The Pop-up Pitch

Do you have situations when you need to sell your ideas to management? Or to explain your solution to the team? Or to convince someone with a selected approach?
The Pop-up Pitch: The Two-Hour Creative Sprint to the Most Persuasive Presentation of Your Life. This is a really helpful book from master of visualization Dan Roam on how to do that (overview of his book regarding visualization is there).

As you can suggest from the book name, it is focused on creation of persuasive presentations. As a base the author uses storytelling principles, sketching, simplicity and emotional involvement to attract the auditory attention.

Main Ideas:

✏️ To make a successful meeting you need to define its purpose. Pop-up pitch is focused on the meetings to present new ideas and meetings for sales (to request an action).

✏️ Every meeting is about persuasion. The most effective approach is positive persuasion when you don't put a pressure on the people, but attract and emotionally involve them. Positive persuasion consists of 3 elements:
1. Benefits. The presenter truly believes that idea is beneficial for the audience.
2. Truth. The idea is something the audience actually wants to get.
3. Achievability. We can do that with a clear step-by-step plan.

✏️ Visual Decoder. You should always start preparation with your idea description the following dimensions:
- Title – What’s the story about?
- Who? What? – Main characters and key elements
- Where? – Where things happen and how people/parts interact
- How many? – Key numbers and quantities, measurements
- When? – Timeline and sequence of events
- Lessons Learned – What the audience should remember at the end

✏️ Pitch. It's a 10-min presentation based on storytelling techniques. Your story should have the element of drama, ups and downs. The whole storyline consists of 10 steps:
1. Clarity. A clear and simple story title.
2. Trust. Establish a connection with the audience, show that you understand their problems.
3. Fear. Problem explanation.
4. Hope. Show how successful results could look like.
5. Sobering Reality. We cannot continue to do the same, we need to change the approach to achieve another results.
6. Gusto. Offer a solution.
7. Courage. Show the result is achievable with key steps and a clear plan.
8. Commitment. Explain what actions are needed.
9. Reward. Show what audience can have in the nearest future.
10. True Aspiration. The big long-term win.

The book is well-structured with step-by-step guidelines to apply recommendations in practice. It makes me rethink some meetings approach and keep in mind that the most important thing in the presentation is not what you want to say, but what the audience is ready to hear.

#booknook #softskills #presentationskills #leadership