Is Your Pitch Framed Right?

Is your sail big enough?

Many people are concerned that their talks, presentations, or pitches lack the oomph, power, or grandiosity to really capture people. If they are worrying about that, they are usually right.

Unfortunately, many people who don't think about that are the ones who need to read this article.

So let me first tell you a story about whether your sail is big enough.

In the sailing world, particularly in the old days with the clippers and pirate ships, the more sail you could put on a ship, the faster it would go. Do you have enough sail to capture enough wind to give you momentum?

I liken that to setting your frame in a talk.

“Is your sail big enough?” in the sense of giving a presentation or a pitch is about how big the idea you're tying your talk to is. The bigger and grander the idea, the more it will capture the imagination and the more momentum you'll gain in your talk.

This is all done with framing. Framing is where you focus your talk and it’s boundaries. Any talk can be framed in terms of an aspect of your topic or aspects of an adjacent topic. You can frame things in straightforward ways or imaginative ways. Framing itself is an art, and I've talked at length about it in these articles, my presentations, and my coaching. It's one of the most important things to do with anything related to a pitch, presentation or talk.

However, in the past I've mostly been talking about framing in the opposite way. Most of the time, people are scattered in their approach. Their talk is all over the place. They're doing things that's going everywhere. I recommend framing it down to a portion of what they want to discuss to get depth in a specific area, particularly if there's a time constraint.

I've often said that if you're doing a TEDx talk and you are a scientist in a certain field, you can't give the whole fundamentals of that field and how your research fits inside of it in a 15-minute talk. It's just not possible.

What you can do is frame your talk in search of one question and answer. You've got a question about this thing. Can this thing happen? Is it possible it can exist? And how you go about answering that. That frames the talk down. It still makes sense to people and it can be compelling even if they don't understand the full breadth of that subject. So that is an example of framing and I stand by that. That's still incredibly useful.

However, framing can be used another way, too. If you have a small startup with a small niche in there, a very specific product that does a very specific thing, talking just about that product and the people that you serve is important. But if it's the whole talk, then you won't do very well with your investment pitch.

What you want to do is frame that into the more significant trend, the larger market. What's happening with people in this industry? How the industry is trending? What's happening with the industry?

Now, you still want to talk about your ideal client. Who you're serving. How you're serving them, and the difference you're making with them. But you want to broaden your sail, catch a little wind, and follow the industry trends. It may be even broader than that. You may have a social trend feeding into this industry, and you might want to discuss that.

A talk doesn't necessarily have to have one single frame. If you did have a single frame for your entire talk, it can become a little boring and monotonous. Again, it depends on how long you've had. You can make multiple frames and join them together as long as people know where they are in that frame and how they fit together.

For example, let's say that you've got a startup that has something going on in MedTech. And you've discovered or created a way to do a test that will test for a certain type of cancer. Now this type of cancer is fairly rare. But it's been hard to detect until now.

If you talk about this discovery and the business you're associating with it and the development of this product in terms of a very small percentage of people who suffer this particular cancer, then you're making an error in framing.

Because that's not your customer. The customers aren't the ones that have that type of cancer. The customer is anyone who's concerned that they have any cancer.

In your frame, you want to discuss the prevalence or significance of the number of cancer sufferers in society. If two out of seven people suffer cancer, then it's a significant market. Then, you talk about the impact of a diagnosis in your presentation. It has a huge impact on the person who is getting diagnosed with some cancer or illness, but they don't know what it is. These people are suffering significant pain. Not necessarily physical pain, but the psychological pain of not being in control and not knowing what is happening.

If you can portray in your presentation and pitch the level of pain and psychological concern that these people have, then you're much more likely to grab the attention of your investors. You both show them the market and their propensity to buy. They're in significant psychological pain, and they need to know the answer.

Now, as we said, only a small percentage of people have this type of cancer. But everybody who has been diagnosed with cancer would probably want to do this test, assuming it's affordable. They will want to know if they have this type of cancer. A negative result has considerable value for these people, assuming again that the test is accurate and reliable.

Another less morbid example might be that you're doing your sporting company. And you've got an accessory that can help cyclists in some way, shape or form, whether it's racing cyclists or commuting hobbyist cycles. If you talk too micro, it might be great to talk to a room full of cyclists because they get it.

But if you are talking to a more general audience, you need to widen the frame. Get more wind in your sails and talk about the cycling trend —how it's trending up, why it's trending up, and the general pitfalls and problems that cyclists face, whether it's competitively or socially.

So next time you are putting together a talk, pitch or presentation, take the time to ask yourself: How big is my sail?

Unpacking Wisdom is a weekly section in which I explore a famous (or not-so-famous) quote and how it applies to the Compelling Communicator.

This quote resonated with me because, in one way or another, I have embraced my ignorance throughout my life. And I do realise how bad that sounds. But it is because I used to be the opposite. I was a real smarty-pants as a kid. I read a lot. More than my parents, I had a lot of random information stuck in my head, and I tended to infer a lot from what I knew. I was certain I was right about almost everything.

This is a dangerous place to be.

I assumed I was right about everything by tying it to something I knew and making connections I thought were logical. This led to an inevitable fall. I was humiliated when I did a science essay when I was about 7 years old. It was about how seasons work. I cracked open a book, saw an image of Earth’s slightly elliptical orbit, and concluded disastrously that summer had happened when Earth was closer to the sun.

Of course, I was humiliated in class.
Everyone laughed at my naivete. -Although to be fair, it wasn’t that I was naive; it was that I was lazy. I put in the minimum amount of effort to reach a conclusion that satisfied me.

But that humiliation was possibly one of the best things that happened to me early in life.

After that, I became much more aware of my ignorance. What am I missing? What are my assumptions? What do I need to take into account?
Because I knew that summer in New Zealand was winter in the UK. But that didn’t fit with the model I had created. If I had considered that, I knew I would have moved forward until I found a model that did fit.

If you spend any time on social media, you will see this exact thing playing out with people time and time again. Intellectual laziness, where people make logical connections from too little information. This is the basis of many of the conspiracy theories you will encounter. This situation has become endemic in our society.

The worst thing is that now if you confront someone’s poor logic or incomplete research, they will not engage in discussion to gain more understanding because they have not embraced their ignorance. Instead, they will defend their ‘model of the world’ as if they were defending their lives or the lives of their loved ones. This is crazy.

Our models of the world are just ideas. They must remain flexible so that we can keep up with the rapid rate of change that we experience in the world. To do this, you must embrace your ignorance.

Because none of us can know everything.

What I am up to this week…

Professionally:

Busy, busy, busy with creating assessments for the Print industry. It is great to learn a new skill, but also mentally draining. And I can’t give into my natural laziness! 😉

Recreationally:

I know this might not come across as recreational, but I have been enjoying getting back into podcasting after a couple of weeks' break. Episode 514, “No Beers for You”, came out this morning as I write this.

What I am reading:

I have been looking to jumpstart my YouTube channel this year, so I have been reading YouTube Secrets by Sean Cannell & Benji Travis. I have also started re-reading Traffic Secrets by Russell Brunson.

What I am watching:

I recently re-watched The Last of Us, and have been working my way back through all of the Rick & Morty episodes.