How to avoid a MONSTER of a pitch
It’s Halloween, don’t let your pitch turn into a monster
Three ways to avoid a monster of a pitch
Quick wins #1
Don’t wade through endless slides like a mindless zombie – keep it short and effective.
#2
Don’t stay up all night working on your slides like a blood-sucking vampire – plan your workflow and follow a road map.
#3
Don’t pull slides from other presentations last minute, and create a Frankenstein of a deck, design for the audience in front of you.
Making an engaging, compelling and attention winning pitch is not easy, but it’s not impossible.
It might feel like a never-ending fight for clarity and simplicity against hordes of data, charts, and formatting, but just like battling the undead what you need are some rules and tools.
Three rules for avoiding a monster of a pitch
#1 Headshot
Zombies only go down with a clean headshot.
A pitch is truly effective when the audiences connect emotionally to the message when they see themselves and their challenge in the solution.
If you have too many slides about you and not your audience, there is no connection.
You, your slides and your content will bunch together meaninglessly like the undead outside a shopping mall.
#2 All-nighters
Vampires only come out at night and stay away from sunlight – you are a hard-working professional and need quality sleep if you are going to be efficient and compelling as you pitch.
Plan your time, so you are not crashing into all-nighters after working long days and only snatching a few hours sleep before a big stage presentation as this puts your pitch, idea and all the hard work of scheduling the meeting at risk.
Use the 8 Steps to Showtime presentation road map to plan your workflow and time, so you are fresh and ready to engage your audience.
#3 Thrown together
You may already have a slide that is similar to what you need today but don’t waste time digging through folders of old presentations looking for it as when all these different slides are stitched together it becomes an obvious mess.
The formatting is often different slide by slide and needs time-consuming fixing; text positioning can be a few pixels miss-aligned and become a distraction.
Overall the message flow is bulky, lumbering and ineffective. And all your left with is a slide deck shuffling around like Igor sweeping up your audiences discarded attention.
So this Halloween; avoid the forces of evil as you pitch online or at in-person meetings.
Banish lifeless pitches which suck away precious time and attention.
Instead, stand brave and stand down the hordes by pitching with a clean tight message, emotive slides and an outstanding performance.
Thank you for your time and attention, and please share any of your pitch horror stories below.
The killer plague sweeping the globe is another risk to your pitch, get this free guide to online pitching sharing ten tips to help you be amazing at your online pitches.