Strategy #30: Master The Two Elements Of A Flawless Pitch

With a job interview in the offing, you need to think about how you can best equip yourself for a crucial hiring meeting that’s likely to decide your immediate future. If you do things the right way, and then go on to succeed in getting the job you’re after, you can look forward to some celebrations. If you do things the wrong way you’ll probably fail, and it’s back to the drawing board. So, how can you load the odds of being successful in your favour?

Preparation is the key, so you have to think about what you’re going to say and do. You also have to consider the way you’ll say and do everything. Your words and your actions are the two elements of a flawless pitch, but they must be constructed properly and delivered impeccably. In today’s strategy I’m going to give you some guidelines about developing your content and honing your delivery as well as possible.  

To have any hope of winning the job you really want you’ve got to enter a hiring meeting with a well-considered plan of attack and this starts with building some great pitch content. Once you’ve done that you can think about how you’re going to deliver it. Great content and excellent delivery. These are the two elements of a flawless pitch.

Now, I’ll be straight with you. This part of your work-search project will take a bit of effort. If you don’t have the appetite for doing this, I suppose you could try to take a shortcut by improvising your words and winging your delivery. This might save you a little time but I’m assuming that you’re serious about crushing your next interview. So, let’s reserve that possibility for the kind of job hunters who are happy to leave things to chance, ride their luck or hope for the best. I’m sure you’re made of plenty of the right stuff and therefore I’m guessing that you readily accept that high rewards will naturally follow on from steady endeavours.  

On that basis, I’ll start by analysing the sort of pitch content you should assemble before moving on to the way you present it. To put the following guidance into context, I’m going to be referring to two aspects of the pitch which I’ll be talking about in the next pair of tutorials. These are the use of a narrative structure within your presentation and an outline of the constituent parts of the pitch, so bear that in mind.

To start with, here’s a snapshot of the content stages of your pitch. There are four distinct sections which are: introduction, presentation, expansion and commitment. I’ll tell you more about each of these in an article that’s coming along soon, and explain how they all fit together to make a homogenous pitching whole. They’re all really important and serve different functions but the part that you should concentrate on as far as your pre-prepared content is concerned is the second, the presentation.

This lies at the heart of your pitch. It’s where you present the business problem you’ve discovered, and your viable solution of course. It’s also where you make the primary case for why you’re the person to take on the challenge you’ve outlined, including the major reasons you should be hired immediately. You’ve got to get this part of the pitch absolutely spot-on, and there’s no excuse not to do so because you’ve got plenty of time to assemble your ingredients, mix and match them appropriately and then practice delivering them in the tastiest way.

I give you the exact recipe in my paid-for training programmes, but the essence of the presentation phase of the pitch is fifteen minutes of carefully-constructed material that’s designed to hit the decision maker’s most sensitive taste buds with force. It’s a super food that contains no fatty surplus but plenty of nourishing protein. Done right, the presentation will make them salivate, then enjoy the complementary flavours you put together before digesting everything with ease.

A compelling narrative structure lies at the core of your presentation. I’ll be talking about this in the next strategy but, for now, I can tell you that story is one of the best vehicles for guiding someone’s attention and persuading them to take an action that suits you. In my Job Search Masterclass I show you how to construct a business narrative that exemplifies your best qualities and demonstrates your highest values to an employer. As I say, there’s an introduction to this coming right up.

You should write out your pitch content verbatim, so you need to commit every word you intend to say to paper or screen. Depending on your proficiency as a writer, this might be quite an easy task or it could become an incredibly arduous one indeed. But don’t worry because I give you a template to follow, plus a sample presentation script that you can adapt and mould to fit your particular needs.

One of the reasons I suggest you write everything down exactly as you’ll say it in the hiring meeting is so that you don’t miss anything out when you’re delivering your presentation. There’s much more on this coming up in articles #33 to #35 of this series, but it’s worth mentioning now that the two pitching elements are linked in the sense that good content invariably leads on to good delivery. If you’re confident of what you’ll be saying during a hiring meeting, especially in the key presentation phase, you’ll be much more likely to speak your words with clarity and authority.   

An almost universal question I get concerns the necessity of writing your presentation text in exactly the way you’ll say it aloud, which happens when you’re in front of a hiring decision maker. Why can’t you create your pitch content in the form of notes, bullet points or headings that you’ll improvise around, rather than memorising a word-for-word script? Well, my feeling is that it’s pretty important to follow the pattern I suggest because, otherwise, you risk diluting the latent power of your pitch content if you hesitate, forget key points or wander from the core message you want to convey.

By all means use notes to work from if you feel more comfortable doing so, but be aware that the very best presentations are scripted. They’re carefully written, revised and rehearsed. The greater the upside of achieving a successful outcome, the more important it is to do this. My 30-plus years of training people to make business-critical presentations, whether that’s in one-to-one situations or during conferences with large audiences, tells me that most people benefit hugely from doing what I recommend.

But this isn’t an instruction that’s cast in stone. My job is to present you with the most reliable method of finding fantastic work opportunities and then pitching yourself with maximum impact. This is the way to do it. The ends justify the means and this is an excellent example of this concept.

Having said that, of the two elements of a flawless pitch, content is definitely more important than delivery. In a perfect world you’d give equal weight to both but don’t get hung up on this. If you can produce some really strong presentation content, you can get away with glitches in your delivery. Unfortunately it doesn’t work the other way around as it’s extremely tough to mask weak content with excellent delivery.

As you’d expect, developing great pitch content and practicing exemplary delivery is one of the most important things that I help my coaching clients with. It’s what many of my face-to-face training seminars concentrate on too. If you think you might benefit from these, you’ll find information about my support programme on my website. 

Neil Grant, Vocation Master

If you have any comments, suggestions or questions about the issues I raise here, I invite you to contact me personally. Please get in touch via LinkedIn;

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