An Excerpt from Daniel Pink’s NYT Bestseller "To Sell is Human"

Whether you're in sales — or just need to "sell" your boss on a new idea, you need to know how to pitch. In his latest book, To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, bestselling author Daniel Pink explores new research on the necessary ingredients for a successful pitch.

In the following passage, he shares research direct from Hollywood on those factors that lead to the successful pitching of film ideas by screenwriters to studio executives.

Daniel Pink will be joining us for a live webcast webcast on July 9 to share his insights: To Move Others and Sell More With Daniel Pink. 

Lessons from Tinseltown

Kimberly Elsbach of the University of California, Davis, and Roderick Kramer of Stanford University spent five years in the thick of the Hollywood pitch process. They sat in on dozens of pitch meetings, analyzed transcripts of pitching sessions, and interviewed screenwriters, agents, and producers. The award-winning study they wrote for the Academy of Management Journal offers excellent guidance even for those of us on the living room side of the streaming video.

Their central finding was that the success of a pitch depends as much on the catcher as on the pitcher. In particular, Elsbach and Kramer discovered that beneath this elaborate ritual were two processes. In the first, the catcher (i.e., the executive) used a variety of physical and behavioral cues to quickly assess the pitcher’s (i.e., the writer's) creativity. The catchers took passion, wit, and quirkiness as positive cues— and slickness, trying too hard, and offering lots of different ideas as negative ones. If the catcher categorized the pitcher as "uncreative" in the first few minutes, the meeting was essentially over even if it had not actually ended.

But for pitchers, landing in the creative category wasn’t enough, because a second process was at work. In the most successful pitches, the pitcher didn’t push her idea on the catcher until she extracted a yes. Instead, she invited in her counterpart as a collaborator. The more the executives— often derided by their supposedly more artistic counterparts as "suits" — were able to contribute, the better the idea often became, and the more likely it was to be green-lighted. The most valuable sessions were  those in which the catcher “becomes so fully engaged by a pitcher that the process resembles a mutual collaboration,” the researchers found.  "Once the catcher feels like a creative collaborator, the odds of rejection diminish," Elsbach says. 4 Some of the study's subjects had their own way of describing these dynamics. One Oscar-winning producer told the professors, "At a certain point the writer needs to pull back as the creator of the story. And let [the executive] project what he needs onto your idea that makes the story whole for him." However, "in an unsuccessful pitch," another producer explained, "the person just doesn’t yield or doesn’t listen well."

The lesson here is critical: The purpose of a pitch isn't necessarily to move others immediately to adopt your idea. The purpose is to offer something so compelling that it begins a conversation, brings the other person in as a participant, and eventually arrives at an outcome that appeals to both of you. In a world where buyers have ample information and an array of choices, the pitch is often the first word,  but it's rarely the last.

Reprinted from Pink, Daniel H. (2012-12-31). To Sell Is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others. Kindle Edition used by permission of Daniel Pink.