Pitching for the business is quite different to selling to a client representative we may be meeting in a meeting room. In the latter case, we have only one or sometimes two people to persuade, but in a pitch it could be department representatives from many parts of the firm. The worst possible pitch environment is when on this occasion you have had no chance to meet the client beforehand to understand their situation, aspirations, issues and problems. Hopefully the pitch would be after you have had a chance to consider all of their requirements and instead of just sending in a proposal, they ask you to deliver it to the key people in the firm. There should be no reason why you cannot meet with some members of their team beforehand, but let’s assume that worst case is the scenario.
Even though we may not be able to meet before the pitch, we can still do research. Often we have other clients in the same industry, so we will have some broad ideas about the current issues facing similar firms. Even if we don’t have such clients, we may know someone working in the industry or we can find access to someone to find out more about what is going on at the moment. Additionally, we can do a literature search on media reporting on the company in question and on the industry in general. There may be stock analysts who follow the industry, who for a fee, will provide us with their findings on what is going on. Through LinkedIn, we might be able to connect with a senior person who has left the firm recently, who may be willing to provide some broad insights. We shouldn’t expect to get all of the company’s dark and dirty secrets, but they may be happy to share in broad brush terms.
ChatGPT is a bit useless as a research tool for current information. For example, when I asked about the current state of the 5 Star Hotel industry in Tokyo, I get this answer: “I’m unable to provide real-time or the most up-to date information as my knowledge cut-off date is September 2021”. In Tokyo 5 Star Hotel terms, September 2021 is like a hundred years ago in terms of vacancies and losses in revenues thanks to the pandemic. Today they are doing a booming business, as foreign tourists flood in to enjoy a very cheap yen environment.
Anyway, back to the pitch question. We may not have been given direct access to company staff, but we can still try and do a matching process between what we offer and what we believe would be of most value to the firm. As we don’t exactly know what is ailing them at the moment, we need to offer up a few alternatives, on the basis that if we just burst into action on one and it isn't resonating, we will be out the door in short order. So we draft up a few scenarios which we think could be reasonable cases for seeking our help with finding solutions to their problems.
There is no point starting with the weakest case and moving to the strongest. Everyone has limited time, patience and availability to listen to us, so we have to go in hard with the best case we can come up with. When we are delivering this first case, we will be able to tell by the reactions whether we are on track or not. This is not a perfect angle though. There is also the issue that different departments have different interests and they may respond variously depending on what strikes a chord with them. If we are striking a chord with no one at all, then we better move on to case number two and keep going.
There will be senior people in the room and the rookie mistake is to only talk to them. Often the President is there, but he or she is not a sole decision-maker. The top executives may only look at the possibility of working with you, after those lower down the totem pole have worked on the due diligence.
I have made this mistake, imagining that if I could win over the President, then the orders to work with me would rain down on the rest of the crew. I remember sitting in the President’s office as he got very excited about all the wonderful things I was telling him about our training. He jumped on the phone and called the heads of the HR team to drop everything and come to his office immediately, to meet me and hear what I had to say. I was getting very positive about the direction this sales call was going. These two HR guys turned up and did a lot of nodding in front of the President. When I left I said I would contact them to have a further meeting to go through the detail. I am still waiting for a reply to all of my follow-up emails to these two guys. I presume they didn’t like him getting involved in their world and so did nothing, despite the President’s excitement.
So when we present our pitch, we should assume everyone will be involved at some point in the decision. This includes those junior people who will do the due diligence, to those who will shepherd the idea through the labyrinth inside the firm, up to the senior executives who will approve the consensus decision. That means we work on everyone in the room and don’t just look at the President the whole time and ignore everyone else. The other people we shouldn’t favour with our exclusive attention are the English speakers, if we are doing this pitch in English. Often they have no decision-maker power within the hierarchy and are treated like language technicians.
If we got close to the mark on what they are needing, we can hope that there will be some clarifying questions after our pitch, which will give us a better idea of what they need. We should also be looking to find key people in the room, with whom we can have a follow-up meeting, to try and get some feedback on whether we need to change the angle of our solution or whether our solution is relevant or not.
This type of pitching is clearly the most challenging, but if we do our research and if we bring multiple angles to the pitch, we may be able to break through the wall of silence they have thrown up. Not every company wants to open the kimono to total strangers, with whom they have no existing relationship or with whom they are yet to build any trust. If we keep that in mind, we will do a better job of pitching to the potential client.
