3.1 Pitching your ideas

If you have already thought about how you pitch your ideas, you will have decided how to get your stakeholders to listen to you, about the clarity of the message, how you communicate your passion, about your phrasing, body language, eye contact and so on.

As you will see in this 6-minute video, Pitch: ‘Berlin as a Startup City’ (Sollich, 2016) pitching is something like a swan swimming, moving smoothly on the surface and paddling like crazy under the water. (Please note this video contains some swearing and implied nudity.)

Pitch: ‘Berlin as a Startup City’
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This is what we think of when we think of a pitch, and you can find plenty of tips online on how to hone your pitch, which we do not propose to go through here. When communicating your ideas to your stakeholders, it is tempting to focus only on what you are doing. However, whether pitching your idea to a funder, gaining the trust of a distributor, or encouraging a supplier to increase your credit, there is a need to listen.

Listening means more than waiting for your turn to speak – it is an active, two-way process. Rogers and Farson (1987) suggested active listening involves:

  • Listening to the full meaning, the content of the message itself and the attitude or emotion within it.

  • Responding to the emotional elements, which can often be more important than the content.

  • Attending to other cues, beyond the words used – pauses, body language, the gaze of the person speaking, their posture all provide cues.

  • Listening is a form of communication – it tells the person you are interested in what they have to say.

Activity 3 Active listening

Timing: Allow approximately 10 minutes to complete this activity

Think about the last time you pitched to someone – it might have been your big idea, or even something else. You probably planned what to say, but did you plan when and how to listen? Can you think of opportunities to listen that you didn’t take?

Note down what you might do differently next time you are pitching an idea.

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Discussion

You will have started to recognise that active listening is rather more than repeating back in your own words what you have heard to ascertain whether ‘this is what you meant’. Active listening suggests a deeper engagement.

Next time you are attempting to persuade your stakeholders of the merits of your idea, it might be worth considering how active listening might help to win them over.

3 Communicating with stakeholders

3.2 Hidden meanings and internal communications