How to Pitch Like a Pro: The Science of Persuasion

Episode Transcript

Kelly Callahan-Poe: If you pitch new business, and let’s be honest, all ad agency professionals do, this episode will change how you walk into the room and how often you walk out with a yes. Welcome to the Two Marketing Moms podcast. I’m Kelly Callahan-Poe, and today’s episode is called How to Pitch Like a Pro, the Science of Persuasion with Tom Martin.

Tom is the author of the book, The Invisible Sale, founder of Converse Digital and an internationally recognized keynote speaker with over 30 years of sales and marketing experience. Welcome, Tom.

Tom Martin: Thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it.

Kelly: I attended a webinar of yours a couple of weeks ago and you so graciously agreed to come on and chat with me about this topic on my podcast. And I want to start with the number one question that any ad agency professional has, which is why do agencies win pitches and alternatively, why don’t they win a pitch?

Tom: Well, the good easy thing there is it’s the same answer for both. The agency that wins the pitch is the agency that makes the client believe that they are the most trusted and really most likely to deliver that future outcome that the client is looking for. And the agency that loses usually doesn’t. They might have even a better idea. They might have a better solution. But at the end of the day, clients in a pitch are running a risk analysis in their head. And that risk analysis is how likely are you to really pull this off? Because if you don’t, the agency will get fired, but maybe the client will as well. And so that’s kind of really what you’re trying to do. You’re trying to make them believe we’re more likely than anybody else you’re talking to pull this off.

Kelly: So, in essence, it’s about reducing risk because you mentioned something about trust is placing someone at risk to a certain extent.

Tom: Yeah, I mean, trust at the end of the day is I’m placing something I value. I’m making it vulnerable to your actions. So, if I hire you, I’m placing at a minimum my reputation. Because let’s face it, you get high enough in an organization, all you do is make decisions. You don’t really actually do anything. So, the quality of your decisions is your reputation. At a maximum, I might get fired. I might be putting my family’s well-being in your, if you’re a solo income household, for instance, and I get fired, well, then I’m like, there’s no money for me and the kids and all that. That’s a big deal. And so often, work with agencies and I have to remind them, whether it’s a pitch for a new client or even just pitching a new campaign, you have to understand what you’re truly asking that person to do. And it’s not just said yes to your new campaign or hire your agency. You’re asking them to trust that they’re going to be better off at the end of this than they were when they started. And they’re not going to get hurt. That’s so many agencies that I’ve worked with over the years, they’re like, what? They’ve just never thought about it like that. They just think, hey, my job to be the smartest or be the most creative and your job is to say, yes, I win. I’m the most creative. I’m the smartest. And at the end of the day, that’s not really what’s happening inside that room.

Kelly: Well, usually agencies think having been in these rooms so often, am I solving their problem? But it’s more than that, right?

Tom: It is. I mean, at a baseline, you gotta have a solution. But again, they’ve got to understand your solution. Cause you may be going, you’ve been thinking about your solution for days, weeks, maybe months, depending on what you’re doing. You know it inside. Now you’ve done all the research, you’ve had all the discussions internally, you’ve walked through the logic trail. It just is a no brainer to you.

Now you have 60 minutes to make a person or maybe a group of people get where you are mentally, but they’re not where you are right now. And so, you’ve got to move them down a pathway of, where are they today to where do I want them to be in 60 minutes, which is I want them to say yes or pick me. That is something that, especially once agencies are working with their own clients, they kind of skip that part. I was just listening to another podcast I was on a week or two ago, and the host and I were having this discussion. And I told him a story about a client that we were hired with to just really be a consigliere. And we went up to Boston, where a bunch of her new agencies, she had just hired big, massive agencies, were going to be presenting ideas and stuff. And she’s like, will you come along and just listen, I need somebody I trust that I can, hey, what did you think kind of thing.

And she knew my biz dev background, so she kind of saw me as a good filter. And I was blown away by these agencies pitching these huge ideas, not inexpensive ideas. And there was zero rationale, zero lead up, there was zero anything. They just said they were at this place where they thought, well, we’re this big monster agency that’s well known, and you’ve hired us. So, all we have to do is tell you what cool ideas we think you should do. And you’re just going to say yes, you’re going to believe that they’re the right ideas, because we’re telling you they are. And I remember getting in the cab and driving back to the airport with her and then sitting at the airport bar having a beer waiting for the flight. I mean, I wish those agencies could have heard the discussion because I think it would have been incredibly eye opening for them. She was just like blown away. She’s like, how do I even know what to pick? It’s basically like a beauty pageant. What’s the cooler idea? What’s the funnier idea? But like there was no strategic underpinning to help you understand which idea had the best chance of delivering that outcome, which was brand growth, customer loyalty, etc. And it’s just, I don’t know, maybe we’re not investing enough time and effort in training people to think like that. Maybe it’s our own arrogance.

I don’t know, but I’ve seen it so many times. I’ve had the good fortune of being on the other side of that table in pitches. Clients have said, hey, can you be like a consigliere? I used to do this for a living. Now you teach people how to do it. You come in and be the BS filter for us. And it’s such an eye-opening experience because you really get to see kind of how bad agencies are at pitching themselves.

Kelly: Unfortunately, I see it as it depends on who’s in essence running the pitch. If it’s a very creative agency, they’re going to want to shoe in some creative, whether it’s been asked for or not, right? Or it’s a strategy led conversation or it’s sales and it’s relationship based. So, it really depends on who the players are and how they work together. But I’ve been there plenty of times where you’re kind of battling it out to say, this doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s too much.

I think we’re going to dig into that in a minute, but let’s first talk about, in essence, the science of persuasion. Why do you call persuasion a science?

Tom: Well, because it is. We live in a society where there’s this misguided belief that the truly brilliant presenters, the people who are able to sell things to people that don’t really need them, there are like this Don Draper people in the world that just, they’re just naturally persuasive people and you’re either born a Don Draper or you’re not. And if you’re not, you just don’t have the gift of gab. And the truth is, when you go look, there are Don Drapers. I’ve worked with some, know some, you probably have as well. And they walk into a room and they’re just magnetic and they just always have the right things to say. And people are like, yes. When you take those people’s presentations and you deconstruct them and you go, okay, what are they doing? Let’s really look at it. All they’re doing is what science tells us. And there is an abundance of science about how the human brain makes decisions.

The problem is we don’t study it. We’re not taught it. It’s not part of our curriculum. As a young man coming through the agency business, nobody ever sat down and talked to me about the science of persuasion, of how the human brain is going to process information and how I can tilt that in my favor if I just lean into it. And so often what happens is you see people are actually fighting against it. They’re not trying to, they just don’t know any better. And they’ll do things and they’ll present in ways that really are working against their own best interest, they just don’t know any better. And if somebody would teach them, then they can change. This is probably the most fun thing I do with agencies is help them rebuild pitch decks and so forth. Because they go do a couple and then they win two or three or four. And they call me back up and like, my God, this was magic. It’s like, that’s not really magic, but now you know it. But I’ll take it. I’m glad you’re happy. Tell a friend.

Kelly: Exactly. Well, can you walk us through your three-step framework for crafting the perfect pitch utilizing the framework of persuasion?

Tom: Sure, the high-level framework is first and foremost, understanding where you lie in the perception of authority in your audience’s mind. Secondly, and based on where you lie, what is the architecture of your persuasive message going to be? And then thirdly, when it’s time to deliver it, do you understand the language of influence? And that really comes down to more the words in between the words. We focus a lot on the words, what’s gonna be on the slide, what are we gonna say, but it’s really the words in between those words that oftentimes derail you, that reduce your credibility, reduce your perceived authority, topical expertise, et cetera. And again, you just don’t know any better, so you do it.

Kelly: So, starting with the first one, which is the perception of authority, can you talk about that in terms of, obviously, you know who the lead people are in a pitch, but what if you happen to be a younger professional? How do you increase your perceived authority while you’re pitching?

Tom: Right. Well, ideally, you’ve done a little bit of work in the preambles. You’ve either made sure those younger folks have been exposed in some way, shape, fashion, or form, maybe it’s just as simple as their bio and the RFP response.

Ideally, maybe you can have them handle some of the pre-pitch communication, give them a chance to write emails or make phone calls where they can be succinct, they can be in command of information, which starts to build. At the end of the day, that perception of authority is a simple four-quadrant box analysis of credibility on one axis and trust on the other. And credibility, like trust, is built one engagement at a time, one exposure at a time.

If you haven’t had a chance to do that, and it’s really just got to happen in the presentation, then it’s really up to that junior person to make sure they are incredibly well rehearsed, that they speak flawlessly when it’s their time.

And ideally, the agency, if you’ve uncovered an insight or an angle or a way of thinking about something that the client hasn’t, you’re pretty sure you’ve got a new way to think about their problem, let the junior person deliver it. Because there’s no better way. When you can stand in a room full of people who are older than you, and you can teach them something they don’t know, or show them an analysis of data that they have all the same data. They can do the same analysis. They either didn’t or they didn’t connect the dots the way you did.

Nothing builds credibility faster than that. I know this because I’ve done it. I remember sitting in a room with a bunch of American Airlines clients and we were doing a transfer. The one brand manager was handing the division off to another. They were doing a swap and I was briefing them. It was on the West Coast, and it was about some media markets. I said, Continental and TWA or somebody, they’re all running newspaper and television and they’re talking about this, we’re just doing newspaper and it showed the media share of voice analysis and everything. And the clients wouldn’t even look up from the deck. This is back in the days of paper decks, right? You didn’t have PowerPoint and they’re like flipping through the decks and they’re looking. They had all the same data I did, but I connected the dots.

And my bosses let me present it instead of them presenting it, because I did the analysis. And I can tell you, I walked into that room, and they thought about Tom Martin one way. When I walked out, Tom Martin was a very different junior AE in their minds. And in fact, they ended up making like a $20 million incremental spend in media, which my bosses were super happy about at 15%. And all because of this point. And they were all like, wow, this kid might be somebody we should pay attention to when he talks to us and read his emails when they come across. And it just took one presentation. Now you can destroy your credibility just as fast. But yeah, if you’re a younger person, I think that’s what you have to do. And if you’re an agency, you owe it to your agency and your younger staffers to give them those opportunities to show the client, hey, I know I’m only 23, 25, but I’m pretty smart. And I can teach you a thing or two beyond maybe how to make an Instagram post.

Kelly: So, the next step is the architecture of persuasion. And you describe this as kind of building the yellow brick road from where your audience is now, which is no, and to where you want them to be, which is yes. Can you talk to us about that and how to bridge that knowledge gap?

Tom: Sure, so it’s really about what does your audience know today? They may be at no; they may just not be anything. It just depends on what you’re trying to sell, I guess. But where are they today? What do they know? What don’t they know? And what they do know, where did they find it? And that sort of thing. And then, this is where I need you to be and you build, that becomes your story arc.

And you have to stop and ask yourself, okay, if I knew this, and I need you to know these things over here to make this a feasible yes, how do I get you there? What data points do I need? What data points don’t I need? And that’s gonna change. It’s gonna change based on what quadrant of the perception of authority you are in. If you’re upper right hand, high trust, high credibility, you can get away with probably not including every single detail in your deck, in your presentation, because there’s just an assumed expertise. Doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have it, shouldn’t be in an appendix someplace, but you can probably throw the dice and go that direction. If you’re in the lower left-hand corner, you’re probably going to need to build more of that argument via data and third parties, because you don’t have that stature. You may have more of it in the deck than the appendix.

But the idea is you’ve got to figure out what that is. And then you have to take it down to the minimally viable expression of that. Because just because you can say it doesn’t mean you should. You really want to get down to what’s the minimally viable amount of information I can share. And in what order does it need to be shared so that it builds on top of each other so that by the end of the presentation, when you go for the big, and this is what we think you should do, the client’s not looking at it and going, well, what they’re thinking, well, yeah, of course. Of course that’s what you would do. Makes perfect sense. That’s a win. Whether you’re selling a campaign or pitching your agency, you win. Game over. But yeah, it’s really about going for that minimal viable. I’d always rather a client or an audience member say, hey, hold on a minute. Can you drill down on that point? I don’t know if I understand exactly how you got there. Oh yeah, hold on a minute. Or can you show me an example of how that would work? Oh yeah, well let me go to slide 72 in the appendix. I got a couple I can show you how this works. And then you get them and they go, okay, yeah, I got it. Great. Now I’m back into my main pitch, back to wherever I was. I’d much rather that than to put too much detail in and then I start to close or glaze or phones start getting pulled out. Or if it’s, God forbid, it’s a virtual presentation, that second screen starts getting their attention, right?

And so that’s always been my approach, less is more. Be prepared for the person to ask you the question. Have your slides in an appendix that can explain it. You’re always better off that way, I believe.

Kelly: And the next one is about the language of influence, and you have a lot of examples of that. Can you talk a little bit about those things that kind of undermine a pitch?

Tom: Yes, in fact, I just did one, the most common one. And I’ve noticed I’ve done it two or three other times during the course of this interview and discussion. It’s the biggest, it’s a filler word. We all do it, everybody does. And we do it because the human brain, especially in a conversation, despises silence. If you don’t believe me, the next time you’re in a conversation with somebody and they finish talking and it’s clear now it’s your turn to begin talking.

Kelly: You got it, yeah.

Tom: Don’t. Just sit there. Start counting in your head. And if you get to 10, you call me and let me know. I’ll send you a free book or something because you won’t make it to 10. You will not make it to 10 unless it’s somebody who’s listened to this podcast and they’re going to sit and wait just because they know that you’re messing with them. But we abhor it. And so, what happens is when we’re presenting, our mouth and our mind will get out of sync. It happens all the time. The more you’re doing something impromptu like this, the more likely it happens. And we’re fearful that silence makes us sound stupid. It’s actually totally opposite. So, we’ll fill the void with um or er. And all we’re trying to do is let the synchronization kick back in. And then we’ll go into what we were going to say. They’ve researched this countless times. What they find is that when you put those filler words in, it reduces your credibility, it reduces your topical expertise in the minds of the audience, because it appears as though you are fumbling for words that you don’t really know what to say, versus the person who has trained themselves, because they understand this, to not use those words. What you’ll notice is that instead of the um or er, they’ll just take a breath.

They’re not afraid of the silence. And they’ll take that breath and they’ll let their mind sync. And then out comes the word and it’s flawless. And it’s really hard to teach yourself to do. It’s a muscle memory, but it is probably the single most effective thing I could tell you to do on this call. Because it’s not just when you’re presenting, it’s when you’re having a conversation like this, or you’re talking with a client over coffee or anything. Anytime you’re talking and trying to persuade somebody, start to dial in and self-modulate that and it will improve your persuasiveness and your credibility with clients immediately. From this point forward, you are going to notice when other people say ums and errs. When you find somebody who doesn’t, you’ll notice it. It’ll stick out to you. That’s the easiest one. There’s a whole litany of things, of little words between the words like that. That one, though, is by far the number one credibility killer.

Kelly: There’s my pause. When you work as a podcast host, you find that you frequently do have to pause because you don’t want to jump in if someone hasn’t completely finished their statement. So, it’s, I have learned that because people are sometimes still processing when they stop and take a breath. So, it’s a good exercise to be on podcasts and learn about these.

Tom: You’re funny, I like it.

Kelly: Well, let’s move over to pitches and the reality of pitches because I have been on pitching teams where the pitch decks were, and I’m not kidding, 70 to 75 to 100 pages. And you mentioned that 95% of information is not remembered after 48 hours. Can you talk a little bit about cognitive load and then relate that to the pitch itself? Is there a specific length that a pitch should be? Is it more about the content of the pitch? Talk to me a little bit about that cognitive load and how do we stop agencies from pushing so much information?

Because I’ve tried myself and you know, this makes no sense. It’s too much. I don’t even understand the pitch after 25 pages. I really don’t. So, what are your thoughts on that?

Tom: I’m so glad you asked this question. The thing is, yes, science shows you’re gonna forget 90% of what was presented to you within 48 hours. And I don’t know what the magic about the two-day marker is, but in all the studies, the two-day is the marker they use, and the best I’ve seen is 40% retention, so you only forget 60%.

But that’s only when people are using decks that are really, really well designed, really low cognitive loads, et cetera. However, most people erroneously think that this lack of memory is driven by deck length, and it’s not. There was a study done where they did a 10-minute presentation. Let’s face it, you can only show so many slides in 10 minutes.

And they started talking to the people in the audience immediately after. And 50% of the audience could not, with any degree of specificity, play back what they had just heard. And it was a 10-minute presentation. They went two days later; the number grew to 75%. So just shortening the presentation is not the solution. Understanding how the brain processes and then feeding that information to the brain in a way that it can process, again, it’s like the yellow brick road, the next idea that they need to connect to the previous one is the next brick, and it can’t be too far, it can’t be too close, they can never get unstable. And that’s the lens you have to view your deck. Now, that might be a 30-slide deck.

Might be a 10-slide deck, might be a 40 or 50 slide. It just depends. And it’s not even the slides because I see agencies, my favorite is they want to reduce cognitive load and they’ve heard somebody tell them, well, you should just have one idea on every slide. And so, it’s a 50-slide deck, but there’s only 50 ideas or points or thoughts that are being shared. And they think because they only had one per slide that that’s going to increase retention.

It doesn’t, it absolutely doesn’t. Because if I’m creating an argument and that argument, maybe I’m saying that, hey, to be successful, you can’t show up and throw up. And that’s my slide title. And I’m gonna support that with four ideas and I make those four bullet points that just build on one another, that’s going to be easier to remember than if I put that idea and then the next four slides are each an individual bullet point, but you’ve lost the main idea that they’re rolling up under because that was four slides ago. That places so much more cognitive load on the human brain than the first one where the bullet points build underneath a single slide title.

And so that’s a thing. You could build a good deck, that 50 slide deck might be seven slides if it’s built properly. So, I wouldn’t get caught up in the length. What I would get caught up in is if you are giving them so much information that you get lost because it’s just a tsunami of information, which is exactly what it’s going to feel like to your audience, then the deck is too long.

There’s also some things you can do around design and strategic repetition of the key ideas, the key things like the minimally viable version of your deck. There’s a way to go about strategically repeating some of those things, which drives them into the brain easier. And so, there’s something to be said for that. That’s a big part of when we’re rebuilding a deck. We have a high degree of repetitiveness of certain ideas and thoughts so that we can really hammer those home to the individual. And it also helps us show how at a high level the entire plan, idea, campaign, whatever, how does it all come together? If they go back to their company and the CEO goes, so what did that agency have to say?

You want them to be able to play back like an elevator speech version of your pitch. And they may not be able to do all the details, but that’s okay. You just want them to be able to give the core idea. You do that, you win more often than you lose by far.

Kelly: And you’re a big fan of the addendum or the appendix, correct? For this reason.

Tom: I love the appendix. It allows you to be shorter and more concise. But I also love it because, and maybe this has happened to you in pitches where you’ll have somebody in the room and you’re not the agency they want to hire, their buddy who owns another agency, whatever. They’re a big fan of one of the other agencies. And so, they’ll purposely try to mess you up by asking these more detailed type questions. And when you have stuff in an appendix and they pop that, we used to call them the a-hole questions, and they pop that off and you go, oh yeah, hold on a second. We thought it through. Then boom, you show them two or three slides, whatever it takes to answer the question. Is that good? Then you go back. And four or five slides later, boom, another a-hole question. And you go, yeah, yeah, we thought through that. And you show them. They might get a third one out before the rest of the room looks at them and goes, dude, enough.

They got it. They’ve thought through it. And if not, that’s all you’re doing. You’re reinforcing like, yeah, these guys have thought of every angle. They’ve thought of every—it just makes you so much more credible.

Versus if you had to put all that and had your 150-slide deck, well, now you just bored them to death. Because most of the people in the room might not need that level of detail. They might be like, all right, it makes sense logically. I can always ask for a follow-up or proof later. So, it really works at two levels. And it’s a really powerful way to present. Because it’s actually more impactful when they think you haven’t done your homework and actually have.

And if you do have that person who’s just trying to derail you because they’ve got a favorite agency, it shuts those people down. I’ve never seen one do more than three questions before the rest of the room gives them the stink eye and goes, they’ve got this.

Kelly: What’s your opinion on unsolicited creative?

Tom: I’ve never understood why people do unsolicited creative. All you’re doing is increasing your cost of acquisition of that client. And if they didn’t ask you for creative, there was a reason that they didn’t ask you for creative. And so, when you do that to me, you’re telling the client prospect, I don’t listen very well.

I just don’t listen very well. Now, that’s a little different than trying to get around some of the guardrails that clients will put on RFPs. I remember we did one when I was still doing BizDev for agencies before I opened my own, and in the RFP, you weren’t allowed to have any contact between the agency personnel and the decision makers prior to the actual pitch.

And so, when we sent in our digital response to the RFP, we embedded instead of just showing a bio slide, we embedded little 30-second videos on every bio slide of the person going, hey, how are you doing? I’m Tom, blah, blah, blah, whatever. We skirted the rules. We found a way to create an opportunity for them to get to know everybody on the pitch team. But I didn’t come to meet with you. So that kind of thing.

I think that’s fine. In fact, I think clients actually appreciate that. And I remember that particular client we won, and he told us later, he’s like, that was kind of sneaky. I said, it wasn’t sneaky. It’s just creative. It was an innovation around your restriction.

That wasn’t even his restriction. Procurement had put it on or somebody in accounting or whatever, just to level the playing field. And he was like, I really liked it. That was good. He appreciated how they solved the problem and they did it in a creative way using technology and nobody else did. So that kind of stuff’s great. But yeah, when someone specifically says, don’t show me any ads and you go show them ads. I just think you’re screaming, I don’t listen to you, and I can’t follow orders very well.

Kelly: Agreed, 100% agreed. Well, any final new business tips that you have?

Tom: The best new business advice I’ve ever been given, and I was given it maybe day 10 of my career by the account director on the American Airlines business, a guy named Paul Gold, old New York ad guy, and he told me, said, Tom, I’m gonna tell you the most important thing anyone will ever teach you in your career. We’re in the agency business. He said, people don’t hire agencies, they hire people. Never forget that.

And that’s what I tell people all the time. They hire people. You have to make a human connection. The goal of a pitch process, whether it’s you just prospecting or whether you’re part of an official RFP style, the goal has to be to make a connection with that person where they see you not as an agency, but as a person and maybe a person they tend to like and respect and think, man, this person would be a good partner.

You do that, you will win more than you lose, I promise you.

Kelly: Thank you for sharing your insights today, Tom. I appreciate it. I will include links to your book and all of your resources on our website. You can listen or watch the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or on TwoMarketingMoms.com. Don’t forget to subscribe and share and thanks for joining.