Over the last two weeks, the ‘haka’ has been the subject of more news coverage than the rugby.  It started in Cardiff a week ago. Usually, at their home ground, the Welsh team can rely on a combination of massed male voice choirs, Land of our Fathers and Katherine Jenkins to give them the psychological edge-except against the All Blacks.

They have the haka.  Performed immediately before the whistle, for maximum impact, The Maori war chant once came before battle where ‘exaggerated grimaces are used to throw fear into the hearts of the enemy’.  Today, ‘it animates the players combative spirit’.  As Sean Fitzpatrick, legendary All Black captain, said on television “the haka is about us”.

Last week the Welsh tried to undo the haka by standing still and tall.  Mid-week, English players were quoted, ” Your dreaded haka doesn’t frighten me” said Nick Collins, ”Flutey insists he can hack the haka”.  Yesterday, the crowd at Twickenham tried to counter it with a raucous ’swing low sweet chariot’.  It was fun but the All Blacks were always going to win.

The point of all this?  Pitching,  whether in battle, on the field or in the office is about performance.  How you start matters!  A powerful, surprise opening is critical.  It lifts you up.  It lifts your audience. It fires expectation.

Over the last few days it has been difficult to escape news that Malcom Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, is in town to promote his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success.  Amongst the sometimes eulogistic coverage, was a three pager in last Sunday’s Observer Review headlined, “Is this the world’s most influential thinker”?

Whether you believe this or not, he certainly provokes thought and this evening will be talking to an audience at the Lyceum Theatre, where for a day he replaces the less demanding Lion King.  It was in an interview in Time Out, discussing his talk, that the areas of agreement were apparent.

A recurring theme here has been the encouragement  to use storytelling more and powerpoint less.  Discussed in the last post ’ Please tell us a story’  and  in the  Best Practice  Guide, Staging and Content.  This is what the great thinker had to say:

“I won’t be singing” Gladwell confirms, “I will tell a story unadorned. No visual aids.” A firm believer in the axiom  ”Power corrupts, PowerPoint corrupts absolutely,”  Gladwell favours old school narrative tecniques where performance is concerned.

“PowerPoint has destroyed storytelling, so I pledge there will be no PowerPoint.  It’s going to be very nineteenth century………..We’ll try and tell a story with a beginning, a middle and an end.”

Great minds..

To continue the theme of the post before this, storytelling, I checked out Nigel Rees’ Dictionary of Anecdotes for a relevant story. This one caught my eye.

Oscar Wilde was once asked by a friend how his latest play, Lady Windermere’s Fan, had gone. “It was a great success,”he replied, “but the audience was a total failure,”

If you have the wit of Wilde you can carry this off.  If you are as humourless as the self-congratulatory judges of Strictly Come Dancing you can’t.  Blaming the television audience, who have made John Sargeant an unlikely folk hero, was not an astute move.

The same goes for a pitch.  When the eager question, ‘how did it go?,  is met with, ‘they didn’t seem that interested, ’ or, worse still, ‘ they clearly had another agenda’,  then you know the audience is being blamed.

The pitch may well have contained great insight, a killer strategy and a perfect solution.  It deserved success!  But if the performance was difficult to follow,  lacked surprise and failed to engage, don’t blame the panel when they don’t vote for you.

Worth remembering also, that unlike the ‘Strictly’ panel who do claim expertise, people judging pitches may not be experienced in receiving and evaluating a pitch.  Not  an easy task when much rests on the decision.

All this leading to the unsurprising, oft repeated, advice that you rehearse before an ‘audience’.  See if they get it, and enjoy it.

 Anyone  with young children will have heard these words.  Rapt attention and eager anticipation, your reward when you give in.  The great comics are all about story-telling. Think back to the seventies when every mum’s favourite, Max Bygaves, started every performance with his catch phrase “ I wanna tell you a story”. Think now, Billy Connelly or Ricky Gervais.

Away from comedy, think Barack Obama. His acceptance speech was mesmerising, its impact undeniable. And yet, how much of what he actually said do we now remember?  I tested a few friends. Their limited responses included ‘yes we can,’ ‘change’, these united states of america’ and ‘a puppy dog for the children’.

However, what they all recalled, with ease, was his story.

“This election had many firsts and many stories that will be told for generations. But the one that’s on my mind tonight is about a woman who cast her ballot in Alabama.  Ann Nixon Cooper is 106 years old. She was born just a generation past slavery: a time when there were no cars on the road or planes in the sky….”

Storytelling is the most neglected area of pitch stagecraft yet good stories, or personal anecdotes, will stick in the mind long after the charts. They provoke thought whilst engaging and entertaining the audience.

“Please tell us a story, please…..”

These clever words were written by copywriter Kevin Millicheap when he edited, and improved, the content of the Best Practice Guide on this site, ‘Rehearsal. The Discriminators’.  Experience in recent months, working  with teams from very different companies, confirms just how apt is this thought.

Typically in the first, and too often the only rehearsal, time, angst and energy are expended on revising content, altering visual aids, deciding who says what and when and for how long. Then, with luck, there will be a run-through, stumble-through, of the presentation itself.

All this is fine if it is the first rehearsal. These practicalities must be sorted before proper rehearsals will work and then you need two of them, but aim for three or more. The London 2012 Bid team rehearsed 10 times.

It is fascinating to to observe the real improvements where rehearsal is taken seriously.  From a startpoint, where concern over content inhibits, moving up through the ‘rehearsal gears’ increases confidence.  This leads to a more spontaneous, engaging, personable approach.  People become their normal ‘nice’ selves. 

 And who wants to work with ‘nasty’ people?

The dictionary definition of the word overture is: an instrumental prelude to an opera.  Among many famous  ones are the overtures to Rossini’s William Tell, Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro and Wagner’s Tannhauser.  What all these great composers had in common was their understanding of the importance of engaging the audience’s senses from the outset, raising the emotional temperature and  building anticipation for the performance that followed.

Perhaps the commonest mistake I come across when coaching rehearsals is the complete lack of an overture. The lack of any opening that surprises or engages.

Too often the starting point is ‘a polite thank you for the opportunity, an introduction to the team members, the agenda for today and a reiteration of the brief (which the prospect already knows having written it).’

Whilst some of these elements may have a role, they are not an overture!  Like the great composers, be creative with your opening.  Use imagination and wit.  Consider a topical observation, a story from personal experience or a relevant piece of theatre.  Prepare it and rehearse it several times.

The great overture will achieve two things.  It will raise the mood and expectation of your audience.  It will raise the confidence and performance level of you and your team.

Incidentally, a further dictionary definition reads: opening moves towards a new relationship.

The amazing Barack Obama (see post before this) has won his race as convincingly as Usain Bolt won his at the Beijing Olympics. Both share the ability to compete when it counts.  Competitiveness is the the theme of the following article that I wrote for the newsletter of GPB Consulting (www.gpbuk.com), presentation advisers to Seb Coe’s successful London 2012  bid team.

As we bask in the reflected glory of the astonishing success of Team GB in Beijing, this is a good time to  look at competitiveness in the pitch situation. All of the athletes were highly trained, all were talented but what separated out the medal winners was their ability to peak at the right time, to harness their competitive spirit when it most mattered.

 It may seem a far cry to relate this to the mundane world of pitching for business but it is that same competitive ability that separates out winners from losers. I find it helpful to look at the competition in 3 ways: competing externally against your rivals, competing internally for resources and competing for the prospect’s decision.

 We know that we are competing head-on with rival companies, typically 3 or 4 of them. I find it useful to look at their capabilities in two ways. Firstly, what are their physical characteristics, strengths and weaknesses, their track record, what are the likely points of emphasis that  they will make in any pitch? Then answer the questions, how are you different? How are you better? Ask these questions searchingly since this is where noticeable differentiation lies.

The other way your rivals will be competing with you is more intangible. It will be their attitude to the pitch and how that comes across to the prospect compared to yours. Your plan of attack must ensure there is more energy, more passion and more commitment radiating from you than your competitors. This can be demonstrated in the smallest of things, right down to the answering of a telephone. One slovenly response can undo the committed efforts of the entire team.

 The second, often neglected, area of competition is the one for internal resources and support. Often the pitch team will go it alone. This is a mistake. Pitches are the lifeblood of a company and from the outset everyone, even those outside main operational activity, should be enrolled. Let them know what’s going on. Give them practical ways in which they can help. Site visits, desk research, focus groups, anything that helps engender an enthusiasm that will be felt by the prospect.

Internally you also need to make sure that you are not ‘competing’ with, and losing out to, your day job. The ideal, which applied to London 2012 bid team, is to have no other day job. 100% of your energy goes into the pitch. You may not be able to achieve this but ruthless time management can make sure the pitch team’s priority time is the pitch.

Finally, there is the competition for the prospect’s decision. Here you are competing in two ways, for the heart and for the mind. The biggest mistake in most pitches is to focus all the energy, the time, on solving the problem, developing the proposals, writing up the case histories to produce the content that scores rationally, with the mind. We too easily overlook that in the decision process reason leads to conclusion, whilst emotion leads to action.

Competing and winning comes when energy is focussed on building rapport with the client, listening to them, engaging with them as people  and pitching an emotional experience.

Returning to the Beijing story, to me the most poignant moment was when the favourite in the BMX race, Shanaze Read, having fallen at the final bend, lost out on the only thing she was interested in which was a gold medal. To her, silver was worthless.

It’s the same with pitches. Coming second is coming nowhere.

 In a couple of days we get the result of the greatest, most expensive pitch, political or otherwise, of all time. So far $2.4billion and still counting.  When Barack Obama wins, as he surely will, it will be down to many things from  dislike of Bush, to the economy, to it being time for a change ……

It will above all be down to superb pitching!  “He has been an extraordinary candidate, running a brilliantly conceived and flawlessly executed campaign” (Sunday Times).  The lessons include:

1. Energy management. Anyone who has pitched knows the importance of keeping the momentum going, managing energy every day, and not just in a panic as pitch date looms.  Obama maintained the energy level, including his battle against Clinton, for some 20 months!  McCain and his team by comparison “lacks the same energy and sense of purpose”.

2. Consistent emotional ‘brand’ communication.  Throughout the campaign it has been his attitude, his style, his story, rather than the specifics, that have engaged so many. “Some presidents become icons after they get elected, like Kennedy.  Barack Obama has managed to become a cultural icon in the course of the campaign…”

3. A perfect pitch process. Successful pitches don’t just happen.  Detail, ruthless efficiency, leaving nothing to chance, ticking every box, all matter.  Obama scores here as well. ” The most seasoned political observers have been struck by the meticulous professionalism of his campaign”.

Who knows, perhaps Obama took time out to read the Best Practice Guides on this site..