I have been doing a lot of cold outreach lately. And yes, I hate it.

Sending emails to people who do not know you exist, calling in German when you are not quite there yet with the language (I’m like B1 so…), pitching a business idea to someone who has no reason yet to believe in it.

All of it deeply uncomfortable, if you ask me.

The hardest part in these things is not knowing what to expect. Because when you cannot predict the reaction, you cannot really prepare a defence. So you just go in and hope you come up with something.

However, after enough frustration and the feeling that nothing was working, I decided I had to change my approach. I was done.

Because the problem was never the cold outreach. The problem was that I was thinking about it as a defence instead of a story. And those are two completely different things.

And that’s when I came across The Pitch by Danny Fontaine while randomly visiting a book store in London.

Subscribe now

It is not about you

I think we all know this but again it is not so easy to override as the default setting.

Anyway, the moment I stopped thinking about what I needed to say and started thinking about what the other person needed to feel, everything kind of shifted in my outcomes.

Think about it.

An interview, an investor meeting, a cold email, or just being an interesting person in a room.

All of these are moments where you need the other person to feel something. And to make them feel something you need to take them somewhere, not explain yourself to them.

Most of us pitch from a place of wanting to be understood. But that is not a story. That is a CV reading.

The brutal truth about who has the advantage

Some people have a head start on this. The voice, the posture, the appearance, the people you know, what is on the CV.

Yes, all of that can matter.

But here is what I have seen: it becomes secondary the moment your pitch is strong enough.

I genuinely believe this.

A strong enough story overrides almost everything else in the room.

What actually matters

Fontaine breaks it down into six things.

Why now,
what the vision is,
what the challenges are,
what you bring to the table,
what you need from the other person,
and why there is no better option than you.

Simple on paper, everything in the execution.

But beyond the framework, what I actually think makes the difference is this: Make the other person feel what your end customer feels or you feel.

Read the room because no tone works everywhere.

And if you can, skip the deck. Do something unexpected because the unexpected is what gets remembered.

And keep your cool

Know your non-negotiables before you walk in. You do not have to agree to everything just to win the room or be liked.

The strongest impression is almost always left by someone who is clear on what they will not move on. That is not arrogance. That is the whole pitch.

Leave a comment

You need to sell