Stage vs Solo Pitches

This last week, I started some work coaching a person on their sales presentations. Although they are not a person seeking funding for their startup, the reality is that I have advised Founders previously about the different roles of pitches from the stage and pitches with individual investors.

What I refer to as Stage pitches and Solo pitches.

So today, I want to go through what I see as the role of each of these types of pitches, and I will spend some time looking at giving a Solo pitch to an individual investor (I will continue to refer to this as the audience).

I will focus on the Solo pitch today because I have written a lot about Stage pitches but have yet to write much on Solo pitches.

The different roles

Both Stage and Solo pitches fulfil a specific role. This is important because, as I have said many times, the first step of any presentation is to determine your objectives, done in the Clarity stage of the Pitching Pyramid.

The role of the Stage pitch is to put your best foot forward, introduce yourself to the audience and invite them (explicitly or implicitly) to connect with you for more information. I have sometimes referred to this as the ‘tease’. You want to pique their interest, get them excited, and show them a path they never considered.

In the Stage pitch, you don’t usually want to get into the weeds of how things work and all the various options available. Think of it as the first date. You and your audience are getting to know each other. Going into too much detail about some of your habits on a first date may be off-putting!

In contrast, your Solo pitches will be like subsequent dates once you have ‘started dating’. This is where you get a little deeper. And it is the first real chance for you to get information about the other party. In the Stage Pitch, information was pretty much one-way. Your first objective in a Solo pitch is to elicit as much information from your audience as possible.

Also, there is often more than one Solo pitch. Each will have a slightly different objective, with the final Solo pitch aiming to ‘closing’ - asking for the investment or the sale.

For example, the first Solo pitch might talk about how you may be able to help but focus primarily on getting information from the prospect. The second Solo pitch may be to present a custom solution and set up a trial and feedback process. The third may be to get a contract signed.

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I frequently tell start-up founders that expecting to give a pitch from the stage and getting lots of investors to write cheques is a fantasy. There will always be a follow-up before getting to the close.

Stage pitch prepares for Solo pitch

Although the Solo pitch is quite different from the Stage pitch, the work put into preparing for your Stage pitch is invaluable for the Solo pitch. If the Stage pitch can be likened to a TEDx talk, then the Solo pitch is more like an Improv show.

Structure vs Response

Whereas the Stage pitch relies on the structure to get the message across with the most clarity to the broadest group of people, Solo pitches rely on your ability to listen and adapt what you are saying in response to what the audience is telling you.

A couple of years ago, I took some Improv classes with the very talented Jim Fishwick, who has, unfortunately for me, moved to Australia. My last class culminated in a stage show. Over several months with Jim, I learned many of the fundamentals of improvisation.

The hardest thing for me was to learn to truly listen to the others I am sharing the scene with and avoid following my agenda or preconception of where the scene should go. This is precisely the problem many of us have with Solo pitches. We know how we expect the conversation to go and push along that course like a train on rails, regardless of the audience’s input.

This railroading is understandable and even inevitable from the stage, where information is mainly one-way. But if you treat your Solo pitch in the same way as a Stage pitch, you will find yourself with many responses: “Well, that sounds interesting; we’ll get back to you.”

I recommend the book Ditch the Pitch by Steve Yastrow, which looks at using Improv performance skills in persuasive conversations. While ultimately, Steve suggests that you never use the same sentence twice with different clients, it is far more realistic, at least initially, to use the chunks you have developed for your Stage pitch in your Solo pitches. Chunks is a highly technical term ?? I have used over the years to describe pieces of content you use and reuse. A chunk may be a response to an FAQ, or an anecdote, or how you describe a process or feature.

Improv is not the same as winging it

I feel I need to make this note. Using the tools of Improvisation is different from winging it. You still need to go through the stages of the Pitching Pyramid. You want clarity around your objectives, and you want to understand your audience, be clear on the journey you are taking them on and what your Call to Action will be for this conversation.

In addition, a competent presenter will be familiar with the tools and techniques that they may employ in the pitch. Some of these are the Improv tools Steve mentions in his book.

In addition, you must be prepared in your knowledge about all the relevant information about your business, industry and the market you are discussing.

Seek input

Confident in your subject knowledge, your primary focus throughout the Solo pitch is to seek input. You may have a structure for your pitch, but you should be able to adapt this structure to the information you get from your audience.

A vital element of this input is accepting it as truth. Often when a potential client tells us something we don’t agree with or believe, we immediately move into an argumentative mode. We feel the need to explain why they are wrong or have been misled. This is always counter-productive. Instead, we must accept this as the truth for our audience and adapt our approach to this reality.

In an Improv scene, we create a scene with partners from a few prompts. The scene is built from the inputs that each of the performers on the stage introduces. Each performer is building the story of the scene in their mind. But at any moment, the input from another performer requires all the performers to re-write the story in their minds.

So if the scene is centred around a lazy teenager who won’t get out of bed, one performer says, “It’s worse than that, he’s dead, Jim.” All performers need to take that on board as the new reality of the scene, or the scene dies. The worst thing a performer can say at that point is, “No, he’s not!”

Similarly, if your Solo pitch audience raises an objection or information you don’t believe is correct, denying or ignoring it kills the conversation. You must elicit information from your audience and adapt your talk to the information you receive.

Yes, and…

In Improv, this is conveyed in the axiom “Yes, and…” Which means that whatever we are presented with, we accept and use to springboard forward.

So when you hear that objection about how good the established competitor is, instead of arguing, you might say something like. “Yes, they have done extraordinarily well, proving the market exists. And you have to hand it to them for achieving all that with the relatively primitive tools they had to build their solution.”

This keeps the conversation going and introduces areas that can be discussed. Whereas a confrontational approach would shut down the audience, and they would stop giving feedback.

Effectively utilising this Yes, and… approach depends on your ability to adopt a different attitude towards the ideal or perfection. For most of us, we want to have the perfect response. But in Improv, we have the attitude that instead of each response needing to be perfect, each answer is a bridge towards perfection.

The philosophy is to trust that we will get to the ideal outcome, and our route is over a series of interactive bridges, and we need only navigate each bridge as best we can.

Conclusion

Pitching is a process. Don’t expect one pitch to do the whole thing; that really only happens at a tradeshow with a product like ShamWow. In reality, you will need to give a series of pitches, each with slightly different, focused objectives.

Most pitch sequences will start with a Stage pitch, a one-to-many presentation designed to get prospects to raise their hand for more information. Then it will usually move to a series of Solo pitches, one-to-one presentations designed to elicit information from the prospect and move them towards the close.

Note: I term a Solo pitch as a one-to-one presentation, even though several people from the prospect company may be in the room. It is still all about that one company.

This was originally published in the newsletter on 25th June. To get more like this, subscribe to The Compelling Communicator, a free weekly newsletter. https://compellingcommunicator.beehiiv.com/