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Pitch Anything - Oren Klaff

By Josh Kaufman

A funny thing happens when you combine the old art of selling with the new science of neuropsychology: you realize you’ve been suffering from a bad case of Caveman Syndrome. Your modern mind is capable of presenting complex logic and data, but when you pitch a potential customer, they’re evaluating your presentation with the most ancient parts of their brain. That fundamental mismatch is a recipe for poor results.

Pitch Anything is a primer on how to structure your sales presentation to ensure your prospects find it enticing enough to buy. In order to close the deal, your job as a salesperson is to grab and maintain the prospect’s attention and interest, help them recognize your offer as an opportunity, and cultivate their desire for what you have to offer.

To accomplish these objectives, you must fully appreciate that your prospect is evaluating you and your offer at a very primal level: who is dominant in the situation, who exhibits the most confidence, who is chasing / who is being chased, and whether or not a new piece of information is worth considering. Other major topics include framing, motivation, social signals, loss aversion, curiosity, and authority.

Oren Klaff is a veteran investment banker, and illustrates these principles with vivid stories of high-stakes deals. Some pitches go well, and some of them are disasters. Klaff doesn’t sugarcoat his mistakes, which serve as excellent examples of what not to do.

Pitch Anything has fundamentally changed how I think about the sales process. Parts of the book are disconcerting, but in the best way possible: the human brain undeniably works in particular ways, regardless of how we might prefer it to work. Tune your pitch to your prospect’s ancient brain, and you win.

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