More important than having a great idea is figuring out how to sell it to the boss -- especially in a culture that's not too keen to accept your idea.
How to do it? A couple of academics from Stanford and the University of California at Davis looked at how ideas are successfully sold in, of all places, Hollywood. Selling a script or a movie may not be all that close to selling your idea for a new product or marketing campaign. But the lessons ring true, no matter what kind of idea you're peddling.
Here's what Stanford's Roderick Kramer and UC-Davis' Kimberly Elsbach discovered:
"A lot of naive pitchers we talked to assumed what was important was for them to be passionate and to get their concept across clearly," says Kramer, a former script writer and psychologist who is a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford. "That's important, to be on fire about an idea. But the other thing was to what extent the catcher was engaged and also felt creative."
In fact, adds Kramer, the person hearing the idea "has to feel like (he) is drawn in and contributing." The more you can make the potential buyer of the idea believe he or she came up with or helped improve the concept the better. You need to effectively persuade the "suit" that he or she is truly creative.
My takeaway: Never underestimate the importance of ego and vanity -- not yours but the person sitting across the table -- in selling your idea.
Related Stories: | Topics:Innovation, ideas, Stanford, Roderick Kramer, University of California-Davis, Hollywood, Kimberly Elsbach |
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Recent Comments | 7 Total
August 26, 2003 at 4:43pm by Robert Moss
Hello John,
As a copywriter who freelances for ad agencies and has his own clients, I can attest to the importance of your audience feeling part of the process. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to listen carefully to the people you're pitching to. All it takes is one word to find the key to bring them on. Let it pass and they might do the same on your ideas.
Best always,
Rob
August 27, 2003 at 7:15am by Bart
As an innovator I find it is crucially important to be able to sell your idea. However, one of the problems I encountered was that there is a fine line between taking the other into your idea or the other picking up the idea and presenting it as his.I seem to have some ego and vanity too.
August 27, 2003 at 6:19pm by Russ
I am rarely disappointed with your tips, but the "Pitching Ideas" was a bit thin. Perhaps I was eagerly wanting a silver bullet to deal with the world's most risk averse COO. I love your magazine, but this tip missed.
August 27, 2003 at 7:51pm by Jack O'Connor
Although the study appears to be plowing old ground, it is true that very few people in business understand what they are doing there. The whole concept of pitching ideas is a fool hardy exploration into the void. Businesses no more pitch ideas or products than the man in the moon exists. People "purchase" ideas, projects, problems, goods, services, etc. because they can visualize the solution to some of their headacres being held in the value of the offering.
Inherently that means they buy when they are ready and to "sell" you have to listen closely to the questions you pose to them and understand when you are learning enough about the "customer" to be ready when he is to "buy". This is true with products, ideas, dogma, etc. What Stanford should study is why it is important to publish a study!
August 28, 2003 at 7:04pm by Vic Cauchi
In the past year I have done the 'passion as personality' thing, drawn in the sleepy, and even stroked the egoless, and if there is one thing I've learned it's that the message has to be as good as the medium. But in this post dot-bomb (tech-wreck) world, the audience has become smarter or just less likely to get off their hands. So without a good quality business case to fall on you can bark at the moon till your throat goes dry...the audience wants meat!
I've had reasonable success at parlaying nearly clarvoyant skill at converting my catchers into an engaging dialogue, but most of the time it turns out to be nothing more than an excercise in 'taking candy from a baby'. It became even easier if I learned about my audience beforehand. The result in those cases was that I felt good about my pitch techniques; I just wondered if they felt as though they'd been taken. So I stopped the practice and directed my passion to telling a good story about the product and empowered my audience to listen. Invariably the questions came after and lasted to several emails and phone calls.
August 29, 2003 at 6:37pm by Tony Ramos
The scary thing is that more people are pitching than ever, and they are using a tool that they believe supplements their pitch: PowerPoint.
A soulless pitch cannot be made more exciting via bullet points. And since most PPT users execute their presentations in a linear, unadaptive style, they are prevented from playing a freeform riff from the words or ideas of their audience. Expediency (e.g., Content Wizard) becomes dogma ("hey, why doncha use this presentation I made last month").
Persuasive, flexible and artful use of PowerPoint is out there, but with grade schools and church clubs scooping up InFocus projectors of the dot-bombed, you know that things are getting worse before they get better.
September 9, 2003 at 11:57pm by Bob
Interesting- I watched larry ellisons speech at Oracle world in San francisco- Cool lazers and a huge stage using a montage system. Then he steps out and has his powerpoint slides. Looked awful.
Big black bullet points on a green stage.
All it said to me was - dont buy oracle stock.