MasterStroke with Monica Enand & Sejal Pietrzak

Pitching - It's About Connection

• Season 1 • Episode 12

Share episode

We would love to hear from you, send us a text!


It’s how you make them feel!

Pitching isn't just about selling products; it's about selling ideas, visions, and, ultimately, yourself.  People do business with other people. There is a personal element to everything that we do. Find the shared interest, capture attention! Join hosts Monica Enand and Sejal Pietrzak for a special episode on what it take to have a successful pitch. 



Georgianna Moreland - Creator, Executive Producer & Managing Editor;
Matt Stoker - Editor


Monica Enand:

You know, everyone has a plan until Mike Tyson punches you in the face. So you got to be ready to roll with whatever happens, and I think that the key is, as we're talking about, I would say, solve one of the top three problems on your audience's mind, like talk to them about their problems and how you're going to solve them.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Welcome to the masterstroke podcast with monica enid and sejo patrizak conversations with founders, ceos and visionary leaders in technology and beyond.

Monica Enand:

One of the biggest lessons of my career is learning how to pitch something, whether it's pitching myself, pitching my company, pitching an idea. You know I think I've shared with you that I went to school for electrical and computer engineering at Carnegie Mellon and if you had asked my 22-year-old self, like how important are sales skills, I would have gone, oh, not important at all. Like technical skills are all that matter. Like I don't care about sales skills. I either will never need them or, if I need them, I'm sure they're easy to acquire, and I probably gave them no respect or no importance. When you started out your career, did you feel like you knew the importance of sales skills?

Sejal Pietrzak:

No, I don't think I really knew the importance, but it's funny For you, inherently engineering and the analytical side was a part of you. Right, it's inherent for me. I didn't know what it was, but I think sales or you know, I never thought of it as pitching, I never thought of it as sales was more inherent to me, um, and, and so it just came easily, you know, influencing or pushing for something you don't really know what you're doing. I mean, I remember being in college and, um, desperately wanting a, uh, an internship in my sophomore year at General Electric, and I applied through the school's career services office and I didn't get it, and it was for a summer internship after my sophomore year. And I found out later that most of the kids who had gotten it were juniors, you know, going into their senior year, and for whatever else reason, I wasn't the right fit for it, I guess. But I really wanted it and I didn't believe that there wasn't an opportunity to get it. And so every week I used to call the person who was in charge of the intern program at GE. I was there in Virginia at college and he was up in Connecticut, and I would just leave a voicemail.

Sejal Pietrzak:

I would usually just call college and, and he was up in Connecticut and I would just leave a voicemail. I would usually just call I mean, that's that's kind of pitching right, that's kind of selling yourself, um, if you didn't sell yourself enough in the interview or through your resume but you really wanted the job, um, and I would just leave these voice messages. And I remember we were at beach week and so this is the week right after school finals is over and you're hanging out with your friends, and this is before cell phones. And I walked over about a half a block to a payphone. I remember exactly where I was at this payphone and there I could see the sand and I could see the ocean, and I'm on the payphone leaving a voice message, thinking I was going to be leaving a voice message because it was like four or five o'clock. I remember the sun, I can remember it exactly. And all of a sudden he picked up and this is after I had left for the intern director four or five, six voicemails over the course of those five, six weeks. Um, every week I would call.

Sejal Pietrzak:

The internship program was supposed to start the following week and I figured this was my last chance and I was going to leave him a voicemail and say I was still very, very interested for the internship program in GE. And he picked up and he said, in fact, that someone had dropped out, had dropped out Amazing. And if I wanted it, um, I, I had to be in Binghamton, new York on Sunday for, or Monday, and the internship would start. Um, and, and this was Wednesday, wow, and literally beach week was supposed to be over on Friday or Saturday. I left on Thursday. Week was supposed to be over on Friday or Saturday.

Sejal Pietrzak:

I left on Thursday, drove back to New Jersey where I lived, um, got my stuff packed up, and, and then there I was. On Monday I went to Bingham. I drove to Binghamton, new York. Here I was, you know, a 19 year old getting ready to go, and, um, and, and it was amazing, I didn't know anything about what I was going to be doing. I mean, they sent me a package I think it arrived Friday, maybe at my house in New Jersey, and it was amazing. But that's about pitching right, I guess I never thought of it that way.

Monica Enand:

You obviously had some innate persistence and perseverance skills and I think that's really what it's all about. I listened to you tell that story and I think, oh gosh, you know, you and I are about the same age and so I think of myself at 19,. I would never have done that. I would have been so worried that that was annoying, and if they said no, they meant no, and really it wasn't annoying because you were solving a problem that he had. He had someone drop out at the last minute and you were solving a problem for him by being there right place, right time.

Monica Enand:

Well, it wasn't just right place, right time Cause you did it once. It was right place, right time Cause you did it over and over and over again and then all of a sudden, one time it ends up being right place, right time. You know, I think about myself and I wouldn't have done that. But I think about my kids now and I think kids today think, oh my God, they think you would be an insane, crazy person to physically call someone, because I think this generation is so averse to calling. But sometimes you know calling when people aren't expecting a call. But sometimes you know calling when people aren't expecting a call, when they're expecting an email. Or you know, we sometimes did in our business direct mail campaigns, even though you know that was sort of out of favor or more people were doing email marketing. And you've even talked about the magic of kind of a handwritten letter.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Right, if you really want to impress someone, send them a handwritten thank you note. Do you know, when I was CEO, I used to send handwritten notes when somebody did an amazing job on a project or there was a success that was above and beyond and I always thought, well, maybe they care about it, maybe they don't, but it mattered because it was something that I know, I cared about. When people gave me something handwritten and then I would see in people's desks, next to their desk, the handwritten note that I had sent them, pinned to their corkboard, and I'm like, wow, it mattered to them. I sent that like a year ago and it's still up there.

Monica Enand:

It's about capturing attention right. And in this world, how do you capture attention? And I'll go back to saying, boy, I really wish I had known how important these skills were and I had acquired them along the way. Because when I started Zapproved and I started pitching, I have to tell you I think I was horrible. Like I look back now and I go, oh my God, I sucked. I can't believe that. And no wonder people said no so many times. I mean, I think there's a lot of rejection in getting startups. But I do look back and go, wow, it was something I really had to learn on the fly, because at first, you know, I just don't think I had any idea of how to capture people's attention.

Monica Enand:

It took me a long time to figure out how to do and people kept giving me feedback on my pitch. You know they were trying to help me. So they would say like, oh, you know you need to change your pitch this way or you need to think about this in your pitch. And I would get so irritated I would think, oh my God, these people are constantly talking about my pitch and they're not listening to the content of what I'm saying. Like I've got this great idea and there's great new technology and there's a great new product. You know that I can build and I don't understand why they're so focused on the pitch. And then, of course, I learned the hard way that no, no, no People had to be able to understand. You know that you had to wrap your great idea in something that people cared about right, and you had to capture their attention and make sure it was something that people cared about.

Sejal Pietrzak:

How do you capture their attention? How do you know what they care about?

Monica Enand:

Yeah, I mean, I think this is one where it takes doing a lot of homework. You know it's really knowing. You know we've talked about. You mentioned that you have sticky note on your desk all the time and that it always has the three most important things you want to get done Right. And look every busy, every important person of worth has 99 problems all the time. It's not just Jay-Z who has 99 problems, like everybody's got 99 problems. And it's like if the top three are the ones that you're going to focus on, then I think you have to figure out if you're addressing their top three right, and that takes the top three things that they care about.

Sejal Pietrzak:

So when they're looking at you as your company and you're in, you know their potential investors what are? What do you think those top few things might be that they care about?

Monica Enand:

Well, I think if you're pitching for investors, it's a little easier. It depends on if you're pitching individuals or institutions, although I believe that when you're pitching institutions, everyone is an individual. So it is true that you can be pitching an institution and you can look at their investment, theses and their investment areas and their historical. I always looked at like in that in the legal industry, had they ever done legal tech? How did that investment go? And I would start with those kinds of questions like, hey, can you tell me a little bit about this investment and what you learned? And I would try to make sure that I understood first, understood as much as I could without talking to them, but then understood a little bit about, tried to, you know, ask them so that that I kind of could tailor. I mean, honestly, I was tailoring my pitch to to understand what their objections might be.

Sejal Pietrzak:

I think that's really, really important, no matter what you're pitching. If you're pitching yourself for a job, if you're pitching a company, like you were, you know whatever it is. If you're selling a product and you're in sales for um, you know an organization. It's always good to do the research in advance and know your audience Right. I was just interviewing someone yesterday and he clearly had not done any research, didn't know a single thing about my background, and I thought it was so strange. I mean, usually people have at least looked you up on LinkedIn.

Monica Enand:

No, and some people when I coach them and I say, hey, do the research, read that article that the person wrote, or watch a video that the interview that the person did and reference it, they feel like it's stalker behavior.

Monica Enand:

They're like, oh my God, I don't want to be stalker and I'm like, no, no, that is not stalker behavior. That is doing your homework, doing your research. I think too many times we're kind of all, as humans, wrapped up in ourselves and we think it's about us and we think we have something great to say and some new revelation and we really want to share it with people and our passion and enthusiasm might show through and that's wonderful and some people will receive that, but most people won't, because most people are wrapped up in themselves and their problems and that's just how we live in the world, like it's how it's the reality. And so accepting that and deciding it's not about me, it's really got to be about you and it's got to be about figuring out what your top three items are and figuring out how to address those top three items.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's what matters to them. And by knowing your audience, I love what you said about it's an institution or it's a company that you are pitching for a job, but you're also pitching the individual. I find that getting at the beginning of if I'm thinking about an interview, you know it's nice to sort of have a connection, a personal or anything. It was just a meeting that we were having and I knew we only had 30 minutes for the meeting and the person who was the CFO of the division is who I was meeting with.

Sejal Pietrzak:

And this is when I was at Wells Fargo and I get on the phone and he says hello. He's like hi, sejal. And I said hi, and I jumped right into what I needed to talk to him about and I, you know, I had very specific things that I knew was going to take a half an hour and we only had half an hour on the phone. His assistant had made it very clear that we only had half an hour and it was maybe 10 o'clock in the morning. I finished my little spiel at 10.02, 10.03, and it's quiet.

Sejal Pietrzak:

And he said well, good morning, sejal, how are you, how's your day? And I was like, oh man, I forgot about that. There's a personal aspect of business and that's really important and I've never, you know, isn't that funny. This is 20 plus years later and I still remember that story because it was so it was. It was eyeopening for me to say there is a personal element to everything you do and building that relationship up front and and remembering that you're not just in a business meeting or you're not just pitching yourself or you're not just pitching your company, but that you're dealing with a person.

Monica Enand:

Yeah, people do business with people, people buy things from people that they like. People want to spend time with people that they can connect with and enjoy, and this is one reason why I share the feedback that people should always put their interests. You know, when everyone's trying to fit their resume on one page and they're worried it's going too long, and they're, and they're, you know, trying to cut their interests, like who cares that I'm interested in blah, blah, blah, cross country skiing or I don't know? No, I think it's really important to put some interests in there, because in an interview people aren't holding your resume. They want to connect and figure out some way to kind of build rapport and establish a personal connection, and that's a great way.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Oh, it's so true. It's so true.

Monica Enand:

I mean being able to then have that personal connection and then, by the way, they remember you for it, and I think one of the ways that you can be memorable to people is to get them to put themselves in a situation that they've been in that might've stirred up a lot of emotions. It's the old, you know, maya Angelou, you know people don't forget how you made them feel Right, right, and I think it's. It's that, um, like, one of the things I would do is we were selling legal software to for the litigation industry, and so I would ask people have you ever been sued Like? Did you ever go through discovery? What's your experience with that?

Sejal Pietrzak:

And have them start talking, which is actually really interesting.

Monica Enand:

And anyone who's ever been sued or been through discovery is just like you. You can just see their whole body language go oh yeah, and they talk about how awful it was, because it's an awful, awful process. And then, if you can talk about like, okay, well, we have a way to make this, you know, less overwhelming, less risk, all of the all of the great things that you can do to to make it better, that's what's what you're always trying to do. It's important to plan, I think, but I think it's. You know, everyone has a plan until Mike Tyson punches you in the face, so you got to be ready to roll with whatever happens, and I think that the key is, as we're talking about, I would say, solve one of the top three problems on your audience's mind, like talk to them about their problems and how you're going to solve them and how you're going to bring value. One of the other things that you know I was thinking about is talking to people about the downside risk. You and I have talked about how we make decisions right and how we decide whether to do something, and one of the exercises we go through is what's the potential upside of doing this and what's the potential downside, and I do think it's human nature to protect the downside more so than getting excited about the upside, like you might get excited about the upside but you're worried about the downside, and that's a scary thing. I so I I also think it's important to talk to people about hey, there's low downside risk in doing this. We can try it in this minimal way and if it doesn't work, what have we lost? We've lost very little like and and this is how we'll know and this is how we'll shut it down.

Monica Enand:

I have entrepreneurs that come to me and say, hey, I want to start a company, but my significant other, my husband, my spouse, my wife is nervous about me quitting my job and taking some of our money and doing this. And I'll always say define how much downside risk you're willing to tolerate, and then the person can get comfortable with that and like it'll be, like, okay, we're going to have this fixed amount of money that we're going to spend on this business and when it's over, it's over and we promise you know you start looking for a job, or we're going to spend a fixed amount of time and and after six months, if this hasn't, if this, this and this hasn't happened, then we then we promise you know we're going to abandon it. I think those kinds of conversations are really important with getting people comfortable but like what's the worst case scenario of this goes wrong, and taking those worst case scenarios in chunks. You told me a story about when you were at a company and you pitched an expansion. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

Sejal Pietrzak:

Yeah, no, absolutely. And I did exactly what you're saying about the downside risk being very little, you know. So I was at Active this is back in 2009 or 2010, 2009. And we were really successful with our expansion into London. And then we had also expanded already into Australia. We had an office there and I wanted to get into Asia Pacific. And so I was going to our executive team, our CEO and our CFO and our president, and saying we should expand into Singapore to be able to take on the Asia Pacific market at this point. And this is why and I shared the value what could it bring to the company I shared that you know there's little downside risk.

Sejal Pietrzak:

I was looking for investment, but that I felt we would have that return on investment very quickly. And it wasn't necessarily one of the top three things, like you say, monica, when we were pitching it, because there are a lot of other things the company had to do. This was just sort of an added benefit or expense, the way you see it, but it wasn't something that was the most important thing for the business, not even the top three, but it was a cool opportunity. What I realized pretty quickly was that there wasn't going to be because it wasn't the top three focus areas was that there wasn't going to be because it wasn't the top three focus areas the kind of investment that I was looking for, you know, to really expand quickly and to do what we needed to do. But what I did get was a okay, you can go ahead and do it, but we're not going to give you any money to do it, meaning there's not going to be a lot of investment.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Now, you know, we were able to, you know, say we've made money from EMEA operations and from Australia and we can sort of utilize that, because there's always a little bit of seed money you need. But we had to use what we had already budgeted for some of the other areas of the business and be able to utilize that and just shift the money towards and it towards, you know, a Singapore office, and so it had to be very scrappy and so, you know, even though we were a big company, what I was running was a small part of this bigger company, and so we had to. This is, you know, we had to really think about ways. How could we do it? You know, back then, and we shared hotel rooms when we went, you know, we always flew economy class. We did all of the things that you know you do when you're building a business and really saving money and thinking about every dollar, right, but it was so fun and it was so great and we ended up doing it and we ended up being really successful and growing our business in Asia Pacific, and and then, once you start growing, you get this momentum.

Sejal Pietrzak:

But the important part was was that, you know, during that pitch. You can imagine I'm sitting in the conference room and and there I am on one side and there's the executives on the other side and they were really interested and excited about the opportunity for us. There was a desire to expand and grow the business and all the value that I shared in the meeting. But I had to reduce the risk. I had to say we could do it without the big investment that I initially was asking for, and I had to shift our, our strategy and shift the way we would go to market, um, go to an, an enter into that market, to be able to do it. But the great thing is what I went back to the team is we got approval to do it. I never told the team that you know, um, that you know I wanted X and we ended up getting X minus in terms of you know, whatever it was. But the more important thing is that we were excited to be able to go do it.

Monica Enand:

No, and I think that's that's a testament to you and your perseverance again, because I think a lot of people would have heard you can go do it, but we're not going to give you any money to go do it, and a lot of people would have gone well, you're just setting me up for failure, or you're? You know it's, this isn't going to work and I'm just going to give up. Um, but the truth is you didn't give up and, and I think you know, sometimes selling the value is really important. Always selling actually I shouldn't say sometimes, always selling the value is important, but a lot of times what makes the difference is reducing the risk. That's right, because people are. There is an asymmetry in how people look at upside and downside. People are much more. Humans have a bias, you know, not to worry about the downside risk and worry about what could go wrong.

Sejal Pietrzak:

Yeah, and I think the other lesson learned there is shifting expectations. So when you expect something and then you said that, you know there's times when if you didn't get what you wanted, you would look at it in a negative way. I think the benefit was that looking at it and shifting the expectation to say, okay, but at least we got a, yes, you know we can go do it. And looking at it as the glass half full rather than, oh, the glass is half empty.

Monica Enand:

Key lessons learned. It's it's not about you, it's about them, and that's number one. Like think about them, think about do research, do homework, think about them, articulate the, the value you can add to them or how you might solve their problem. Be crisp, because people don't have a lot of attention, a lot of time, or their attention gets distracted Really so true.

Monica Enand:

So true, to be really crisp, think about how you're making them feel, help them with putting them in a situation where they have to feel something, they remember something they feel, and then lowering the downside risk, and I think you follow those sort of four things. And then, as you said, being you know, because we talked about being crisp and being engaging and capturing attention, being ready to pivot, like you said, and being creative about pivoting. Those are kind of the key elements to me of being a good pitcher or, you know, just a good person to do business with yeah, exactly.

Sejal Pietrzak:

You know, you said this at one point, which is two people may say the exact same thing, but one will get it and the other won't. Why is that? It's about how you made the person feel that you were working with or pitching to Thank you all for joining us.

Sejal Pietrzak:

I'm Monica Enid and I'm Sejal Pietrzak, and thank you to our executive producer, georgiana Moreland. Thank you for joining us. Please follow and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. We would love to hear from you on our LinkedIn page at Masterstroke podcast with Monica Enid and Sejal Pietrzak.