“The most successful sales pitches feel like a collaborative effort.” – Dan Pink on the Design Better Podcast
I should make one thing clear from the start here: the days of pitches are well behind us. If your team or company still relies on big reveals, you’re living in the past.
However, we do still need to influence people and gather buy-in for work. In order to maintain momentum and agility, our approach when doing this must be collaborative, so that we can establish alignment early and often. But how do we do it? Here I’ll share the key elements to successfully collaborating and building alignment.
The Goal
What is the desired outcome? What is your goal? Spend some heads-down time with your project partners listing out what you all think is the goal. Practicing re-writing it for the most impactful and resonant framing, and ensure everyone stands by it.
The Constraints
Next, your team needs to brainstorm the constraints you’re facing. This typically includes, but isn’t limited to, the following areas:
- What people need to be involved in your strategy, either directly or indirectly? This can include stakeholders, customers, peers, and so forth.
- What can they bring to the project, in the form of knowledge and/or skills? What do they need to know to support the project well?
- What are some potential barriers or roadblocks you can start thinking through? Consider people, technology, relationships, accessibility, timing, you get the idea…
These three areas represent the constraints (good or bad) that you must consider when collaboratively thinking through a low-fidelity strategy or session.
Your Ideas
Only after aligning your team on the Goal and Constraints can you move on to the ideation phase. Often, you will already start forming some ideas or solutions when collaborating on the goal or constraints. This is fine, and you should capture those ideas, but not try to solution too much until you’ve had some time to synthesize through the constraints. Too often, people go with their first few ideas. Don’t fall in that trap. Give adequate time for reflecting on your goal and constraints. Allow your brain to start building some new connections and then jump in to a proper ideation session where you can think through ideas.
The magic here is that by the time you get to the end result — the pitch — you’ve already been collaborating toward it for a while, and you arrive together at the idea(s), with all the context as to why it matters and how it can drive toward your shared goal.
Collaboration is the key.
