[Music]
DAN PINK: One of my favorite things to write was the pitch chapter because y'know I'm a
writer and I find myself pitching all the time and I wanted to learn how to do it better.
I identified six new pitches for the 21st century.
The Pixar Pitch is modeled on the narrative structure of Pixar films and a story artist
for Pixar named Emma Coates essentially revealed the source code of this.
Once upon a time, every day, one day, because of that, because of that, until finally—blank.
Just fill in those blanks and it ends up being powerful.
We don't see the world only as a set of logical propositions.
We see it as a set of episodes.
By enlisting the power of story in a pitch, which is something we don't do that much,
it ends up being a very, very effective way to get your message across.
Email is a pitch.
Get over it.
An email is a pitch.
It's a plea for attention, it's a plea to engage.
The effective email subject lines fall into two categories.
They have to be either the category of utility—they're very useful to people or curiosity—they
peak people's curiosity.
Anything in between, anything that combines the two doesn't work very well.
Obama did this very well in the campaign.
He sent out a lot of emails, but the most popular email, the subject line was "Hey"
Woah.
Think about how many times you open an email that doesn't have a subject line.
Some people end up opening those first.
Why?
Because they're curious.
One of my favorites is the rhyming pitch.
Seems kind of cheesy, if not sleazy which rhymes.
Rhymes end up increasing processing fluency and when people are able to process something
more fluently, they absorb it more, they understand it better.
There was a trial of OJ Simpson, a former football star who was accused of murdering
his wife and her friend.
They found a glove on the crime scene, so the prosecutor said, well of course it's your
glove.
Try it on.
And he can't get the glove on his hand.
In the closing statement, the late Johnny Cochran said to the jury, "If it doesn't fit,
you must acquit."
What's remarkable is that 18 years later, people remember that.
If it doesn't fit, you must acquit.
Questions are active, statements are somewhat passive.
So if I just make an assertion to you, you'd listen.
Okay, cool.
You're listening.
But if I ask you a question, you inevitably have to respond.
A great example of this is Ronald Reagan in 1980 where the economy was in the tank and
he could have said "Your economic condition has deteriorated over the last 48 months."
Instead he said "Are you better off now than you were 4 years ago?"
And that's more persuasive.
That's more likely to move people because what happens?
They think of am I better off?
They start thinking about it and they begin to articulate their own reasons for agreeing
with you.
So, don't you think we should all use more question pitches?
Tweeting is a form of pitching and there's some evidence showing the most important thing
you can do in pitching via Twitter is giving people good information, even if it's self
promotional, people tend to dig it.
And also questions.
Questions via Twitter end up being really effective, too.
One of them is the one-word pitch.
The idea in the world right now is you want ownership of one word.
So when people think of you, they think of that word, when people say that word they
think of you and actually turns out that President Obama did a pretty good job of this because
his word in 2012 was "Forward."
All of the ads, all of the public documents had that word.
Forward.
So he was able to distill his message into one word.
The pitch process, when it works well, is inherently collaborative.
In some ways, pitch is not the same word because pitch implies I'm gonna throw this to you
and you're either gonna catch it or not.
It's much more interactive.
We have to think of pitching not as I'm gonna sell you on this right now, but essentially
here's an invitation—an intriguing invitation—to have a conversation.
- "To Sell Is Human" is about how to move people with authenticity, with passion, and
with purpose."
- One day, I went back and looked at my sent emails, I looked at my calendar, I looked
at the tweets I sent.
I realized that an enormous portion of my time involved selling.
Not only selling books, but just convincing people, persuading people, cajoling people,
I had this bizarre realization that I'm a salesman.
- The book truly cemented a suspicion that I've had which is we're living in a world
now where we're all sales people.