Pitch Anything by Klaff Oren

Author:Klaff, Oren [Klaff, Oren]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Published: 2011-10-03T03:11:26.750000+00:00

Chapter 5

Frame Stacking and Hot Cognitions

In Chapter 4, I showed you the first three phases of a pitch. By this point, you have held the target’s attention for a while. The target knows the essentials: who you are, why this idea is important, how it works, what the “secret sauce” is—and what the target gets when he or she buys. But you’re here to do more than just show and tel ; this is a pitch, and you’re here to make a deal happen. Now you have about five minutes left to propose something concrete and actionable—something so compel ing that it wil cause your target to chase you to get what you have.

Welcome to the next phase.

Phase 4: Frame Stacking and Hot Cognitions

In the course of my activities seeking out money for deals, I discovered that investors do not operate only on cold, rational calculation. Do you think that the guy sitting across the table from you is an analytical machine?

The target can like your deal (or be afraid of it) before he knows much detail about it—and the target probably can decide “Yes” or “No” without even knowing what it is. This is hot cognition at work. Deciding that you like something before you fully understand it—that’s a hot cognition.

We have been led to believe over time by managers, consultants, bankers, and professors of finance that business is analytical. That it’s rational. That there are three very wel -ordered stages in each business decision: Identify the problem, examine solutions, and make judgments.

This makes sense, and this is how it should be in a perfect economic world. In fact, if you took out a blank sheet of paper and asked yourself, “How should I make this decision?” that’s how you probably would do it. Research. Analyze. Decide. And if we were al computer-like or even behaved like rational economists think we do, it would work this way. But we aren’t, and it doesn’t. What’s intriguing here is that when we decide on something, we believe that it’s because we real y “thought it through” or we “used a decision matrix.” We think that we are smart, careful, and rational decision makers.

In decision making, however, we don’t do much analysis, if any at al . We go with our gut. When Jack Welch eventual y wrote his biography, it wasn’t cal ed Intense Analysis; it was titled, Straight from the Gut. And when George Soros updates his next edition of The Alchemy of Finance, he’s going to include the research of Dr. Flavia Cymbalista, who believes that we feel decisions in our body, not our mind.

There’s a whole side to us that computers don’t have and the “rational economic man” economists like to talk about doesn’t have either. Our bodies “know” the situations we meet in life and how we should respond.

“Brain Scanners Can See Your Decisions Before You Make Them” is the title of a provocative article that appeared in Wired. The first line in the article reads, “You

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