Pitch Anything Book Review

Jack Cosgrove

Pitch Anything

Oren Klaff

Published in 2011

Prof. Elliot Atkins

Monday, March 5, 2018

Pitch Anything, a book written by an investment banker, and presenter, Oren Klaff. Pitch Anything focuses on multiple tactics and strategies that give you an unfamiliar way of presenting and pitching your ideas. Klaff speaks of ideas such as the STRONG method, frames and frame control, and goes into detail on pitching. Throughout the book, Klaff emphasizes certain key points to follow to improve your sales skills such as, ensuring your pitch speaks to your audience, making yourself the prize, and guiding your target to make gut decisions in your favour. This book is especially interesting because of the uniqueness and effectiveness

The three main from Pitch Anything are:

1. Ensuring your pitch speaks to your audience properly

2. Make yourself the prize, instead of chasing your target

3. To get people to make a gut decision in your favour, use multiple frames

Ensuring your pitch speaks to your audience properly

Oren Klaff works as an investment banker, mainly in the financial side, but took time to study the human brain in hopes that it would progress his skills and knowledge as a presenter. There are three main parts in the brain, which Klaff refers to them as the neocortex, the midbrain, and the “crocodile” or “croc” brain. The “croc” brain was the first of the three to be developed and is known to be the “stupid” or the ancient brain, but excellent for generally survival needs. As Klaff best describes the croc brain using a scenario, “Here’s a person confronting me, should I eat it, kill it, or mate with it,” (Klaff, 32). He uses these terms to

Understanding the differences between the stages of the brain is important because it could change the way you present something to someone and could ultimately be the factor in whether you make the sale. This can be applied outside of sales, anytime you are trying to convince someone of something, or explain something. If you keep your points basic, you will not lose the targets attention, and you will have a higher chance of succeeding. Students in the BMRK program, could find these points extremely useful in the future, in any job they end up with. For the students who will end up working for a company, they will most likely have opportunities to share ideas with others, in which case they can use these strategies and tactics to aid them. Understanding the concept of the “croc” brain, as well as the other two, could allow them to be more successful in the end. For example, a BMRK student works for a company and the boss asks the employees for suggestions on something related to the business. This knowledge could be the reason their boss chooses their suggestion over everyone else’s because he understood more easily what they were pitching. When we keep things simple, it keeps the target focused, engaged, and gives us a better chance to win them over. An example of how students can use this now