The 90 Seconds Pitch

One of the tasks we had in class was a 90 seconds pitch towards a potential employer. You had to pass across your message and be convincing at the same time all in 90 seconds. Here, the audience and the setting was very important.

Everyone went at it, form lawyers, to  engineers, to accountants etc but one of the notable occurrences was that a lot of us did not pay attention to the question. So instead of pitching to a potential employee, so sold business ideas to potential clients and customers; you were already on the wrong patch from the beginning.

The 90 seconds pitch will not give sufficient time to roll our your qualifications and experience so one way of judging how well it went is if you are able to secure a follow up meeting. You must be able to get the listeners so curious and interested in your pitch that they want a second (formal) meeting where you will have enough time to elucidate your offerings.

I noticed one way of getting this curious attention is to start with a bang. It will be helpful if your staring is catch enough and this can be done by understanding the listener, what his organization needs and showing that you have done your research on them.

There is little or no time for unnecessary utterances and one must also be careful with being an overly familiar stranger. I’m thinking that may be a little weird.

I, like some other co-executives, also tried to sign up a client to an exclusive asset management service, where I offered my client access to keep their assets in tax friendly havens. I started with sharing my observation to him being flagged again for Panama Papers and asked “who is taking care of him”. That might have been catch enough but still outside the scope of the instruction.

In essence, no matter how good a driver you are, if you drive in the wrong side of the road, you are wrong and liable to fines and penalties. In the same vein, no matter how good the answer is, if you do not follow the instruction, you are wrong. Except where the instructions are confusing and ambiguous.