I was working with clients from a major UK insurance company last week.
They are intelligent technical experts working as high end internal consultants looking to deliver real, tangible results through, process, technology and operational improvement.
We were looking at the kinds of pitches that they do when asking for funds to deliver these amazing projects. They are often pitching to the Plc board for large piles of cash to fund complex and long-term initiatives.
I was trying to help them move away from presenting the complexity of the projects they were explaining, and towards demonstrating the results those projects would achieve- because they recognised that the technical difficulty of what the projects entailed were often too much for even very expert senior managers to ‘get’- and after much discussion, Peter came up with the following-
I guess what we’re really saying every time we go in front of them is, ‘you give us £6 million and we’ll give you back £12 million…’
And that was the moment when we all ‘got it’. Isn’t that what every ‘pitch’ is about. Bringing it back to this ‘give/get’ principle can really help to cut through the ‘how’ and focus on the ‘what’. We can give the audience all of the detail, if they want it, but the pitch should be focused on showing clearly the possibility and demonstrating the likelihood of success. Everything else is just ‘clutter’.
Thanks Pete.
