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Life Is a Pitch!

September 21st, 2009  by miki  Filed Under Faculte, Faculte Story  

It’s day 2 of our 4-day trip to San Diego. We’re down here for this year’s DEMOfall conference, where we’ll be officially launching our company and product, Faculte’s Broadcast Studio.

At DEMO, we are to pitch our company on stage in front of a crowd of fellow businesses, media, press and investors. Independently we’ve developed pitches for each of these audiences like a press release, investor presentation, product demo video and information to help our sale guys. Every time we make a pitch, we get to showcase our own product. Our pitch is how effective you can make your pitch through Faculte.

Preparing for the DEMO on-stage presentation was no different than any other pitch we’ve had to prepare. We faced yet again the same challenges that everyone faces whenever they set out to create a pitch:

• How do I squeeze all this information in?

• How do I get my point across?

• How do I make this entertaining?

• How much time before I lose my audience?

DEMO handles part of the last challenge. They have assembled over 500 people to give us no more than 6 minutes of their time on stage. Our job is to captivate this audience with a moving speech and a powerful product demo.

Here are the lessons we picked up in our last few weeks of preparation:

Lesson #1: Unless you’re an experienced Orator, don’t have someone else write your script word-for-word.

You know your content and subject matter the best. Unless you have a masterful script writer, your writer won’t know how to write for your voice. I wrote the first draft of the script for our CEO, Maher, but it just didn’t sound right and he stumbled. He had to make it his own. You need to take it upon yourself to just get in front of a camera, start recording and talk your way through a few practice runs. The more times you rehearse, the more your speech will solidify itself and become ingrained in your head.

Lesson #2: Humor works well, BUT it’s always a fine line to walk

We all want to be funny. It lightens the tension for us, makes for a more entertaining pitch and keeps the audience interested. However, a lot of the time our humor is simply OUR humor, either an inside joke or overly contrived. If you want to add a bit of humor, make sure you field test it by doing a full run of your pitch to someone completely new to it. We’ve thrown in a subtle joke into our pitch. We only knew it worked, when we got laughs from strangers. Don’t forget to field test it!

Lesson #3: A pitch is a performance, BUT you’re not a very good actor

With a pitch, you want to emotionally engage the audience like great film or theatre. When on stage, you might use role playing or have planned dialogue between two people to emphasize a point. Be cautious of trying to be too much of an actor. Be sure to pick roles that you play every day. If you try and deviate too far, it will end up looking forced and unnatural, which is just plain painful to watch. In our pitch, I play the role of the marketing manager who has to make last minute changes to our pitch on request of the CEO. Guess what? That is my role. So it wasn’t much of a stretch!

Lesson #4: Practice, Practice, Practice!

Do I have to write the word practice more times? Grab your colleagues, sit them down and make them listen. Just be wary of the feedback you get. Not all of it will steer you in the right direction and can actually complicate the process more. Choose your practice audience for their ability to give educated feedback based on their experience.

Lesson #5: Drive home one strong message, not five weak ones

Pick one central theme. Open with it. Stress it in the middle. Close with it. There is always  too much to say and too many points to cover. Use this central theme as your filter mechanism. If a point you want to make doesn’t directly connect to the theme, scrap it.

The DEMO conference will be streaming live on their website starting tomorrow. Click here to go to the live stream: Faculte’s presentation is at 10:00 am on Wednesday, September 23rd. Tune-in to see us on stage and let us know what you think of the pitch!

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