Why is the pitch so important?
Think about the last time someone said to you, “Tell me about yourself.” Did you have a good answer for them? Like a really good answer. It’s such a seemingly benign question and yet it’s so loaded. How do you make a great first impression? When someone says tell me about yourself and you think “Okay I’ll start at the very beginning, “let me walk you through my long and impressive resume.” No one wants to hear about your resume and no one has time for a long monologue about who you are and where you’ve been. The answer to the question “Tell me about yourself” is the strategy I’m going to teach you today. Which is all about leading with your destination and where you’re going next with your career.
What is the goal of the pitch?
The goal is to help me get where?
It’s actually not to get hired. It’s not to close that next round of funding. It’s not to land that new client. (chuckling) It’s actually not. The goal of the pitch is simply to get yourself to a second conversation. The chances of you closing a deal or landing a huge new business opportunity in that first conversation is slim to none. What is really possible is you getting a second conversation with me. That’s the goal of your pitch. It’s to get me engaged. It’s to turn a monologue, where you’re just spewing out information about yourself, into a dialogue, where you and I are gonna engage. Where there’s gonna be back and forth, give and take. Where I’m gonna ask you questions. Where I’m gonna wanna learn more. Where you’re gonna just give me enough to get me interested and intrigued, and then I’m gonna be asking to engage with you further. That’s the goal of your pitch. Keep your sights set on that so that you have the next conversation, and you will be totally successful.
Framework overview
How did it distill into this kind of framework for you? Was there a moment that you came up with, oh, it’s actually just this easy, or.
Well, I. Being a perennial career-switcher, I went from Peace Corps to Goldman Sachs. I went from the EPA to ExxonMobil. I knew I was never gonna get my next job talking about what I had just been doing. No one cared. I had to talk about what I wanted to do next and why I was the absolute right person to do it. That’s how I was able to convince people to take a chance on me.
Here’s what you’re gonna do.
Every single conversation, you’re gonna lead with your punchline. You’re gonna start with your destination, you are gonna look forward, where are you going next? What are you excited about? Then you go to your backstory, and then you bring it all together and you connect the dots. And the beauty of this strategy is that you don’t have to memorize anything. You don’t have to know your 30-second pitch.
You have to know three things.
- know your destination,
- know your backstory, and
- know how to connect the dots.
And you have all of those in your pocket, and then you pull each one out as necessary. It’s a dialog, it’s a back and forth, there’s no memorization.
Lead with your destination
The most important piece of your pitch is your destination.
Unfortunately, it’s also the hardest.
- The biggest challenge is that we often don’t know where we’re going next, what we want to do, why we’re having this conversation.
- The destination is so critical. You have to ask yourself with every conversation, why am I here?
- What am I trying to accomplish?
- Why do I really want to work as a product developer for Dropbox?
If you don’t have a good answer to that question, there’s no way you’re gonna make a good impression.
If you don’t have a good reason why I would want to come work for you as a client, you’re not gonna get my business.
The destination is the hardest thing.
The questions you have to ask yourself are,
- What am I excited about right now?
- What do I want to do next with my career?
- What am I trying to achieve in this meeting or this conversation today?
You have to answer that question for me first and foremost, because if you don’t, I’m not gonna be interested in the conversation and I’m not gonna stick around for the second conversation.
Let me tell you about Alexi. He meets a woman from Fidelity and he starts a conversation with her and tells her about himself. Hi, so nice to meet you. I’m Alexi. I started my career in marketing, spent a few years doing that. Had a really neat opportunity to join a startup in the Midwest and while I was doing that I wound up managing my own money and now I’m thinking that actually that’s what I’d like to do. Nothing happened.
And then I met Alexi and I said listen, here’s the deal. If you start by telling me that you’ve spent three years in marketing and then you became an entrepreneur and then you decided you liked managing your money, I’m not that interested.
But if you start the conversation like this:
Hi, it’s really nice to meet you. I’ve been managing my own money for the past two years. I’ve had amazing returns and I want to go into investment management.
I might say, oh, good for you, we should talk. What did you do before?
Well actually, I was working in marketing and then I went to a startup, but my real passion is finance and analytics and I think I would be a great candidate for this rotational program you have in asset management.
Is Alexi getting an interview now? He sure is, and he did.
The destination is like the foundation of the pitch, right? Like, you have to lay a good foundation.
The thing I always say that the reason you don’t sort of get hired for a job is not because you’re not qualified, it’s because I don’t believe your story.
- Take a moment to ask yourself the question, what’s the goal of this conversation?
- What’s the outcome I’m trying to achieve?
Before I get on any client call, for real, I stop and ask myself,
- What’s the goal?
- What’s today’s punchline?
- What’s my destination for this specific conversation?
And if it’s not entirely, 100% obvious to you what your destination is, then you should press pause. Right now, take two minutes, three minutes. Get out a pen and paper and write down what’s your destination. ‘Cause this is the hardest part of the whole pitch. But if you don’t have it, the whole pitch unravels.
Explain your backstory
Your backstory, arguably the easiest piece of this puzzle. You can talk about yourself, right? You know what you’ve done, you know where you’ve gone to school, it’s really easy to talk about your resume.
Although, I don’t care about your resume and I don’t wanna hear your resume in reverse chronological order. So here’s what you do instead.
When you’re talking about your background, you’re gonna create a backstory.
What’s the difference between a backstory and a background? It’s that you’re the author. You get to pick and choose what you wanna tell me.
When I meet people today, I don’t talk about the fact that I was a White House intern, or that I was at the EPA. I talk about the fact that I’m an author, that I write for Harvard Business Review, that I film courses for LinkedIn Learning, and that I teach communication skills. You get to pick and choose what to include.
So what should you include? You’ve two things to choose from.
- You can either talk about relevant experience.
If you have relevant experience, then bring it to the table, best case scenario. If you’ve worked in consumer retail for three years, if you’ve launched a new product, if you’ve done digital marketing, tell me about it, that’s amazing. - You can talk about transferrable skills.
If you don’t have relevant experience, there’s another thing you can sell yourself on, and that’s transferrable skills. Are you a big picture thinker? Are you great in the weeds? Are you really calm, cool, and collected under pressure? Are you great at juggling multiple ball in the air? Are you really agile? Are you a quick learner? What is it that you bring to the table? You can always, and frankly should, talk about your transferable skills.
I have a client, she’s a management consultant and she has spent her time in consumer retail. And she’s not so interested in working with consumer retail companies anymore, so really wants to focus on digital technologies and cloud computing. And so we were having this conversation and she was talking about, well, how do I make that shift? And I said, well, you talk about it. When someone asks you what you do, you don’t tell them about the last three client engagements you’ve worked on, you talk about the fact that you are really excited about and passionate in digital technology and cloud computing, and that you see the wave of the future going in that direction. And you wanna be part of that change, working with companies who are taking their businesses online to the cloud. You sell yourself right there. Then, when they ask you about your experience, you can say, well, actually I’ve spent a lot of time in the luxury retail space, but the truth is we’re seeing it across industries, across roles, and this is why I’m the right person to help you take your business to next level. People believe her. It’s a compelling story. It’s not what’s recent that matters, it’s what relevant.
Connect the dots
The way you connect the dots is you talk about how everything fits together, what you’ve done in the past, what you’re driving to do in the future, and how it all comes together.
The surprising truth is the reason you don’t land your pitch in a way that’s effective, the reason you don’t raise that money or get that next call with a potential client, or land the job, is not because you don’t have the skills. You are talented, you are qualified, you have great experiences.
The truth is so does everyone else, so you’ve gotta set yourself apart.
The reason you don’t get hired, the reason you don’t close that deal is not because you don’t have the skills. It’s because I don’t believe your story. You have not convinced me about your destination. You have not connected the dots for me.
You haven’t made me give you the benefit of the doubt, where you’re doing something new, or different, or challenging, and I say okay I’m on board, I get it, I’m with you.
Instead, I have a lingering doubt, and I think mm, not sure, not you’re the right person that I want to jump into this new business venture with.
When I was interviewing for jobs on Wall Street, I made it to final round interviews with Goldman Sachs. I was pretty excited. I went down for a final day, where I had 10 two-on-one interviews with investment bankers, right, a grueling day, and I actually loved it, I had a great time. And at the end of the day, I got home that night, I was living in Ithaca, New York, and I got a phone call from a woman named Elizabeth Miley. And Elizabeth said to me Jodi, thank you so much for coming in today, it was great having you. Everyone really liked you.
Let me tell you what happened. She said we interviewed 10 people today. We dinged eight of them, we gave one offer, and then there’s you. And I’m thinking okay, this doesn’t sound very good. And she said here’s the deal. Everyone really liked you, Jodi, but they weren’t sure you wanted to be an investment banker. And I said of course I wanna be an investment banker, and I’m thinking in the back of my head I have no idea if I wanna be an investment banker.
So I said Elizabeth, there is nothing I want more than to work at Goldman Sachs and become an investment banker. She said okay, then let me ask you a question. Would you be willing to come down for a second final day, a second super day. And I said of course, I’d love to, I’d love to do 10 more two-on-one interviews. So I hung up the phone that day, and I called my dad. And I said Dad, you’re not gonna believe this. Goldman Sachs called. They said they interviewed 10 people, they dinged eight, they gave one offer, and there’s me, and they don’t know what to do with me because they’re not sure I wanna be an investment banker. And my dad said to me well good for Goldman, you don’t wanna be an investment banker.
And in that moment, I decided I was gonna go down there, and I was gonna get that damn job. I wanted to be an investment banker, but until I convinced myself, no one else was buying what I was selling. So I went down for my second day of final round interviews, and I got the job.
Next steps
Now that you’ve got the framework, now that you know you are gonna lead with your destination every single time, I have good news for you and I have bad news for you.
The good news is,
The great news frankly is that all this takes is practice. You can do this. You can nail your pitch. All it takes is practice. If you sit down and you think about
What is your destination?
What are you trying to achieve?
Where do you wanna go?
You can nail your pitch.
The bad news is
You might need more than one pitch. There is oftentimes not a situation where one pitch works for every conversation. Obviously, if you’re interviewing for a job, that’s a very different story than if you’re selling an executive on an initiative. If you’re trying to raise capital, that’s a different story than landing a new client. It takes work. You’ve gotta think about what is this conversation really trying to achieve? Who am I talking to? What does my audience care about? Maybe my destination is the same, but my backstory changes. With one person I’m talking to, I talk about a different part of my background than with another. If I’m talking to someone internal at my company, there may be a very different backstory than when I’m talking to an external stakeholder. So the great news is you can do this. It is 100% in your control to nail your pitch. The bad news is it’s gonna take some work on your part. And let me push you just a little bit further.
Next time you’re having a high-stakes conversation or even a not so high-stakes conversation, ask yourself the question, what’s my destination? Don’t make this just about the pitch. This is every client conversation. This is every customer interaction. This could be every personal conversation.
What is the destination? Ask yourself that question before you pick up the phone or go into someone’s office to have a chat.