Pitch

How to sell your solution convincingly?

Andy Weeger

Neu-Ulm University of Applied Sciences

May 9, 2024

Introduction

Relevance

Great ideas are a dime a dozen. What separates the dreamers from the doers is the ability to convince others to get behind the idea. This could mean securing funding, getting buy-in from colleagues, or attracting customers.

Without that ability to sell,
your ideas are likely to stay just that — ideas.

Setting

This is your unique opportunity to present
your idea to the board.

You have 15 minutes to raise the funds for the market-ready development of your solution.

Key is to convince the decision makers that your solution is …

• desirable (i.e. that it sufficiently addresses relevant parts of the challenge),
• viable (i.e. that it creates business value for the company) and
• feasible (i.e. that it can be implemented today within 6 months).

Note: Only your group knows the idea, background information and the total process.
Therefore, keep in mind that you have to present your idea in an easily understandable way.

General remarks

Problem

Make your
problem statement stick.

Demonstrate understanding of the stakeholders values and interests before you provide solutions to problems.

Relevance

The secret to selling
great work is to sell
the idea of the work
before you sell the work.

Make sure you convincingly explain the purpose and vision of your idea to demonstrate your confidence and commitment.

Focus

Make a choice about what’s important and let everything else go.

Try to simplify as much as possible to make it easy for others to understand.

Look ahead

Everything starts with an idea, but this is only the beginning.

Present a roadmap, aka a plan for translating an idea into actions and results.

Sell yourself

When you are selling your idea, the audience must first buy you.

Make sure that the audience trusts you, that you have recognised the problem correctly and are able to lead the solution to success.

Some guidelines

Modes of persuasion

Aristotle, the ancient Greek philosopher, suggested that any spoken or written communication intended to persuade contains three key rhetorical elements:

Logos
Appeals to the audience’s reason, building up logical arguments.

Ethos
Appeals to the status or authority so that listeners are more likely to trust the speaker.

Pathos
Appeals to the emotions, e.g., trying to make the audience feel angry or sympathetic.

Telling good stories includes:

• Thinking up in advance exactly what arguments can be made both for and against a given proposition, selecting the best on your own side, and finding counterarguments to those on the other.
• You need to be clear about what your audience needs to know (or believe, which is the same thing in rhetoric) in order to understand that you are trustworthy, that you have the right to speak on the subject and that you are speaking in good faith. Your audience needs to believe that you are “a pretty honest guy”.
• Finding ways to drive your argument it forward. This is the stuff of your arguments, the way one point proceeds to another, as if to show that the conclusion to which you are aiming is not only the right one, but so necessary and reasonable as to be more or less the only one.

Elements

Behind really good stories is a well thought-out structure that forms the backbone of the story. This backbone, called the story elements, help writers develop great stories. The essential elements of a story are:

Characters
Setup or conflict
Sequence of events (plot)
Resolution

Structure

General structure of a good story/pitch

 

 

 

 

Additional remarks

Tell a story

• Start and end strong
• Relate to the stakeholders

Show don’t tell

• Use valid facts & figures
• Demonstrate your solution to make the audience understand
• Make your value proposition tangible

Grading

Evaluation criteria

The main criteria is how convincing your pitch and solution is.

In addition, we look at the following criteria:

• Students demonstrate excellent understanding of the problem, the approach, the solution and/or the implementation plan.
• Presenters are professional, extremely well prepared, and easily able to respond to even tough questions.
• Visual aids are well done and are used to make presentation more interesting and meaningful.
• The presentation is well organized with a beginning, middle and end. There is a strong organizing theme, with clear main ideas and transitions.
• Presenters speak in a clear voice and show a flair for communicating with the audience.
• Presenters make excellent use of the allowed time.
• The presentation slides are error free (spelling and language).

Q&A