Prepping your pitch can be time-consuming and nerve-racking. After all, success will play a big part in your initiative or offering becoming a reality. That’s why I, Emily, am back again to show you another benefit of the Buy-in Building Blocks: how they accelerate investment. In the last post, Tamsen discussed how the Core Message, Core Case, and Core Story help “prime” your pitch—she laid out a pitch deck structure with your Core Elements to secure agreement with your offering before you even get into the details and evidence for it. I’m going to dive a bit more into some additional benefits of using your Buy-in Building Blocks to develop your pitch, and maybe it will give you the nudge you need to give them a try. To have the BIB delivered to your inbox, click here.
Start with your audience’s goal
Most pitch advice says to start with a single one-sentence description. If you’ve developed your Building Blocks, you have that already in your Core Message.
“To get X [QUESTION], do Y [CORE IDEA].“
Following Tamsen’s pitch deck structure—opening with a slide with your company name plus a sentence stating something along the lines of “we help [AUDIENCE] achieve [Goal]”, followed by a slide with your Core Message—means the Goal and your idea are apparent right away. What’s more, you don’t have to spend your time coming up with a new attention-grabbing sentence for your deck, because yours is unexpectedly obvious already.
Build the argument for your offering
The next step is to present your Core Case, which builds the argument for your idea (initiative, offering), based on shared beliefs with your audience.
“We believe that [BELIEF] and that [BELIEF] which is why we believe [CORE MESSAGE].”
This statement does a lot. Those beliefs are built from elements your audience already wants, and already agrees with, centering the argument for your idea in their point of view. Plus, in order to be a bedrock belief, it has to be one you share—and by stating beliefs you and your audience share, and what you see as the best way to achieve the mutually desired outcome, you’re implicitly and explicitly providing insight into your company and your mission. And, an additional benefit to driving down to those bedrock beliefs: you often find concepts that people can more easily understand.
A good example of that is this statement, which is a version of something one of Tamsen’s clients used to say: “High-efficiency filtration provides recycled and reusable water while extracting the value from waste.” That may mean something to the company, but it’s unlikely to really explain anything to a potential customer or investor. Now imagine instead they said something like this, “Because multiplying actions multiplies their effects, we developed a way to multiply traditional water filtration methods to filter ten times more water in the same amount of time.”
It’s also an instance where the Core Case helps with a tricky part of pitching: speaking to the “gatekeepers,” those people whose influence or (financial) investment you need to serve your ultimate audience. We call these kinds of messages “nested” messages. They’re built the same way as other messages, but each share the Core Case, because even though the gatekeepers may be asking Goal questions like, “Which startup’s water filtration approach will bring me the best return on my investment?”, the answer depends on the strength of each startup’s case to the ultimate audience or customer, the people who determine whether or not the startup will generate the revenue that would provide that investment. In other words, the Core Case, to your ideal audience, sits within your case to the gatekeepers.
Provide structure with a story
Securing financial investment starts with securing emotional and intellectual investment. Nothing does that better than story, because stories are how we make sense of the world and best process new information. When you present your Core Message and Core Case using story structure—the Red Thread—you’re using a “coding language” that your audience’s brains not only instantly recognize, but prefer. Even better, because story structure naturally creates emotional highs and lows, in addition to being more understandable, your pitch is likely to be more engaging and interesting. Even better, the Core Message and Core Case already provide most of the core elements of that Core Story.
As you tell the story, you’re hitting the major points a pitch needs: it states the Goal your offering achieves for your end customer, you address the real Problem that stands in the way (and which your offering also solves), the principles that destabilize the status quo (Problem Principle) and set a new direction (Truth), the differentiating Change your approach represents, all the details for how you and your team will deliver on that approach (Actions), and the results you and your investors can expect (Goal Revisited).
With your Core Story in hand, you’re prepared not only to tell the story of your offering to your audience, but it’s the one your audience will tell themselves about your approach long after you’ve left the room.
And a final note, this has been said before but it’s worth repeating: your Core Story IS your elevator pitch. Once you’ve built that, you have one type of pitch ready to go. Memorize it. Distribute it among the team. When everyone is on the same page, everyone involved can give the simple, engaging story of your approach or initiative.
So grab a copy of the Buy-in Blueprint worksheet or head to this post and sketch it out on your own. Use it to build your Buy-In Building Blocks and see for yourself how they can make designing your message for your pitch, your website, and so many other things that much easier, and get you quickly on the way to securing the investment you need to make your offering a reality.
Please note that many of the links are affiliate links, which means if you buy a thing I link to, I get a percentage of the cost, and then donate it to charity.
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