3 Steps to a Better Pitch

I was terrified to pitch to my boss. I had recently moved into sales (or more accurately forced into sales), and the VP of sales wanted to see how I present. While I had spoken in front of audiences before, the stakes seemed much higher now with my employment potentially at risk.

Before the move to sales, I was a software engineer. I was comfortable talking about tech and how things worked. I even gave several training classes on the software my company sold. But now I had to present things like pain points, unique value propositions, and pricing.

We were not the most marketing savvy company, but we had our standard corporate deck that seemed good enough. I rehearsed a few dozen times attempting to remember all of the bullet points from each slide. When the day came, I gave my best effort and nailed the pitch in 30 minutes.

And the VP of Sales said straight to my face, “That was the worst pitch I have ever seen.”

The only thing I felt was me melting into a puddle in the front of the conference room. I just listened silently as he ripped me to shreds for several minutes. The only thing I remember him saying was I had the energy of a “dead fish”.

I did not get fired that day and over time I got much better at pitching in front of audiences. Whether it is corporate decks, product demos, or event presentations, I learned through lots of trial, error, and failure to be more confident and aware during my talks. But there was this one moment a few years after my epic disaster in front of my boss when I finally learn the art of the pitch.

My company was in a bake-off with two of our most fierce competitors at the time to win the business of a leading global corporate bank. That meant 14 days to configure five in-depth scenarios and then 60 minutes to pitch in front of 85 of the bank’s managing directors from every business unit. Only problem was one of the leads on the account had to take medical leave two weeks before the pitch date.

My manager pointed to me and said lead the charge. I looked over the scenarios and realized right away we were in trouble. The scenarios required a clear understanding of corporate banking processes. Many of the scenarios required product features that were not yet available in our platform. And given the work required to create a customer demo, we absolutely did not have enough hands-on deck.

We would not win on technical merit. We had no chance if we simply rolled out our standard demo. I knew that if we were going to win, we needed to convince the bank that we deeply understood the banking industry, how they operated, and how our solution aligned with their specific needs and processes.

I assembled the team, called in favors from the product group, booked our war room, and laid out our plan of attack. Two whole days were spent just aligning scenarios to product and features to identify gaps. The product folks went back to build workarounds for missing functionality while I led our team to configure a fully customized demo, with new user flows, demo data, automated workflows, and dashboards. All throughout there were arguments, coffee runs, stress, and a few all-nighters.

Demo day arrived and despite the exhaustion, we marched into the bank’s auditorium with high hopes. Though nervous, we felt going in that we had put our best effort into building the demo. Each of us took part in walking through the scenarios, all the while telling the story as a day in the life of a banker. We sprinkled in a few jokes. We dropped big banking names. We definitely overacted our parts, but showed enthusiasm. When we wrapped up with our closing slide and thank you to the audience, the most surprising thing happened. They all clapped. The entire room of 85 bankers actually clapped!

I watch a ton of startup pitches in my role at AWS. Sometimes it is as a judge for a pitch contest or demo day. Sometimes it is from startups that ask me for help with their pitch. The biggest issue I come across are pitches that suffer from the “dead fish” syndrome.

As startup founders, we have this insatiable urge to talk about product. The result are pitches that are all facts and figures to try to convince customers, investors, partners, and employees how cool their solutions are. The problem is that human brains are not wired for receiving and remembering data in the way we expect them to.

As Daniel Kahneman explains in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, the human mind is setup to process information in two ways. The first way is fast and automatic for quick decision making based on prior patterns and experiences. The second way is slow and deliberate for complex problem-solving and analytical tasks that require more effort. These are respectively called System 1 (intuitive thought) and System 2 (logical thought).

What this means is that we are pitching System 2 information to audiences in System 1 frame of mind. We need to instead think about a pitch not from the product point of view, but from an attention point of view. The best way to get attention is to tell a story as I shared in a previous post:

“Research suggest that facts are 20 times more likely to be remembered when delivered in a story.”

How to do that though is where most founders get stuck. Based on hundreds of pitches I have given and observed, I have found the three most critical elements of effective pitches relevant for founders.

Create Drama – This is the one time you actually want drama in your startup! As it relates to pitching, your story has to be dynamic and create tension. That is what hooks an audience. You can do this by creating contrasts such as a battle between a hero and a villain, a prediction of a seismic shift in the future, or a personal reflection of triumph against the odds. When you introduce conflict or change into your pitch this automatically triggers the System 1 part of our brains and draws in audiences to engage your talk.

For example, I used this slide to describe my own startup journey and the feelings that we felt after exiting the business as a set up for a longer talk about how startups are thriving in this post-funding winter.

Engage Visually – Stop with the bland presentation formats! This is an opportunity to be creative and put your uniqueness on display. Most pitches are supported by slides with lots of words that merely mimic what the speaker is saying behind a bland corporate-looking template. Instead use this real estate to support your talking points with photos and images that help paint the story you are telling. Facts and figures will often be forgotten, but our minds much more easily recall the visual elements of a pitch. Even when you have to present something technical or with lots of words, you can arrange information on a slide in unique way to make the idea stand out.

I gave this talk about how to launch a technical community and used this image of devices being networked to explain the idea of how more people in a community creates exponential value.

Don’t Be Boring – The thing about dead fish is they don’t dance! What I mean is that you need to be emotionally engaging. Long after your talk, the data you shared and words you spoke will have less impact, but your audience will remember the feeling they left with. That was the problem with the pitch I gave to my sales boss years ago, I was reading words from a screen. You need to bring more passion into your delivery through your body language, inflections in your tone, speed of your speaking, making eye contact, strategically using pauses, and conveying the passion you feel for your startup.

This was a photo from a presentation on startups and the use of Generative AI, and I use slides like the one behind me to create an emotional connection to inspire the audience in their own journey.

Using these three concepts as the foundation for any pitch you create and present will significantly raise the impact of your pitch. I also recommend reading the “Better Storytelling for Startup Founders” post for ten specific pointers to elevate your storytelling, whether to investors, customers, or employees.

Good luck with your pitching and if you need another pair of eyes and ears to help you hone your pitch, feel free to reach out by sending a message over LinkedIn.

Mark

A recent Lex Friedman podcast with Pieter Levels went viral across Twitter last week with a few hot takes on building startups. For those that do not know Pieter Levels (@levelsio on Twitter), he is one of the biggest names in the indie maker community having built several successful products.

The one opinion that got the most attention was his belief that many of the newer developer platforms and frameworks are not necessary. Pieter is known for using basic languages and libraries like PHP and JQuery to build out his websites and hosting them directly on cloud services like AWS.

One of the recent trends in the developer ecosystem has been the creation of abstraction layers. These abstractions remove much of the complexity and time needed to build websites. Some of these include platforms like Vercel, Netlify, and Fly.io which can significantly speed up development. The downside is these platforms are higher cost than the Do-It-Yourself option.

Pieter’s opinion is that developers, particularly those earlier in their careers, are being lured into using these platforms because the ecosystem that incentivizes and prioritizes these platforms. That ecosystem includes VC’s that fund developer platforms, developer influencers that promote these tools, and indie maker communities that run towards the latest shiny new objects.

My take is that the growth of these tools has actually been positive for startups and indie makers. Tools that simplify the development and deployment of apps means non-technical entrepreneurs can get started on their own building MVP’s and experimenting in faster cycles. This is similar to how AWS helped startups remove all the time required previously in setting up racks of servers in data centers to even get started. With the birth of cloud computing, a lot more people could jump into startups and launch their ideas.

These platforms however are not for everyone and there are situations when it is best to build directly on the cloud. One common pattern I have seen is startups that launch on a platform, they begin to see traction, then the costs quickly accelerate. Also when you start to operate at scale, you need to be able to “get under the hood” to optimize performance and availability, which is harder to do when you are using a platform. Lastly, if you and / or your team are technical and proficient in the cloud, there may not be as great of an advantage to use these developer tools.

Let me know if there are tools that you have used to speed up your development. Did they work as promised, or were they not worth the cost and time to use?

I am back in NYC, the city I grew up in and call home! As I get back into the swing of things, if you are here in NYC and want to chat over the next few weeks about AI, cloud computing, or startups, I would be glad to meet in person.

One tip I would recommend for NY’ers and those visiting from out of town is to check out the ferries that travel around Manhattan. They are truly the best way to appreciate the grandeur of the city!

Any events you are planning to go over the next few weeks in NYC or elsewhere? Let me know and I look forward to hearing from you!