Perfect Pitch
SELLING YOUR IDEA WHEN FIRST IMPRESSIONS COUNT
A quick word first
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The how and why of pitching
Say you finally were able to squeeze on to the calendar of somebody important to you. Maybe it’s your boss and you need her support to launch a new initiative. If you’re an aspiring entrepreneur, maybe it’s a potential investor for your start-up. Or it could be a high-value customer you’d love to woo away from a competitor. Whatever the case, you’ll only have a few minutes to talk.
So, here’s the question. Which should you focus on: why your idea is important or how you’re going to implement it. Time will be short. You can’t do both. Pick one or the other.
According to a new Harvard Business Review article by Simone Ferriani, Gino Cattani, and Deise Falchetti, that’s a trick question. Prominent experts strongly disagree about which is the correct answer.
They cite Simon Sinek, author of Start With Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action. According to the HBR authors, Sinek believes that communicating an idea’s purpose (the why) “makes it easier for people to engage with the idea because it allows them to understand the motives and goals behind it.”
In the opposite corner, though, is Adam Grant, author Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World. Grant warns that emphasizing a bold reason for innovation invites skepticism about whether the goal can be achieved. He favors instead focusing instead on how the idea can be implemented.
In their recent Strategic Management article, Ferriani, Cattani, and Falchetti have come at the how-why question from a different angle. Their studies show that different kinds of audiences, call for different approaches. Their research shows that the why-approach is more effective when dealing with lay people and crowd-funders. With professionals—investors and innovation managers—implementation is more important, so the how-approach is the better path.
In short, one size does not fit all. Tailor your pitch to your audience.
The message and the messenger
We’ve covered the how and the why of the pitch and the who the audience is. Now we’ll focus on the one who is making the pitch. Several years ago my HBS colleague Alison Wood Brooks and her co-authors published a research article, “Investors Prefer Entrepreneurial Ventures Pitched by Attractive Men.” Drawing on field data and laboratory experiments, they found that men’s pitches—especially if the men were handsome—were rated as more persuasive and compelling than those presented by women. (As it happens, this preference was equally true whether men OR women were doing the rating.)
And get this: in some of the studies, the male and female presenters were saying exactly the same thing, word-for-word. Alison discusses the findings in a short HBR Working Knowledge article, “Venture Investors Prefer Funding Handsome Men.” She says, "I was surprised to find the effects consistently across both field and lab settings, but, in general, I find our results to be more sad than surprising."
More recent work by Babson College Professor Lakshmi Balachandra, paints a more hopeful picture for women, though at a cost, it seems. Her co-authored piece, “Don’t Pitch Like a Girl!: How Gender Stereotypes Influence Investor Decisions.” The subjects that Lakshmi’s team used were experienced, professional investors. With this data set, women did equally well in the initial pitch stage of seeking funding, some succeeding, some not.
The researchers also examined gender stereotypes (appearing more masculine or more feminine) that can cross biological lines. As they explained, “[T]there are differences in what are considered acceptable behaviors for men and women. In western societies, while men are expected to display masculine behaviors associated with assertiveness and dominance, women are expected to display feminine behaviors associated with warmth and emotional expressiveness.”
The authors speculate that investors may doubt the leadership potential of pitchers (both women and men) who are emotionally expressive and less assertive. I for one, doubt that’s a valid indicator of a person’s competence to get things done. And it puts a burden on women entrepreneurs that most men don’t have to carry.
Housekeeping
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