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Coaching for Leaders

75: Are You Making These Mistakes When Pitching an Idea?

Coaching for Leaders

Dave Stachowiak

Management, Careers, Business

4.81.6K Ratings

🗓️ 11 February 2013

⏱️ 22 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Bringing smart ideas to the table isn’t enough; we also need to be able to sell those ideas. The best idea communicated poorly will fare much worse than a mediocre idea communicated well. In this episode, I’ll examine what you can do to help your ideas take off.

Six mistakes you may be making when pitching a great idea:

1) Neglecting to interact with the people who are impacted most by your idea.

2) Ignoring people who could help you.

3) Spending too much time on the unimportant details.

4) Assuming the “pitch” is the decision point.

5) Failing to strategize how to work around obstacles.

6) Hesitating on bad news.

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Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

Have you ever pitched a great idea to a group of colleagues, managers, or customers only to get blindsided with negative feedback?

0:09.0

And then later saw someone else with a bad idea get a ton of buy-in?

0:15.0

It's not always the best ideas that get traction.

0:19.0

On this episode, I'll help you discover how your ideas can take off. This is Coaching for Leaders, episode 75.

0:26.0

Produced by Innovate Learning, Maximizing Human Potential. potential. Dave Stahoviac. This is a weekly show to help smart people improve their communication

0:47.0

and leadership skills. And if you're smart, you have great ideas.

0:53.0

But that doesn't mean that people are ready to follow you.

0:56.0

Having a great idea isn't enough.

0:59.0

We as leaders and effective communicators need to be able to position our ideas in a way that's

1:06.8

going to add value to others and that shows people that we've done our homework.

1:14.0

And often I see many people making mistakes when pitching a great idea,

1:20.0

whether that pitch is going to a customer, maybe it's their management team or even a group of their colleagues,

1:27.0

and they make these mistakes and as a result it keeps them from getting traction on really good ideas and when people aren't

1:34.8

getting traction on their ideas more than often I see one of these six mistakes

1:39.2

happening now we have all had it happen where we've been blindsided with negative feedback or we went into a situation thinking, oh, this was a slam dunk.

1:51.0

This should be an obvious decision that someone would make and come out of a situation thinking

1:56.7

wow I didn't see that coming I've certainly had that happen in my career I'm sure you've

2:00.6

had it happen to you many times as well.

2:03.0

But here's the thing is if you find that that's happening to you a lot,

2:08.0

or maybe a know someone that that is happening to a lot,

2:11.0

but I bet there's one of these six things or maybe a number of these six things that you may be making as a mistake.

2:18.7

So in this episode what I'm going to do is help you to discover what these six mistakes are, how you can avoid them, and how it will help

...

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