Hello, I'm Dr. Rob Yeung, a business psychologist and a coach at a
consultancy called Talentspace, and I'd like to talk to you about how you can
pitch ideas more effectively. Now I hope that this will be useful to you whatever
your message or your audience. So perhaps you're pitching to just one person,
perhaps your line manager or a colleague, or a group of people such as some
internal customers or external clients, or you might even be a line manager
yourself and you're trying to inspire your employees to adopt some course of
action. Whatever your message, what we do know is
that most people do not respond solely to data alone. It really makes sense to
choose carefully your words, your language, in other words the
rhetoric that you deploy. So one rhetorical device that you can use is
something called the analogy, and this is where you compare your situation to
another situation. And what many people in business do is that they compare
their situations to larger, more successful businesses for example
imagine an accountant who wants to do something innovative. He might say he's
going to launch a set of accounting services that are going to use
technology and clever design and he's going to become the Apple of the
accounting world. Or I'm a psychologist I write articles and do training videos
like this, and I might say that I want to offer
psychology advice on demand like Netflix. And immediately by mentioning successful
brand names, it makes the proposition, the idea, very
easy to understand, and perhaps you might even be able to get some of the glamour
and success of those larger businesses rubbing off onto your idea as well.
Another tool that you can use to boost the success of your ideas is what's
known as "argument by generalisation," and this is where you talk about one
situation and then generalise it further. And this is particularly useful when you
want to launch a product but all you've got is a very basic prototype. Or you
want to target perhaps thousands of customers
but you only have a few or even one example. So all you need to do is to talk
about your situation in detail. And the reason this works is because as
psychologists we know that most people are not actually very convinced by
abstract forecasts and projections, they're much more persuaded by talk
about narrative stories, about things that have actually happened. So talk
about your example your situation and then generalise it more widely. A final
technique that you can use to boost the strength of your ideas is something
called "argument by authority," and this is where you seek endorsements, testimonials
or positive comments from other successful people. For example authors do
this all the time, both of fiction and nonfiction books, so they'll get other
authors of books that you may have read before to say something positive about
their own book. And I do this as well so I write books and typically on the cover,
either on the front or the back, I'll get an endorsement from either a successful
business leader or perhaps a professor of psychology. And by getting an
endorsement you gain credibility. So you can do this whatever your idea, you could
get a written endorsement, perhaps in an email from a head of department or from
a major customer, or go visit that person and perhaps shoot a twenty second video
on your smartphone. Or if it's a really important business presentation you're
giving, then perhaps even get that person to turn up in person to speak on your
behalf. So in this video we've covered three rhetorical devices that you can
use to strengthen your pitching. So you can use analogies to compare your
situation to other successful brands; you can use "argument by generalisation," talk
through an example and generalise it; or use "argument by authority" to seek
endorsements from people who really matter.