ. Some people see me not at all in the way that I want to be seen. I want to be seen as a sexy, in demand, highly successful, likeable, extremely funny, always levelheaded, gregarious guy, but that’s not how everyone sees me it’s sad to say.

How do I go about developing my own levels of empathy?

I go and I talk to other people about their views of me sometimes. I’m trying to get in contact more with my own feelings.

One other way I develop a higher level of empathy is to burst my bubble of friends and colleagues and just go and talk to completely random strangers.

Things like Meetups are great for that. You enter a room, you go to a place, you meet people who you really genuinely would not meet otherwise. Also try and do things that you don’t like doing. That will help you grow as a person but it means perhaps you’ll come across people that you would otherwise never do. 

Recently I went and did an improvisation course and suddenly I was surrounded by lots of actors and I found that all very strange. I’ve met some comedians too and suddenly I started to appreciate the world perhaps a little bit more through their lenses. If I ever come to pitch to people that are actors or thespians perhaps I’ll have a say higher level of empathy.

In conclusion, our pitching superpower is empathy. I would hope that you’re being empathetic with me and you are reading this post and you’re thinking to yourself ‘this is wonderful’. If you think it it’s wonderful show me your high degree of empathy, ‘like me’. Write comments about me, positive please. Be genuinely generous and warm towards me. Show me your empathy and I’ll show you mine back.

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