Why Your Pitch Vanishes The Second They See It

Gord Vickman: Welcome to the next Podcast Payoffs. We're so glad you're with us. My name is Gord Vickman here with Dan Sullivan. Dan, there's an organization called the Media Barometer Report. Sounds very serious. They wrote that podcasters received over half a million email pitches from PR agencies. Only 3% of these pitches received a response, so that means no one is paying attention to them. So, top line, why do you think no one's paying attention when people who are professing themselves to be experts are not getting anyone wanting to listen to them? What could they be doing wrong?
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, when they're pitching. Yeah, a dumb pitch. Well, I can remember back when I first started coaching, so it'll be 50 years this coming August. What I did was I had a particular early approach to how I coach with people, and I had a big pad, you know a big artist pad. I'm a trained layout artist for advertising, also advertising copywriter. I remember I had this really interesting way of framing it. I would say, I've got a process for thinking through your future, and I'm just wondering if you'd be willing just to try it out. So I'd have this pad, and I said, first thing I want to do, I want to pick a date in the future. Let's say a year in the future, 12 months from now. And I put the date up there, reflecting that it's a year from now. And I'd say, if you were thinking about improving your life, and we'll take both business and personal, what would be some measurements a year from now that are bigger and better than you have now?
 
And we'd chat, and I'd make all sorts of notes. And you'd brainstorm, and maybe you had 10 points there. And I said, so if there were five that were really worth making some improvements, making some changes that would be worth it, what would they be? And they circled them, and I said, good, let's have another beer. You could tell already just by asking the question that they were doing some thinking they hadn't been doing before. And then I'd say, OK, let's bring it back to the present. Now, what in your life now doesn't support these five bigger, better results? I said, we'll call them obstacles. And they'd write down obstacles. And we'd brainstorm. And I said, but which are the five that if you [unintelligible] really change them, you'd get this result? And they'd give me the five. And then I said, OK, let's take each of the obstacles. And I developed kind of a routine. You know, there was a structure to it. There was a process to it. And I had a way, and I says, which obstacle do you want to look at first? That would be the number one. And I said, so how has the change come about? Is it a decision? Is it something you have to communicate? Is it an action you have to take? And they think about it, and we come up with a little action plan, and then we do the same for the other four obstacles. And I said, so that's a year away, so we can break it down into quarters. And I redraw it. It's a pretty marked-up sheet, and I take it and I bring some simplicity and order to it. And I said, so it's a quarter from now, if you were checking up, what kind of progress towards the result that you'd like to see, and you do it. And I said, what do you think? And they says, cool, this is great. This is really great. And that was my pitch.
 
Gord Vickman: That was your unique value proposition. The unique selling point that nobody else was doing.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, how much of it was about me talking about myself?
 
Gord Vickman: Nothing.
 
Dan Sullivan: It was strictly what was going on in the person's head. And basically the content was entirely theirs, but the context was totally mine. So I've just always focused on context. I'll take you through the context here. The context is, you want to improve your life, but all the content of what that means and what you're going to use for measurement is strictly yours. One of the things that struck me right off the bat, Gord, was, they had never done that kind of thinking before in their life. And nobody had ever given them the questions, nobody had ever listened to their answers, nobody had asked them questions about their answers, and nobody had laid it out in a diagram so that they could see: here we are, this is where I want to be, this is what has to happen in the middle. And it's timed out. And that's the essence of Strategic Coach 50 years later. It was that technique. That's 50 years later. So my pitch is, what kind of bigger future do you want?
 
Gord Vickman: You had that figured out pretty much from the onset of how to stand out in a crowded marketplace, because that's what I wanted to talk about today.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, I wasn't in a marketplace. I was just, my relationship with this individual. And I already proved the value of it. They had already made improvements. Take an hour and a half, two hours, a couple beers. So I would do it for free, you know, I wouldn't charge him anything for it. But if we were going to meet every quarter, then now we start talking about how much this is going to cost. You know, and there's a lot of trial and error with that. And I was just a single individual with a, you know, a big artist pad. And I didn't have any technology behind me, and it was hard to get things reproduced in those days. I used to go to blueprint shops, architectural blueprint shops. They could put it all into a blueprint for me. So they'd get this big sheet of paper.
 
And I had people who signed up, let's say, in 1974. I'd worked with them maybe for a year or two years. And somehow, 10 years later, I would see them. And they said, I want to show you something. And they have a roll. And they said, this is the picture. You know, I achieved all this stuff. And sometimes they'd come back. "I'd like to do it again." And depending where I was, where they were, I'd do it again. And I did that for 15 years. And I got to the point around 1974 to 1989 that I was making 10 times more money, 20 times more money than I ever had as an advertising writer and copywriter working for a big agency. My time was my own, and all I had to do was ask questions. I didn't have to know anything about the person. The only thing that they needed was a future they wanted to get to. That was my pitch, and that's our pitch today. It's the same pitch 50 years later, but we have a lot of teamwork. We have a lot of technology now supporting that. So the number one thing about the pitch is, it can't be about you. It has to be about them.
 
Gord Vickman: Interesting you say that because we kicked off the show with talking about pitches. People are pitching their services, their expertise, their know-how, their coaching proclivities and whatnot, and no one's really paying attention.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, nobody's interested in your pitch. The other thing, you know, and this is just the number one constraint going forward in the future, it's been a constraint since 200,000 years ago, that human beings can only think about one thing at a time. And they got a hundred things coming at them.
 
Gord Vickman: And a hundred people coming at them, telling them that they have the solution.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, not only that, they have answers and nobody's looking for answers. They're looking for questions.
 
Gord Vickman: Ah, so there's the unique differentiator. Because you said I wasn't in a marketplace. It was just me one on one. The marketplace might disagree with that.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, marketplace, who is in a marketplace? I'm just in relationships. Now, marketplace, I mean, does the marketplace have an email number? I mean, is there an email address to the marketplace? It's like society, you know, society as a society. Does it have a street address? Does it have an email address? Does it have a cell phone number? I've never talked to the society. I've got this relationship and that relationship. So, I think the big thing is to stop thinking in terms of marketplaces. I don't know what a marketplace is. I don't know who the marketplace is for what we're doing here at Strategic Coach. But I do know we've got really satisfied customers who know other people who are interested in what's happened to their lives as a result of our question-and-answer process.
 
Gord Vickman: Somewhere in the world, there's a guy named Mark T. Place, and he might have a phone number, so you can call him up.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, but I don't want to know him.
 
Gord Vickman: Now, I was thinking about the marketplace because when I was getting prepped for this, this episode, I hopped on Google, typed in "coaching for entrepreneurs." 55.5 million Google results. I'm like, whoa, that's got to be hard to stand out in. And you're just saying, don't even bother trying. Unique value, just one on one, focus on those individual relationships.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. The other thing is, one of our mindsets that's developed, you know, over the 50 years of my coaching and then 35 years of having a company with other coaches is just a sentence we have up on our wall in both our Chicago workshop and Toronto workshop: "Our eyes only see and our ears only hear what our brain is looking for." So, it's very, very interesting because how do you discover what somebody's brain is looking for? And there's a variety of answers to this, okay? They may be looking for more of the same. Well, I'm not interested in people who are looking for more of the same, okay? I'm interested in people who are looking for new, better, and different in their life. So right off the bat, I've got a way of separating who I'm gonna talk to.
 
And these are just lessons I've learned through trial and error, is that I'm looking for people who, no matter what age they are, they have a new growth step ahead of them. And what that did immediately in the first three or four years, because I was testing with people who worked in companies or corporations, and I found is, if they work in a company or corporation, probably they don't have any future in their mind that's different from where they are right now. Or if they do, they're not going to tell anyone about it because they're operating in a very competitive operation, and they keep that sort of information secret, so they won't tell you, so that disqualifies them. Or they're elected officials. I had some politicians, and most of them couldn't see beyond the next election. You know, that was the framework they operated in, and they were hassle people. And this is when there was just landlines, you know, landlines and letters, and they were a hassle. And then when microchip world came in with computers and cell phones and fax machines and everything else, they just got more hassled.
 
But gradually, through trial and error, there was only ambitious entrepreneurs. Successful, talented, ambitious entrepreneurs who are looking for greater freedom in their life. Freedom of time, freedom of money, freedom of relationship, freedom of purpose. So we narrowed it down, and that was just me on my own. It took 10 years of me out there on my own. I was like an Antarctic explorer, just out there mapping out new territory. And then I got enough. I had enough after a couple hundred individual planning sessions. And I said, I know who we're looking for, and I know what they're looking for. If I pose the questions properly, the information will come out. But that's my pitch. If you looked at me in 1974, and you're now looking at me in 2024, you'd see a great resemblance between who I was then and who I am now. I'm just a lot more experienced and skillful.
 
Gord Vickman: You know, those are wise words for those who are just maybe starting out or trying to gain traction. Because I don't know who said it, but when you're good, you tell people. When you're great, they tell you. Where did that come from? Do you know? Walter Payton. Walter Payton.
 
Dan Sullivan: American philosopher. Hall Of Fame American philosopher. Running back for the Chicago Bears. He said, "If you're good, you tell everybody. If you're great, everybody tells you." It's much better if other people tell you.
 
Gord Vickman: We'll put his Wikipedia link in the show notes there. Just click more on wherever you're listening to this. But that is good advice for people in the space who are trying to gain traction on podcasts, because podcasts are a wonderful place to build your voice and, you know, your profile and whatnot. But some of the things that we see, because we know that, as I mentioned off the top, only 3% of these pitches get a response, the spray and pray where people just send out the same generic- It's funny when you get a pitch from someone, and your name is a different font than the body of the email. You clearly know. It's like, my name is Times New Roman, and then we got just Helvetica for the whole rest of the thing. It's like, I wonder when you wrote this in 2016.
 
Dan Sullivan: I never trust Times Roman.
 
Gord Vickman: No, there's something weird about that serif font, you know? It looks a little sketchy to me. Get rid of the serifs. But I've shared advice with people before because I remember there was an agent. She was a young woman. She was talking and she wanted to come on one of your programs. And I just said, I'm sorry that we book guests on our podcast based on our interests, based on Dan's interests and from his own network. We don't accept submissions through public relations. We don't accept agency submissions because that's not what we do here. There's plenty- If we want an expert on something, someone is in Strategic Coach who can be an expert on that. We don't need to farm that out to anyone. So she got back to me and she asked me, in earnest, and she asked for advice. And I thought that was kind of neat, because most of them you'll never hear from again. And I said, five or six well-tailored pitches that are specific, detailed, and prove to me as a producer that you're not just full of baloney, and you have actually listened to the show is going to go way farther than sending out 300 unsolicited spammy messages that are never going to get responses.
 
So, target who you want to reach out to for your client that you're trying to get on these podcasts. Listen to a few of their shows and then try and solve a problem or present to them some reason why your client would want to be on. And by the way, don't send a laundry list of 18 things they can talk about, because if you're an expert on 18 things, I would suggest that you're probably not an expert on any one of those things. So, get more specific and get more focused, as I promise you, you're going to get much better response when you focus and you drill down on, let's say, 10 you're focused on and really go at those people with something intelligent and something that is personalized because we can smell nonsense from a mile away. And everybody knows, back to the font, when your name is a different font than the body of email, you've just been pitched and it's a spam. It's not a good way to stand out in a crowded marketplace, to spam people who have the ability to do for you what you want from them.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, when we first met, which was process of you joining Strategic Coach to be the podcast manager for that room full of stuff that I had created. You know, I remember the first weeks, the first months when we got together, we got really, really clear saying this because I had been critiqued by people who are podcast people and they say, what you said really came home, that what podcasts are for is to attract and deepen a personal relationship with a particular type of listener. You become a very, very positive experience in their life. And every time they come on a new episode of the podcast, they're strengthening a relationship with you have them. And it's because there's something that you're saying and the way that you're saying it about your approach to the world that really resonates with their approach to the world.
 
I never had it that clear until you came aboard, you know, and took over the whole management of this whole process. And that's really, really became rock solid for me right from the beginning that every podcast we have, there's somebody out there that how we're talking about things and the way we're approaching things and our mindsets really resonates with the direction that they're going in their life. And this is nutrition for them. And this is reinforcement. Going to the critique where we've been critiqued, I've had people saying, you guys do a really, really weak job of selling Strategic Coach. You know, I mean, isn't that your product that you're trying to sell? And I said, no, we're not trying to sell Strategic Coach. We're just going to talk about who we are as individuals and how we live our lives and how we approach the business world and how we approach our future. And I just got a feeling, from 50 years experience, that there's a lot of people out there that this kind of resonates with. And they say, yeah, but where's the money come from? I said, well, we have a whole process for getting the money, but I know we never get any money unless people feel they have a relationship with us.
 
Gord Vickman: A hundred percent. Who do we do business with? Those we like, know, and trust. Who do we not do business with? People that we don't feel those things for any of those people. So would it not be beneficial, then, to create content that would allow people you don't even know to like, know, and trust you? In your sleep.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah. No, and I have marketing guys who said, you know, I can get you 10 times more people that you're getting right now. And I said, yeah, but who we would be after we went through your process would in no way resemble who we want to be. And all you've done is increased our problems by 100 times.
 
Gord Vickman: Because the wrong people are in the room.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, the wrong people are now in the room. I don't want the wrong people in the room. So anyway, Jeff Madoff, who is a really great marketing guy, and I do one of our podcast series, Anything And Everything, with Jeff. He was saying he's been talking to a lot of high-level executives at marketing companies, especially in the fashion industry, where Jeff has that history. And he said, you know, we're hitting more and more walls. We're just not getting through to people. What they don't realize is that all human beings, from the moment they're born until the moment they die, specialize in human relationships. And you're ignoring the whole quality of relationship. It's the number one issue for all human beings, is how do I relate to the people that I have available to me? It's either good or bad. And what I noticed, the more technological the communications become, the more the technological reach, what gets stripped out is relationship. So they're spending an enormous amount of money, using up an enormous amount of time, trying to sell things that don't in any way relate to what people are looking for in their future.
 
Gord Vickman: But you can do it fast, Dan. You can do it in big volumes. I can have my AI voice make 3,000 calls for you in 20 minutes. Won't that be beneficial? Isn't that going to be great? No, because they're going to hang up on you every single time.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, and I don't know if I'm unusual this, but I've never yet mistaken the message that was meant to represent an individual where I couldn't spot that it was AI.
 
Gord Vickman: Uncanny valley, something just sounds weird. They can't pronounce R.
 
Dan Sullivan: There's just something off about this. You just get a feeling that it's like someone who looks perfect, but you just got a feeling that, oh, I don't think something's right here, you know. But I think the big thing is that, I think there's a kind of a fork in the road here. As the great philosopher Yogi Berra said that when you come to the fork in the road, take it. He's along with Walter Payton, a great American philosopher. But the thing that I see here is that there is a kind of something at stake in this hyper technological world. And that is that you're either going to become more and more who you actually are, or you're going to be seduced and tempted to be more and more something that you're not, and it's going to be magnified and multiplied by technology.
 
Gord Vickman: There'll be two camps. Will they get along?
 
Dan Sullivan: No, they just won't relate to each other. They just won't relate to each other. I mean, I was watching just a YouTube redo of one of the Sunday morning talk shows. One of the speakers was saying, when it's so clear what a great president Biden's been with the economy and, you know, the stock market and everything else, and why aren't people getting the message? And one of the speakers, who I thought was quite intelligent, and he says, because everything we're saying, nobody's listening to it. Before they cut Biden off, they cut you off five years earlier. They don't watch any of these programs. They don't listen to any of these programs. You might as well be talking to the wall. And you can see this more and more, people who are good at pitches. It's not that they're rejecting your pitch. They've just found a way to not hear your pitch, you know. And I just see this happening more and more in all areas. I mean, whether it's about technology, or whether it's about entertainment, or whether it's about sports, or whether it's about business or anything, there's all these pitches. And I think that people have created pitch filters.
 
Gord Vickman: You know, and content filters, entertainment filters. I was chatting with a pal the other week and I said, there's never been more TV shows on TV that I just have no interest in ever watching until the day I die. There's so many amazing TV shows that I just don't care about being produced.
 
Dan Sullivan: And I solved it with one decision. I'm in my sixth year of not watching any television at all, and it just sorts out all the great TV movies I don't have to even select them, you know.
 
Gord Vickman: That's Dan Sullivan's Scorched Earth Method. Throw your TV on the roof.
 
Dan Sullivan: No, it's still there, but I wouldn't know how to turn it on. It's been six years. I mean, it's got about six things I have to do to it, where, you know, in the '50s, you just turned on the switch and adjusted the antenna. But again, I go back to the statement at the beginning, there's a constraint, and the constraint is, human beings can only think about one thing at one time. They can't think about two things at the same time. They can only think about one thing. They certainly can't hear a hundred things at the same time. And I think that there's a crisis growing in the technological world and the marketing world that is taking more and more effort and more and more money to not get a result than took us not to get a result five years ago. It's just a lot harder not getting a result. You know, and I think there's a crisis going because they didn't realize the relationship that has to be there for people to even be interested in what you're saying.
 
Gord Vickman: Build the well before you're thirsty. Who said that? The great philosopher Joe Montana?
 
Dan Sullivan: There's just a universe of great American philosophers.
 
Gord Vickman: You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Wayne Gretzky. Geez, we're just covering all the sports philosophers.
 
Dan Sullivan: Yeah, this is on par with Plato and Aristotle.
 
Gord Vickman: Dan, if you could give entrepreneurs one rapid fire final piece of advice on how to stand out in the crowded marketplace, that'll be the nugget, the biscuit that we leave people with, having listened to the show today.
 
Dan Sullivan: Well, there is no marketplace, there's only relationship. And you have relationships already, just deepen the relationships you have and be useful to the relationships you have. And I will tell you that having questions that get another person to think about their future is 100 times more powerful than any answer you could give them about their future. And they kind of have a feel for what they want to get in the future. But if you can enable them to articulate their understanding of their own future and put some structure to it, you know, have a time structure and have a process for making progress and measurements that they can do that, they'll be with you all of your life and they'll remember you fondly all your life. So there's no marketplace, there's no crowd. There's just who's available to you on any given day. And you can reinforce that with all sorts of teamwork. But if that essential activity is not at the center, then the crowd is gonna be overwhelming. The marketplace is gonna be too vast to even think about. Got a choice: It's a very simple future or it's an unbelievably complicated, conflicted, complex future. Totally your choice.
 
Gord Vickman: Wise words from Dan Sullivan, and we promise that no Hall of Fame American football players were harmed in the creation of that mindset. Straight from the source.
 
Dan Sullivan: I'll give you another one. Vince Lombardi, great football coach from the 1960s. They won the first two Super Bowls, and before the Super Bowl, there were champions, and I think they were three-time champion, you know, in like six, seven years. Great, great teams. He went to conferences where there were coaches, you know, great college coaches. And they said, you know, your success is so great. You have some very sophisticated offensive strategies and defensive strategies. And he said, we do. We have two strategies. He said, the first one is that when the other team has the ball, we knock everybody down. And he says, when we have the ball, we knock everybody down. He said, I find that if you just knock everybody down on the opposition team, almost any play works.
 
Gord Vickman: Sounds about right.
 
Dan Sullivan: Blocking and tackling for distinguishing yourself in the marketplace is, base it all on relationship, number one. Number two, and when you're having a discussion, make it about the other person and what they're trying to achieve in life, and then allow them to articulate that as a game plan. And that you're someone who keeps asking them questions about their moving game plan as they go forward. And it works now, it'll work 50 years from now. And you'll get better at it with each passing year.
 
Gord Vickman: Can't think of a better spot to wrap than that, Dan. If you enjoyed this episode, share it with someone you know, love, trust, share it with anyone. Share it with two people, maybe share it with 10 people. Podcast Payoffs, we cover the intersection of teamwork and technology here. Dan, it's always a blast talking to you. And today was no different. Thanks so much.
 
Dan Sullivan: Great.