In a pitch, the path to success is paved with engagement.

“Controlling the Room” is a key skill for your team to develop for pitching, to get your audience to the place you want them to be:  a next meeting, investment, winning a project, etc.  It is important for your entire team (not just its leader) to workshop this skill because a wrong answer from one person can sink you.

Where you start:  Research your audience in advance.  To know the general interest and current focus of your audience shows respect and intention. It will also give you something to talk about with a room full of strangers before the pitch.

A fundamental lever to controlling the room is your sensitivity to the audience, or “Feeling the Room.”  What is the vibe of the meeting, are they in the news, who are the decision-makers, what do they want - a big show or intimate conversation, etc.?  Sensing the forces at play is invaluable for navigating the maze of engagement.  

Don’t assume the audience is as focused on your pitch as you are.  It has never failed me to imagine that up until the moment my audience walks in the door, they have not given us a second thought, and have been fully immersed in something dramatic before walking into our pitch.

For example, I once had an audience of one (a Chief Marketing Officer for an international brand) for an introduction (pitch-light, really).  He had just arrived in NYC from Paris, and somewhere between the airport and our office had lost his iPhone.  For the first 10 minutes of our 1 hour together, he sat silently at our conference table feverishly typing into his blackberry, saying not a word to us. We sat and watched him and each other, wondering what to do.

My audience from Paris was freaked-out, jet-lagged, and 100% focused elsewhere. What I had thought would be a simple presentation of capabilities and credentials, become an offer of assistance. It took longer than I had hoped, but we eventually won that client. The point being – do not assume your pitch will begin as you think, you really can’t control that.  BUT, no matter how your pitch begins, you and your team should know how you would like it to end.

How you proceed.  The biggest difference between pitching and presenting is the audience’s engagement with your team.  In a pitch, you want questions, challenges, clarifications and exploration: all chances to build trust.  Some impromptu engagement you can anticipate, but not all.  It is the latter, someone’s response an unforeseeable questions, that is most likely to knock your team off course.

So, be sure to verbalize – to each other, in advance -- what success looks like for the pitch, not the larger relationship or business case. Even between (and arguably, especially for) the most seasoned people on your team, agree what you want the meeting to achieve: another meeting perhaps, the sale of an idea, or just to gain the trust of the audience to confide in you their own plans or pain points? 

Once you verbalize in advance what success looks like, you can rehearse responses to audience questions in a way that advance the cause of your team.  You often see this skill in interviews with politicians. No matter the question, their answer is framed in their own agenda.  Sometimes they get to the answer – as you must do in a pitch – but the opportunity to engage was primarily used to advance their cause.

The “Controlling the Room” skill, can also be used to sidestep the trap of implicit bias.  In her excellent TED presentation, “The real reason female entrepreneurs get less funding,” Dana Kanze unpacks implicit bias in questions asked female vs male founders, and that directly answering certain foreseeable questions can inadvertently reinforce implicit bias and block you from reaching your goal (funding, for example).

Instead, as her research shows, framing all answers in the context of what success looks like is more likely to move the audience to your side.  It is an excellent example of knowing where you want the pitch to end, socializing it with your team in advance, and rehearsing it as the unifying theme of any audience engagement.

Where you end – Different expectations within your team may seem subtle.  But if any of you are knocked off balance by an unplanned questions, it is harder to get the team back on track if there is more than one track in the room.  By verbalizing what success looks like, and rehearsing how to respond to engagement in the context of that success, you are much more likely to get there together.