The Pitch

Last week’s in class exercises developing our elevator pitches and particularly the readings shed new light on the concept of catering your pitch to different audiences for me.  The idea of changing your pitch depending on the audience is not a necessarily a new concept for me.  I always understood the argument for making small tweaks to your pitch to fit the audience in front of you at any given time however I have recently given new consideration to the idea that a completely different pitch can be used to sell different audiences.  For example coming from a background in business I tend put a lot of emphasis on the business components of a pitch (i.e. the problem, market size, leadership team, the operating plan, financials, etc…) but for someone not as interested in business as myself (i.e. your rich uncle that just wants to help) these aspects of the pitch probably aren’t as meaningful.

A book I read recently, How We Decide by Jonah Lehrer, helped enlighten this subject for me.  One of the big ideas that I took away from this book was how our brains make decisions.  Jonah Lehrer argues that our emotions play a major role in all of our decisions, even the ones that we think we are making completely rationally.  This suggests that by appealing to an individual’s emotions rather than their rational thought they will be more likely to be able to form a strong opinion of your argument (this could be good or bad). 

With this in mind I wonder if the best strategy when pitching to unsophisticated investors such as friends and family is to just drop the business jargon of market size, leadership team, and ROI etc… and just focus on the one or two aspects of the idea that is going to have an emotional connection with that person?  For a social venture I would imagine that emphasizing your cause is an ideal way to appeal to the emotions of your audience.  After all you would think that an individual’s desire to create a venture that seeks to solve a societal problem would speak to a potential investor more than an individual’s desire to create a new venture just to make some cash.  Although ultimately this probably really depends on who the investor is, it certainly seems like there are plenty of investors out there who really only care about earning a financial return on their investment.