The key message in these blinks:
To persuade a skeptical, savvy and impatient modern audience, your pitch needs to be under three minutes. To create a persuasive pitch that fits into that time frame, it needs to consist of about 25 sentences that answer the following questions: What is it? How does it work? Are you sure? And can you do it? To maximize the impact of your pitch, you then need to make sure it has an opening, a callback, an “all is lost” moment, a hook and an edge.
Actionable advice:
Put it all together.
If you follow the instructions in these blinks, you’ll have all the elements you need for your three-minute pitch. But how do you put them all together into a final pitch? Here’s the order that Brant suggests. Obviously, you start with your opening. Then you convey the basic concept of it by answering the questions “What is it?”, “How does it work?” and “Are you sure?” Then comes your “all is lost” moment. Follow that up by delivering your hook and your edge. Then do a callback. Finally, close your pitch with your answer to the question “Can you do it?” Keep in mind that some of these elements may go hand-in-hand with each other. For example, in Brant’s pitch for Bar Rescue, Jon Taffer introducing the “butt funnel” was the edge, and the fact that it illustrated Taffer’s expertise was the callback.
Your opening needs a callback.
When did you start to believe you had a winning idea, product, service, or company on your hands? And when did you become convinced that your belief was correct?
The answer to the first question provides the opening to your pitch, where you tell your audience about your reason for being. The answer to the second question provides your pitch with the next element that’s going to push it over the top: the callback. This is a moment in your pitch where you return to your opening and tell an anecdote that helps to illustrate and confirm your reason for being.
To see how this works, let’s go back to the example of Brant’s pitch for Bar Rescue. Remember, he opened with the idea that Jon Taffer, the would-be host of the show, was a man with a winning combination: a huge personality and a deep well of professional expertise. After describing Taffer and the premise for the show, Brant called back to his opening and drove it home with a simple but memorable anecdote.