Confidence is Key

It’s our last day at PopUp Reading so Alan closes the week with some important advice when pitching your business – It’s all about your enthusiasm and confidence.

Note: This transcription has been generated with AI and there may be errors present. 

 

So the confidence, energy and enthusiasm that you put into your pitch makes a massive difference to whether the people are excited or not. And to give you one example of that, I had a council that’s hiring us. And the lady at the council has been trying to spread the word of what we’re doing to the other council people. And she’s been having trouble getting them excited. So she got one of her colleagues to have a phone call with me. And I pitched them the idea of the pop up. Do I have enthusiasm? Do I have energy? Oh, you’ve turned into Churchill? Oh, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. How did that happen? I’ve got energy, I’ve got enthusiasm. It is infectious. So I talked to this guy for 10 minutes about the idea. I position myself as the opposite. I tell him what it does for his residence and what he gets out of it. I found out what his job is. And then I pitched something completely different that he would care about 10 minutes, I get him excited. The lady friend who I worked with at the council then said, What did you do to him, he’s been coming to me going this stuff sounds amazing. We need to get involved. And she’s thinking I’ve been telling him about it for months, but he hasn’t done anything. The reason is, it’s the energy and enthusiasm that I pitch it with, gets people to take action. If you don’t do it with that, people won’t take action, they won’t get involved. So number three, you can say all the right words, you can say how you’re different. But if you don’t have confidence, energy and enthusiasm, you won’t get very far. And the final one, number four is to ask confidently for what you want. At the end. We forgot to ask for what we wanted at the end of our pitch, you’ve got to ask for what you want, what do you want people to do? If it’s in a group pitch like this, it might be to collect email addresses, it might be to sign up to a newsletter, it could be anything. In a single pitch, you might be asking for money, you might be asking for sponsorship, you might be asking for a second meeting. But you’ve got to ask confidently for what you want. If you leave that bit off, you will not get it. One example of that I was doing some work for it was first sales organisation, Guy was pitching at an event with 120 people in the audience. And he wanted people to get excited and then into it. So we came up with this idea. He would do his pitch, get everyone excited. And then he had a friend over in the corner that had everyone’s email addresses in the audience. And what he would do is he’d stop his pitch and say, you’re just about to get an email. The guy over there sends the email, and what happens in everyone’s pockets and all their phones. They’re being beeping and vibrating. He said that email, if you’re interested in this offer that I’m giving you, all you have to do now is pull your phone out of your pocket, hit reply, and I will take care of all of the details and make sure it’s sorted out for you. Can you see how easy that is for the audience to take action. And his take up was I think 35 to 40% of people replied saying yes, they were interested if you’d have done it in a different way. If he hadn’t have asked confidently for exactly what he won and told the audience how to do it. He wouldn’t have got it. So you’ve got to ask for what you want and make it easy for the audience to do it.