Pitch to Win (Half Day) | School of Marketing | ANA

Pitch to Win (Half Day)

Essential Skills for Pitching in the New Economy
(Half Day Workshop)

Pitching has changed because business has changed. Once the domain of marketing departments and agencies, pitching has become integral to innovation itself. If a team cannot decisively engage senior decision-makers on the worth of its innovation, productivity suffers. Knowing how to pitch has never been more important. Today, organizations are flatter. Marketing capabilities are more decentralized. Training budgets are lower. Short-term contractors are involved at every level, and differently experienced people join ad hoc teams more often. In the process and wake of digital transformation, few companies have developed an accessible process for training people to pitch together effectively.

Our workshop helps build fast chemistry and confidence with diverse people to win together as a flexible and responsive team when pitching to an audience of senior decision-makers.

This workshop is not about presentation skills. Not about the number of slides in a deck, the number of words on a slide, or when to use an image or text. Pitch skills do not concern decks. Pitch skills concern the team presenting the pitch, and the quality of engagement they can create with their audience. In a pitch, the audience is evaluating the team just as much as (if not more than) the idea the team is presenting. This workshop will help you control and improve the quality of that engagement, for a greater return on your investment (time, talent, and resources) and to win new business.

The products of our workshop are efficient team building, a common vocabulary, and purpose for cross-discipline participants, as well as exercises to identify vulnerabilities and solutions in pitch – without the constant attention of a senior pitch leader.

Who Is This Workshop For?

This workshop is for teams of 10-15 people who pitch creative concepts to senior decision-makers:

  • Junior professionals wanting to improve their contribution and confidence in a pitch
  • Mid-career marketers (across disciplines) eager to implement an updated process and skill set for succeeding in ad hoc teams
  • Seasoned pitch team leaders tired of flying people to pitches who don’t say anything (or who say too much), and who want the efficiency of a common process, skill set and vocabulary for their teams, in order to do more independently in the formulation and execution of a winning pitch

This workshop is especially valuable to in-house agency personnel pitching in the gig economy. All workshop participants should have participated in a pitch previously.

Workshop Benefits

The benefits of attending this workshop fall under the following key drivers of growth: driving innovation, improving employee alignment, and improving collaboration.

This workshop helps attendees drive innovation and win new business with ad hoc / cross-discipline teams by teaching them:

  • How to add people to (or join) an ad hoc pitch team for a valuable new opportunity
  • How to build chemistry with teammates that your decision-maker audience trusts
  • How to maintain, socialize and improve that culture with different team members

This workshop helps attendees improve employee alignment, focus, and collaboration by teaching them:

  • How to give/receive criticism to improve individual performance for team success
  • How to participate in a team in different roles with purpose, respect, and energy

This workshop helps attendees improve results from innovation, collaboration, and team-building by teaching them:

  • How to listen and participate in engagement with executive audiences, while also concentrating on speaking
  • How to speak and segue with energy between fellow team members
  • How to respond together to impromptu questions, then return to a presentation
  • The process and confidence to communicate innovation to senior decision-makers without the involvement of middle management

This workshop helps attendees to increase new business wins and resiliency by teaching them:

  • How to “Feel the Audience” and make impromptu adjustments as a team for success
  • How to be responsive to different levels of unplanned engagement from the audience
  • How to champion what success looks like with your team and audience
  • Narrative tactics to maintain momentum, clarity and avoid derailment with audience

This workshop helps attendees increase employee satisfaction and reduced employee turnover by teaching them:

  • How to build confidence and speak with purpose and vision
  • How to avoid frustration and wasted time by knowing the difference between education vs selling and sensing when to rebalance them in a pitch
  • How to establish their presence through various physical variables

Download the full agenda here


Faculty:


  • Michael Quinn

    Michael has built agencies by winning pitches, both on-staff and as an agency founder, for over 20 years. Today, he teaches practical skills and offers insight based on experience, ongoing industry research and recent conversations about pitching with senior corporate decision-makers.

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