Pitching with Power and Impact for Service Leaders

Pitching with Power and Impact for Service Leaders

Service leaders have to pitch concise and compelling strategic messages to customers, seniors, colleagues and business partners and hold the responsibility for generating revenue. Their key challenge is to communicate new innovation, business and investments to boards, and welcome or unwelcome changes to their teams and the wider workforce.

Overview 

The attention span of the average person is approximately 2 minutes – so it is vital that service leaders can pitch their ideas and messages concisely and powerfully.  In board meetings, for senior team events, for all-hands meetings (and for many other type of internal and external dialogue), the ability to pitch with power and impact is essential.

Whatever the message, a good pitch must be strategic, well-structured, action-focused and confidently-delivered.  During the module, we’ll explore various different pitch structures (PRON, SCQAA, OFBA, M3A) and use verbal signposting to provide structure and focus.

We’ll road-test these pitch scenarios and use a variety of techniques to handle difficult questions and difficult people – ultimately to bring cynics onside and resolve unspoken concerns publicly. A successful pitch is usually the start of a fruitful strategic conversation.

Pre-work and post-work 

Ahead of this module, participants consider possible pitch messages.  These might be:

1. a significant change to a business process that profoundly affects/enhances a product or service, which might be well-received or unwillingly-received by customers
2. a negative message that needs to be understood and accepted by a senior team, in order to be cascaded downward within an organisation
3. a new idea that brings new innovation to an existing successful product or service (where people’s concerns are ‘why fix what’s not broken’

Additional pre-work will require participants to plan these pitch scenarios and respond to a series of questions to help them clarify their strategic intentions, the stakeholder map and the likely questions people will ask.  They should bring along a single slide to support each pitch.

After this module, we ask participants to practice all the structures and to create a template pitch structure that works for them. We suggest that repetition creates positive muscle memory – familiarity means they will be able to use the structures naturally and effortlessly.  we link back to module 1 to consider other key skills they have learned.  There should be a check-in point with participants after 3 months, where group discussion, individual coaching and peer support are available.

Objectives 

By the end of this module, participants will be better able to:

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