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Last week, my client, ESCHR, entered their first pitch competition ever - and won. Nailed it! The competition was good, very good. It was tough, some of the other businesses have better traction, more experience pitching, and have already garnered investment.

Meanwhile, the guys at ESCHR are more focused on developing their product than marketing, so they don’t pitch. If there was to be any chance of winning, we had to find a way to make them stand out.

Here’s a quick look into how we did it.

The Wrong Story

Starting midweek, we started with a snoozer of a presentation. To be fair, we are talking about search - the little box you use 10+ times a day and never really notice. It’s designed to be boring, plain and simple - more or less forgotten as soon as you’re done with it.

It’s hard not to be boring when that is your starting point.

The first attempt started something like “text is boring, pictures are not boring; we do pictures, so we’re not boring”. First mistake: Negative framing. Saying "not boring" doesn’t help make a point “not boring” because, well, it still uses the word “boring”. Not that we actually used the word, but you get the point. It’s a cognitive bias.

We had a lot of work to do.

The Eureka Moment

​​There are a few books on pitching structure. One of the classics is The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki. ​

It took some back and forth to figure this out, but we got there.

The Right Story

Search is evolving

After 20-years of “text-only” search, it’s evolving. We can see the future being made. Large corporations are starting to come out with visual search - Google has had reverse image search for years, other companies are doing it too. But it’s hard to build and, this time, they’re not giving it away. Companies without billion dollar R&D budgets are being left behind.

Create Drama

We've created a bit of intrigue (new type of search) and a hint of tension (not for everyone). Perfect. Time to paint the picture of how market forces will lead to our conclusion.

The big guys get an unfair advantage, they have eyes. Everyone else, they’re driving blind. It’s tough to win the race when you can’t see the track. Yet, the search evolution has just begun. At the moment, it’s not too painful, but give it some time and the gap will grow, then only the fittest will survive. Pure Darwinism.

Build Emotion

It’s easy to feel the emotion created when the situation is framed like this. Evolve or die. It’s on purpose, loss aversion - the fear of loss, is much more powerful than winning.

Offer a Solution

At this point, people eyes and ears have perked up, we've created tension, intrigue. Everyone is primed for a solution. They want a happy ending. They are giving the storyteller their full attention. It’s time to pitch.

And that’s just how they did it.

• ESCHR.io – visual search for everyone.

A well crafted story. A true story. If you want to hear more, check out their website.

References

For some quick reads on pitching and storytelling check out some of my favourites below while you wait for the next post, where I will distil the top lessons from each :

• Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff
• Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath & Dan Heath

If you want to learn more about cognitive biases and things that influence our behaviour read:

• Switch: How to Change Things When Change Is Hard by Chip Heath & Dan Heath
• Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert B. Cialdini

And the textbook, not for the faint of heart:

• Thinking, Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman ​

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