Online Pitching - Making the Invisible, Visible
In this week’s blog, Liz and Geoff look at how to make online pitches engaging, memorable and fun!
The front-line pitching folk have been telling us that pitching online has some unexpected upsides:
Zero travel means that people are more refreshed on the big day
Printed materials are now in the trash along with the drama of a last-minute courier
Online is also boosting confidence as many introverts are beginning to shine
The good news is that time and cost savings mean that you can do more pitches. But pitches are tough even in the real world, and the challenge of engagement online is even greater.
So…how do you give your clients a virtual experience to fire their imaginations, appeal to their creativity, and enable them to share your vision?
Design the Experience as well as the Content
As our friend at London Business School, Professor Ioannis Ioannou, says – ‘You need to become your own mini Steven Spielberg.’ Think about the pitch in terms of what the client will be seeing, doing, experiencing, through the screen. Make it interactive, make it visually stimulating. Ask yourselves again and again –What do we want them to see, feel, hear, experience, and to take away from this?
At Dramatic Resources, we have a weekly Zoom Jam where we experiment freely and share different exercises and approaches to virtual communication so that we can develop creative ways to engage our participants online.
Flex your Pitching Style
It’s up to you to guide your client’s imagination towards what’s possible; to enable them to picture the solution; to make the invisible visible. This means adapting your style and materials for an online pitch, rather than simply reproducing the approach you would use in the room.
As a recent example, we’ve been talking with one of our clients at Dramatic Resources about an online training solution. We realised quickly our client needed to be able to see and feel how the training would work online- so we adapted our pitching process to a series of online, interactive demonstrations to allow them to experience the approach first-hand.
Tell Stories and Make it Human
Now is the perfect time to use more narrative. Stories are magical, they capture the imagination of the audience and create emotional engagement. They turn a passive audience into an active one. Clients want to see more of you and less of your deck.
Your stories should be real, with sensory detail, challenges, problems, adversities – and, of course, solutions.
Stories don’t have to be epic. The journey you went on as a team to solve the client’s problem can be a story; a customer experience can be a story; the solution you found for another client can be a story. Practice together as a team telling mini, three- to five-minute, human stories. For more on small ways to use story, see Everyday Storytelling
Downsize the Deck
With face-to-face pitches, there is always the danger of overkill with slides, but in the online world, slides create additional problems. You, as speaker, become a small postage stamp in the corner of the screen – so it’s even harder to engage your audience. Try replacing some of your slides with a well-crafted story to illustrate the same point. In this way, you command the screen whilst drawing the viewers into your chosen narrative.
Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehearse!
Preparation is paramount. When you try something out on Zoom, or whatever platform you are using, problems sometimes arise that you hadn’t anticipated, so always find time to practice in advance with a safe audience, not alone. It’s also by rehearsing together that you make discoveries about what works – and crucially – what doesn’t!
Rehearsal should be a creative and enjoyable process. View it as design-thinking in action; a chance to explore what is possible in this new online world. Creative rehearsal works in three stages:
1. Innovate and discover as you experiment and play as a team
2. Refine your practice. Get feedback about what works best and practice it to build muscle memory
3. Hold a technical rehearsal to iron out the glitches.
So.... for your next online pitch, remember to:
Make it an experience not a lecture
Think about what the viewer will see, hear, feel
Guide their imagination
Engage their senses
Tell stories
Be brutal with the slides!
Rehearse, rehearse, rehearse!