To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others (18 page)

Clarity operates by the same logic. Whether you’re selling computers to a giant company or a new bedtime to your youngest child, ask yourself: “What’s the one percent?” If you can answer that question, and convey it to others, they’re likely to be moved.

Part Three

What to Do

7.

Pitch

I
n the fall of 1853, an American craftsman named Elisha Otis, who had found a solution to one of the era’s toughest engineering problems, went looking for a grand stage to demonstrate his invention.

At the time, many American buildings had elevators. But the mechanics of how these crude contraptions worked—a combination of ropes, pulleys, and hope—hadn’t changed much since the days of Archimedes. A thick cable pulled a platform up and down a shaft, which often worked well—unless the cable snapped, at which point the platform would crash to the ground and destroy the elevator’s contents.

Otis had figured out a way around this defect. He attached a wagon spring to the platform and installed ratchet bars inside the shaft so that if the rope ever did snap, the wagon spring safety brake would activate automatically and prevent the elevator from plummeting. It was an invention with huge potential in saving money and lives, but Otis faced a skeptical and fearful public.

So he rented out the main exhibit hall of what was then New York City’s largest convention center. On the floor of the hall he constructed an open elevator platform and a shaft in which the platform could rise and descend. One afternoon, he gathered convention-goers for a demonstration. He climbed onto the platform and directed an assistant to hoist the elevator to its top height, about three stories off the ground. Then, as he stood and gazed down at the crowd, Otis took an ax and slashed the rope that was suspending the elevator in midair.

The audience gasped. The platform fell. But in seconds, the safety brake engaged and halted the elevator’s descent. Still alive and standing, Otis looked out at the shaken crowd and said, “All safe, gentlemen. All safe.”
¹

The moment marked two firsts. It was the first demonstration of an elevator safe enough to carry people. (Otis, you might have guessed by now, went on to found the Otis Elevator Company.) And more important for our purposes, it was a simple, succinct, and effective way to convey a complex message in an effort to move others—the world’s first elevator pitch.

In Part Two, we learned how to
be
—the three qualities necessary for sales and non-sales selling. Here in Part Three (Chapters 7, 8, and 9), I’ll discuss what to
do
by focusing on three key abilities: to pitch, to improvise, and to serve. This chapter is about pitching—the ability to distill one’s point to its persuasive essence, much as Otis did back in 1853. And to understand the dynamics of that process and the purpose of the pitch itself, the place to begin is Hollywood.

Lessons from Tinseltown

At the epicenter of the entertainment business is the pitch. Television and movie executives take meetings with writers and other creative types, who pitch them ideas for the next blockbuster film or hit TV series. Motion pictures themselves offer a glimpse of these sessions. “It’s
Out of Africa
meets
Pretty Woman
,” promises an eager writer in the Hollywood satire
The Player
. “It’s like
The Gods Must Be Crazy
except the Coke bottle is an actress!” But what really goes on behind those studio walls is often a mystery, which is why two business school professors decided to helicopter behind the lines for a closer look.

Kimberly Elsbach of the University of California, Davis, and Roderick Kramer of Stanford University spent five years in the thick of the Hollywood pitch process. They sat in on dozens of pitch meetings, analyzed transcripts of pitching sessions, and interviewed screenwriters, agents, and producers. The award-winning study
²
they wrote for the
Academy of Management Journal
offers excellent guidance even for those of us on the living room side of the streaming video.

Their central finding was that the success of a pitch depends as much on the catcher as on the pitcher. In particular, Elsbach and Kramer discovered that beneath this elaborate ritual were two processes. In the first, the catcher (i.e., the executive) used a variety of physical and behavioral cues to quickly assess the pitcher’s (i.e., the writer’s) creativity. The catchers took passion, wit, and quirkiness as positive cues—and slickness, trying too hard, and offering lots of different ideas as negative ones. If the catcher categorized the pitcher as “uncreative” in the first few minutes, the meeting was essentially over even if it had not actually ended.

But for pitchers, landing in the creative category wasn’t enough, because a second process was at work. In the most successful pitches, the pitcher didn’t push her idea on the catcher until she extracted a yes. Instead, she invited in her counterpart as a collaborator. The more the executives—often derided by their supposedly more artistic counterparts as “suits”—were able to contribute, the better the idea often became, and the more likely it was to be green-lighted. The most valuable sessions were those in which the catcher “becomes so fully engaged by a pitcher that the process resembles a mutual collaboration,” the researchers found.
³
“Once the catcher feels like a creative collaborator, the odds of rejection diminish,” Elsbach says.
⁴
Some of the study’s subjects had their own way of describing these dynamics. One Oscar-winning producer told the professors, “At a certain point the writer needs to pull back as the creator of the story. And let [the executive] project what he needs onto your idea that makes the story whole for him.” However, “in an unsuccessful pitch,” another producer explained, “the person just doesn’t yield or doesn’t listen well.”
⁵

The lesson here is critical: The purpose of a pitch isn’t necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you. In a world where buyers have ample information and an array of choices, the pitch is often the first word, but it’s rarely the last.

The Six Successors to the Elevator Pitch

Elisha Otis’s breakthrough had a catalytic effect on many industries, including the business of giving advice. Almost from the moment that elevators became commonplace, gurus like Dale Carnegie advised us to be ever ready with our “elevator speech.” The idea was that if you found yourself stepping into an elevator and encountering the big boss, you needed to be able to explain who you were and what you did between the time the doors closed shut and dinged back open at your floor.

For several decades during the twentieth century, the elevator pitch was standard operating procedure. But times and technology change. In the twenty-first century, this well-worn practice has grown a bit threadbare for at least two reasons. First, organizations today are generally more democratic than they were in the stratified world of the gray flannel suit. Many CEOs, even in large companies, sit in cubicles like everyone else or in open floor plans that allow contact and collaboration. The closed door is less and less the norm. Fifty years ago, the only chance you or I might get to communicate with the company CEO was at the elevator. Today, we can swing by her workstation, send her an e-mail, or ask her a question at an all-hands meeting. Second, when that mid-twentieth-century CEO stepped off the elevator and returned to his office, he probably had a few phone calls, memos, and meetings to contend with. Nowadays, everyone—whether we’re the head of an organization or its freshest hire—faces a torrent of information. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that the typical American hears or reads more than one hundred thousand words every day.
⁶
If we leave our desk for a few minutes to grab a cup of coffee, greeting us upon our return will be new e-mails, texts, and tweets—not to mention all the blog posts we haven’t read, videos we haven’t watched, and, if we’re over forty, phone calls we haven’t returned.

Today, we have more opportunities to get out our message than Elisha Otis ever imagined. But our recipients have far more distractions than those conventioneers in 1853 who assembled to watch Otis not fall to his death. As a result, we need to broaden our repertoire of pitches for an age of limited attention and
caveat venditor
.

Over the last few years, I’ve been collecting pitches anywhere I could find them. Based on my research, here are six promising successors to the elevator pitch—what they are, why they work, and how you can use them to begin a conversation that leads to moving others.

1. The one-word pitch

The ultimate pitch for an era of short attention spans begins with a single word—and doesn’t go any further.

The one-word pitch derives in part from Maurice Saatchi, who, with his brother Charles, founded the advertising agencies Saatchi & Saatchi and M&C Saatchi. For several years, Saatchi has been touting what he calls “one-word equity.” He argues that a world populated with “digital natives”—those under age thirty who scarcely remember life without the Internet—has intensified the battle for attention in ways no one has fully comprehended. Attention spans aren’t merely shrinking, he says. They’re nearly disappearing. And the only way to be heard is to push brevity to its breaking point.

“In this model, companies compete for global ownership of one word in the public mind,” Saatchi writes. The companies’ aim, and the aim of this type of pitch, is “to define the one characteristic they most want associated with their brand around the world, and then own it. That is one-word equity.”
⁷

When anybody thinks of you, they utter that word. When anybody utters that word, they think of you.

If this aspiration seems fanciful, consider how far some companies have moved in this direction. Ask yourself: What technology company do you think of when you hear the word “search”? What credit card company comes to mind when you hear the word “priceless”? If you answered Google for the former and MasterCard for the latter, you’ve made Saatchi’s case.

“Nowadays only brutally simple ideas get through,” he says. “They travel lighter, they travel faster.” And although Saatchi labels his own concept with two words glued together by a hyphen and followed by a third, he insists that brutal simplicity requires one—and only one—word. “Two words is not God. It is two gods, and two gods are one too many.”
⁸

It’s easy to dismiss the one-word pitch as more simplistic than simple—the ultimate dumbing-down of a message. But that misunderstands both the process of formulating a one-word pitch and the galvanizing effect of its introduction. Reducing your point to that single word demands discipline and forces clarity. Choose the proper word, and the rest can fall into place. For example, in his 2012 reelection campaign, President Barack Obama built his entire strategy around one word: “Forward.” Its use yields an important lesson for your own pitch.

One.

2. The question pitch

In 1980, Ronald Reagan was running for president of the United States in a grim economy. Unseating an incumbent, even one as vulnerable as then president Jimmy Carter, who’d been elected in 1976, is never easy. So Reagan had to make the case that Carter’s poor stewardship of the economy required the country to change leadership. In his pitch to voters, Reagan could have delivered a declarative statement: “Your economic situation has deteriorated over the last forty-eight months.” And he could have supported the assertion with a slew of data on the nation’s spiraling inflation and steep unemployment. Instead, Reagan asked a question: “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?”

As we saw in Chapter 5 with interrogative self-talk, questions often pack a surprising punch. Yet they’re underused when we try to move others, despite a raft of social science that suggests we should deploy them more often. Beginning with research in the 1980s, several scholars have found that questions can outperform statements in persuading others. For example, Robert Burnkrant and Daniel Howard of Ohio State University tested the potency of a series of short pitches to a group of undergraduates. At issue was whether universities should require seniors to pass a comprehensive exam as a condition of graduation. When the researchers presented strong arguments for the policy as questions (e.g., “Will passing a comprehensive exam be an aid to those who seek admission to graduate and professional schools?”), the participants were much likelier to support the policy than they were when presented with the equivalent argument as a statement. However, questions weren’t always best. The researchers also found that when the underlying arguments were
weak
, presenting them in the interrogative form had a
negative
effect.
⁹

The reasons for the difference go to the core of how questions operate. When I make a statement, you can receive it passively. When I ask a question, you’re compelled to respond, either aloud if the question is direct or silently if the question is rhetorical. That requires at least a modicum of effort on your part or, as the researchers put it, “more intensive processing of message content.”
¹⁰
Deeper processing reveals the stolidity of strong arguments and the flimsiness of weak ones. In the 1980 example, then, the question that worked so well for Reagan would have been disastrous for Carter. If he were trying to argue that Americans’ economic conditions had improved during his presidency—when for the vast majority of voters they had not—asking them “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” would have prompted people to think more deeply, leading most to a conclusion different from what Carter might have intended. Likewise, in 2012 when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney tried to use Reagan’s question in his race against Obama, the tactic didn’t work very well. Subsequent polling discovered that while many voters did believe they were worse off than they were four years prior, a greater percentage said they were better off or the same,
¹¹
dulling some of the sharpness of this line of attack.