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  • DAN PINK: One of my favorite things to write was the pitch chapter because y'know I'm a

  • writer and I find myself pitching all the time and I wanted to learn how to do it better.

  • I identified six new pitches for the 21st century. The Pixar Pitch is modeled on the

  • narrative structure of Pixar films and a story artist for Pixar named Emma Coates essentially

  • revealed the source code of this. Once upon a time, every day, one day, because of that,

  • because of that, until finallyblank. Just fill in those blanks and it ends up being

  • powerful. We don't see the world only as a set of logical propositions. We see it as

  • a set of episodes. By enlisting the power of story in a pitch, which is something we

  • don't do that much, it ends up being a very, very effective way to get your message across.

  • Email is a pitch. Get over it. An email is a pitch. It's a plea for attention, it's a

  • plea to engage. The effective email subject lines fall into two categories. They have

  • to be either the category of utilitythey're very useful to people or curiositythey

  • peak people's curiosity. Anything in between, anything that combines the two doesn't work

  • very well. Obama did this very well in the campaign. He sent out a lot of emails, but

  • the most popular email, the subject line was "Hey" Woah. Think about how many times you

  • open an email that doesn't have a subject line. Some people end up opening those first.

  • Why? Because they're curious. One of my favorites is the rhyming pitch. Seems kind of cheesy,

  • if not sleazy which rhymes. Rhymes end up increasing processing fluency and when people

  • are able to process something more fluently, they absorb it more, they understand it better.

  • There was a trial of OJ Simpson, a former football star who was accused of murdering

  • his wife and her friend. They found a glove on the crime scene, so the prosecutor said,

  • well of course it's your glove. Try it on. And he can't get the glove on his hand. In

  • the closing statement, the late Johnny Cochran said to the jury, "If it doesn't fit, you

  • must acquit." What's remarkable is that 18 years later, people remember that. If it doesn't

  • fit, you must acquit. Questions are active, statements are somewhat passive. So if I just

  • make an assertion to you, you'd listen. Okay, cool. You're listening. But if I ask you a

  • question, you inevitably have to respond. A great example of this is Ronald Reagan in

  • 1980 where the economy was in the tank and he could have said "Your economic condition

  • has deteriorated over the last 48 months." Instead he said "Are you better off now than

  • you were 4 years ago?" And that's more persuasive. That's more likely to move people because

  • what happens? They think of am I better off? They start thinking about it and they begin

  • to articulate their own reasons for agreeing with you. So, don't you think we should all

  • use more question pitches? Tweeting is a form of pitching and there's some evidence showing

  • the most important thing you can do in pitching via Twitter is giving people good information,

  • even if it's self promotional, people tend to dig it. And also questions. Questions via

  • Twitter end up being really effective, too. One of them is the one-word pitch. The idea

  • in the world right now is you want ownership of one word. So when people think of you,

  • they think of that word, when people say that word they think of you and actually turns

  • out that President Obama did a pretty good job of this because his word in 2012 was "Forward."

  • All of the ads, all of the public documents had that word. Forward. So he was able to

  • distill his message into one word.

  • The pitch process, when it works well, is inherently collaborative. In some ways, pitch

  • is not the same word because pitch implies I'm gonna throw this to you and you're either

  • gonna catch it or not. It's much more interactive. We have to think of pitching not as I'm gonna

  • sell you on this right now, but essentially here's an invitationan intriguing invitationto

  • have a conversation.

  • - "To Sell Is Human" is about how to move people with authenticity, with passion, and

  • with purpose." - One day, I went back and looked at my sent

  • emails, I looked at my calendar, I looked at the tweets I sent. I realized that an enormous

  • portion of my time involved selling. Not only selling books, but just convincing people,

  • persuading people, cajoling people, I had this bizarre realization that I'm a salesman.

  • - The book truly cemented a suspicion that I've had which is we're living in a world

  • now where we're all sales people.

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