Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method For Presenting, Persuading, And Winning The Deal Quotes
"There is a fundamental disconnect between the way we pitch anything and the way it is received by our audience."
"Our most important messages have a surprisingly low chance of getting through."
"You need to understand why this disconnect occurs in order to overcome it, succeed, and profit."
"Pitching is one of those business skills that depends heavily on the method you use and not how hard you try."
"The difference isn’t luck. It is not a special gift. And I have no background in sales. What I do have is a good method."
"The better you are at advocating your position, the more successful you will be."
"When frames come together, the first thing they do is collide. And this isn’t a friendly competition—it’s a death match."
"The brain is a cognitive miser. Unless it can get value for itself, it stops paying attention."
"If you think you can browbeat your target until finally he relents, you have it backwards."
"Successful prizing results in your target chasing you, asking to be involved in your deal."
"Successful prizing restores calm and poise to the social interaction."
"The prize frame is the window through which you look at the world that allows you to see yourself as the prize."
"We chase that which moves away from us."
"Money is never a prize; it’s a commodity, a means for getting things done."
"Make the buyer qualify himself back to you."
"You don’t earn status by being polite, by obeying the established power rituals of business."
"The harder you try to fit into this social scene, the lower your perceived social value becomes."
"No one likes being made an outsider, especially when there are guests to impress."
"Your brain is stimulated by surprise because our world is fundamentally unpredictable."
"What really counts is having someone in charge who has passion and experience and integrity."
"If you’re describing relationships between people, you can provide plenty of detail."
"When you are the high-status person in a social interaction, you get all the good stuff."
"In social interactions and business meetings as in nature, those who hold the dominant alpha rank are able to accomplish more than those holding a lesser rank."
"If you think you’ll start a meeting from the beta position, always be on time for the appointment."
"There is nothing as attractive as someone who is enjoying what he or she does."
"Attention will be given when information novelty is high and will drift away when information novelty is low."
"People enjoy some intermediate level of intellectual complexity."
"Curiosity is the croc brain becoming interested—feeling like it’s safe to learn more."
"In a pitch, time and attention are not infinite."
"Your brain grows accustomed to things that are not changing, and they effectively vanish."
"Without both, Dennis, the avocado farmer, loses $640,000; Jaws becomes one of the worst movies of all time."
"It’s a survival mechanism, the other person’s brain is making it a priority to understand where you fit in the social structure."
"Conflict is the basis of interesting human connections."
"As businesspeople, we come together to find solutions to problems—not to admire problems that have already been solved for us."
"A pitch narrative can be thought of as a series of tension loops. Push then pull. Create tension. Then resolve it."
"When there’s no tension between you and the target, there’s no interest in what happens."
"The greatest problem in short-form pitching is deciding what details and specifics to single out for attention—what to leave in and what to leave out."
"Actually delivering the core of the pitch is very straightforward stuff."
"Before you decide to spend too much time on this part of the presentation, remember that the following items are a simple punchlist of issues that most pitches have to cover."
"Recognize that you can be incredible at turning a business plan into an executive summary or any other kind of elevator pitch and still have that pitch fail miserably."
"When it comes to a choice of what to focus on when pitching the plan that will make the big idea work, I would start by presenting the budget because most people screw this up."
"Unrealistic budgets and miscalculating costs are the greatest risks to a growing company, especially startups."
"In every social situation, there are basic, human, hardwired functions."
"Sometimes deals are done strictly on numbers—but not this time. This time, it was about people."
"Eliminate your desires. It’s not necessary to want things. Sometimes you have to let them come to you."
"If the shark in Jaws has a GPS beacon on it, and you know where it is all the time, then there’s no drama, and the story is not interesting."
"What worked for me were the three rules of eradicating neediness."
"This deal was about building a legacy from a piece of American history."
"You can’t just pull value out of a community. You have to put value back in."
"How do you spend weeks or months working on a big presentation and not be anxious about it?"
"We are deciding in this room, 50 miles away from the site, what will be done with 1,000 acres of land in the middle of a community."
"The only thing worse than an idea you hate is an idea you just ‘like’."