 You've done all the prep work to write a great pitch. Let's get you ready to go present it to whoever's making that decision for you. Welcome back and congratulations on taking one more step towards becoming one of the great leaders of tomorrow. It takes a lot of prep work to make a convincing pitch, but how you present that idea and how you communicate is just as important as the idea itself. Today I've got five tips for you that'll help you make a really clear and convincing pitch when you present it to whoever's making that decision for you. And stay tuned to the end. We're gonna have a few links for you. We're gonna link to the worksheet we used in last week's video to help you do that prep work to be really thorough getting ready for your pitch. And you'll also get a link to our free leadership development guide that'll help you develop a career plan for the next two, five and 10 years and build a plan of action to achieve it. Last week we talked about 10 steps to doing the prep work to create a really convincing pitch. But all that hard work won't matter if we don't present that pitch in a clear and convincing way. So if you missed last week's video there's a link to it in the description below and you can go back and look at that and look at what those 10 steps were to go do that prep work. In this week's video I'm gonna give you five tips that'll help you take all that hard work you did and package it up and communicate in a clear and effective way to whoever it is you're trying to convince to get on board with your idea. Right off the bat you need to get to know your audience. What is their background? What is their real interest in your idea? Where do they come from? What are some of the biases they might have about what you're pitching and the area that you're pitching in? Do they have a technical background? Do they know a lot? Are they an expert in this field? Or maybe you have to do a little bit of hand holding when it comes to the more technical aspects of your presentation. Have you pitched them before? Have you given them presentations before? Do they like to get a bottom line up front at the beginning of the presentation? Or do they like to be led through the presentation though, have that story build up? And you can build up piece of evidence by piece of evidence to get to the end and have them draw their own conclusions. All of these things are important things to know about your audience before you even walk in the door of the presentation. So if you haven't briefed this individual before, if you haven't given them a presentation before or this group before, try to do some research, talk to people who have given them presentations or have worked with them before and see if you can learn a little bit about them so that you can go in with an effective plan and effective structure to your presentation before you even go into the room. Tip number two is be really clear about the purpose of your presentation, about the pitch you're making. When I was in the military, especially by the time I got to the end of my career, I would usually go in to give one of these presentations and I would say, sir, I'm Lieutenant Colonel Jason Laduke. I'm here to talk to you today about whatever the issue was and I'm gonna be presenting you with some courses of action and I'm gonna be asking you to make a decision on which course of action we should pursue going forward. And the reason I did this is that throughout my career, I saw so many presentations where someone would come in, they would start their presentation and about halfway through the presentation, the decision maker would say, I don't understand why I'm here, why I'm getting this presentation. Am I here to make a decision? What is this about? And a lot of times that person would come back and say, well, sir, this is really just a presentation for your information at this time. And that's okay, sometimes it's important to give information presentations but leaders, especially senior leaders, they're very busy and their time is valuable. So what we wanna do when we're making a pitch, we wanna make sure that we're really clear that there's a decision to be made here, that we aren't wasting the individual's time by just giving them information that may or may not be relevant to them at that moment in time. So be really clear about your purpose and be clear up front about what you're gonna be asking for today. You don't have to get into all the details, but if you're gonna be asking for a decision from a decision maker, be clear that, sir, at the end of this presentation, I'm gonna ask you to make a decision. Tip number three is to start with the problem. And I know some people like to do their presentations where they start with the background and then get to the problem, but I've always found it most effective to start with the problem. And just like we talked about last week, not just what the problem is, but who the problem is for, when is the problem going to occur again? Is it a frequent occurrence or is it a rare occurrence? Do we have some time before the next time the problem pops up or is it gonna be coming up really quickly? And the reason we do this is you may have to set the stage where you even prove that there's a problem in the first place, the decision maker you're talking to, whoever you're pitching, may not even understand that there's a problem or may not believe that there's a problem, just like we talked about last week. And so you may have to set the stage by even convincing them that there's a problem to begin with. And so starting with the problem, the whole reason for your presentation, the whole reason for your pitch is a great place to start. Now that you've set the stage, it's time to build your case for the solution for the decision that you're advocating for in your pitch. And there's a lot of different ways to do this. It's almost an infinite number of ways to do this. And honestly, you know a lot better than I do about your audience and the situation and the factors that are involved about how you should go about putting this pitch together. Again, it comes back to who is your audience, who's that decision maker? What do they like to see? How do they learn the best? The situation in your company or organization. So you've got to factor all those things into account. Some sample structures that you might use is to once you've defined your problem, start with the background research you did on how you figured out it was a problem, start with the impacts of the problem after you go through the background research, and then start to talk about the potential solutions and the pros and cons of the solutions and then finally get to the decision. Or you can take a different approach and talk about the people that the problem is affecting how people's lives you've made better by solving the problem and then start to get into the solutions and the impacts and the risks and the resources and all those kinds of things. Like I said, there's really no set way to do this. You've got to decide the best way based on your audience, the situation, other factors. So I could go through a whole list of different ways you can structure a presentation, but you probably know better than I do about what to do, but you want to build that case. The one piece of concrete advice I can give you when you're building your case is to always support your assertions with evidence. So if you're going to claim that your solution is going to cost a million dollars, be prepared to talk about how you got to that number, what costs actually go into it, what the detailed breakdown of those costs are, and where you might be able to cut some of those costs or the risks are if you don't go those costs. But if you say something's gonna cost a million dollars, you really need to be able to support with more than just a gut feeling why you believe it costs a million dollars. Support your assertions with evidence. I can't stress it enough. Last tip I have for you today is to make the ask. All too often I've seen someone give a presentation where they go through a great definition of problem, they go through a great, they build their case in a great way for the solution that needs to come along to solve the problem, and then they get to the end of the presentation and they kind of just peter off and don't make the ask of the decision maker. And I've seen that happen a bunch of times that I've even done it myself. And so because I've done it myself, I really want to emphasize you've got to make the ask when you go into these presentations, when you make these pitches, don't let that decision maker leave the room without getting a decision on what you went in there for. Now the decision maker may not be ready to make the decision at that time, especially if there's not an urgent reason, an urgent need to make that decision. So in that case, be prepared to make a secondary ask. And your secondary ask is, sir or ma'am, what are the things you would need us to address before you can make a decision? And when would you like us to come see you again in order to get this decision made? And now you may not get exactly the answers you're looking for, clear, concrete answers of, here are my top five things you need to answer for me. And I want you to come back next Wednesday at 10 a.m. What they may say is, these are the kinds of things you might need to address. I really want to learn more about this and why don't you get with my assistant or my staff to set up a time to come back. But even that's better than just giving the presentation and then just kind of standing there and waiting for the decision maker to say something. So if you're going to make a pitch, like we talked about, be clear up front, I'm gonna be asking for a decision from you today. And when you get to the end, sir or ma'am, I'd like to know what your decision is. So there are your five tips for taking all that hard work you did to prepare for making your pitch and to actually go in and make the presentation. And I know these were very general, these were more mindset before you go in and how you're preparing your pitch and when you're giving the presentation, they aren't nuts and bolts, really strong public speaking presentation skills. So if you have really specific questions about how to build that story, how to build that case to make your pitch or some public speaking tips, feel free to contact us, we'd love to help you out and see if we can give you some of that advice that can really make your pitch pop for whoever that decision maker is gonna be. But I think if you go and you do all the prep work from the last video, you're gonna have all the material you need to go build that case. I know that step was kind of vague in general, but if you do all the prep work, you're gonna have all that information and you're really the one in the best position to decide how do I build this case for the decision maker I'm going to. Give these tips a try, go do all that prep work, get your pitch ready, go make your pitch and let us know how it goes for you. If you found this helpful, please like, comment and share it with a friend or coworker. Look in the description below, we've got a couple links for you this week. So the link to last week's video about how to do all that solid prep work before going in to make your pitch is in there. The link to the worksheet that goes along with that video is in there and we've also got our link to our free leadership development plan workbook that'll help you set your goals for the next two, five and 10 years and build a plan of action to achieve them. If you have any business or leadership questions, leave us a comment below, we'd love to hear from you or email us at info at evalgeniusleadership.com. evalgeniusleadership.com is also where you can find about all of our coaching programs, whether that's one-on-one coaching or doing something as a workshop for your company or even some group coaching. So if you're looking to do some development of your leadership style and advance your career, contact us, we'll set you up with a free consultation, we'll figure out how we can help you best. Thanks for watching today. I really appreciate it and remember, the future is out there. Lead the way.