On pitching and seduction
Pitching is a corporate seduction ritual.
Like peacocks or guppies in the wild, we start the seduction of our prospects with splendid colors and alluring fonts (happily furnished by the creative folks in marketing or at the design agency). Then, we bring language into the equation and we tune our language to the rhythm of the seduction dance; we accent it, to borrow from Seth Godin’s parlance. Whereas on the street, voicing words like value proposition or scalability engender only dumbfounded incomprehension, these terms take on poetic significance in the minds of the prospects we are looking to seduce. Last comes the dance—that elaborate bit of theatre, full of gesticulation, which we run through when we present a sales deck.
But, sometimes, if you’re a bit good and a bit lucky, a funny thing happens in the middle of the seduction ritual. The masks fall off and people suddenly start sounding like people. You can tell when you’ve hit that point in the ritual, because the dialogue suddenly becomes infinitely more authentic and compelling. Instead of pitching AT the prospect with jargon, you find yourself talking WITH the prospect, advancing your own personal ideas, being forward, maybe even saying something provocative. You get enthusiastic about a point you’re making. The prospect is also metamorphosed. To your shock and delight, he/she emerges as not flat but multi-dimensional, an original yet sometimes defensive thinker with only provisional power in a vast system of decisionality—in short: flawed and human.
That’s when the fun begins. Seduction meets persuasion when the bullshit is dropped. It’s a shame that it takes so long to get there, and it’s a shame that the path is often so diabolically convoluted.
