Unlocking the secret to a successful pitch can be a game-changer. Whether you're an entrepreneur, a creative, or a visionary, understanding the art of presenting a brilliant idea is crucial. Let's delve into the strategies that can make your pitch unforgettable.
Coming up with creative ideas is easy; selling them to strangers is hard
The person on the receiving end tends to gauge the pitcher’s creativity as well as the proposal itself.
- By successfully projecting yourself as one of the three creative types and getting your catcher to view himself or herself as a creative collaborator, you can improve your chances of selling an idea.
The Artist
Artists display single-minded passion and enthusiasm about their ideas, but they are less slick and conformist in their dress and mannerisms, and they tend to be shy or socially awkward
- Unlike showrunners, artists have little or no knowledge of, or interest in, the details of implementation.
- They invert the power differential by completely commanding the audience’s imagination.
The Neophyte
Neophytes are the opposite of showrunners: they are unencumbered by tradition or past successes and are eager learners.
- They consciously exploit the power differential between pitcher and catcher by asking directly and boldly for help-not in a desperate way, but with the confidence of a brilliant favorite, a talented student seeking sage advice from a beloved mentor.
The Sorting Hat
In the late 1970s, psychologists Nancy Cantor and Walter Mischel demonstrated that we all use sets of stereotypes-what they called “person prototypes”-to categorize strangers in the first moments of interaction.
- When a person we don’t know pitches an idea to us, we search for visual and verbal matches with those implicit models, remembering only the characteristics that identify the pitcher as one type or another
- We subconsciously award points to people we can easily identify as having creative traits; we subtract points from those who are hard to assess or who fit negative stereotypes
Catchers Beware
Real creativity isn’t easily classified
- Researchers have found that people’s implicit theories regarding the attributes of creative individuals are off the mark
- Indeed, individuals who become adept at conveying impressions of creative potential, while lacking the real thing, may gain entry into organizations and reach prominence there based on their social influence and impression-management skills
- Those who buy ideas need to be aware that relying too heavily on stereotypes can cause them to overlook creative individuals who can truly deliver the goods
The Showrunner
In the corporate world, showrunners combine creative thinking and passion with what Sternberg and Todd Lubart call “practical intelligence”
- They demonstrate enough technical know-how to convince catchers that the ideas can be developed according to industry-standard practices and within resource constraints
- Showrunners deliberately level the power differential between themselves and their catchers
