Oren Klaff, Pitch Anything Part II
DishyMix
Susan Bratton
volume_up

Episode 224 - Oren Klaff, Pitch Anything Part II

Part Two of Two

Part One of Two

Oren Klaff it a pitch monster who goes for the deal in a way that takes bravado, chutzpah and an underlying EMOTIONAL connection.

In this 2 part series, learn how to apply Oren's boardroom formula to your online marketing.

We give you the pitching blueprint which includes:

  • Prizing
  • Owning the Frame
  • Intrigue Pings
  • The Hookpoint
  • Hot Cognitions

You will look at your marketing in a whole new light after this valuable reset.

Transcript

Transcript

Susan Bratton: This is part two of a two-part series with Oren Klaff of Pitch Anything. So I want to talk about frames. I think that’s a really important part of this, so prizing is setting yourself up as the expert and getting local celebrity or celebrity in your niche is another way that a marketer would look at it. And I think they understand the idea of selling with a narrative and creating an emotional hook point. And so I’d like to take that next step and talk about the frame, how you frame especially if you’re framing on a web page, right. You don’t know who it is in the room because that could be anyone.

Oren Klaff: Okay, so first of all, lets talk about the fundamentals of frame control and what a frame is, right, and really quickly. When two people come into any kind of social or business relationship, they each bring with them a frame. Your frame, I mean it’s pretty obvious, it’s the way you see the world, it’s the lens through which you look at your business and social and economic life and it’s your values, your morals, your principles and your perspective, that’s another way of looking at it. It’s how you see how the world works. So I bring my frame to a deal and you bring your frame, which is fine. Different perspectives. But the thing is frames don’t co-exist. One frame is always dominant. You never have to perspectives in a business deal that survive. There is one dominant perspective.

So frames come together and they collide, and they smash into each other – boom. And it’s always the case. The stronger frame crushes and owns the weaker frame. The dominant perspective is then the perspective through which the business deal is seen, or the social interaction is seen, or the relationship is seen. That’s what a frame is. So frame control is when everyone in the business deal or the interaction, frame control is when everyone in the interaction sees the deal through your lens. So in a room, which I know you guys are online but my experience is in a room, when you make a stupid joke, other people laugh at it. When you stand up, they stand up. When you put your pen down, they put their pen down. When you stop to send a text, they all shuffle around and do something different. When people are reacting to you, you have frame control.

By contrast, when somebody else tells a stupid joke and you laugh at it ‘cause he’s the boss, or they make a nonsensical point in a presentation or presents some math that you don’t agree with the economics, and you nod your head. They have frame control. You’re seeing the world through their frame, their perspective, their ownership of the interaction. So a very simple way to know who has frame control in any given interaction is if you are reacting to someone else, they have frame control. If they are reacting to you, you have frame control. So then it becomes a question of how do you get frame control? What’s the value of it, which we need to talk about in a second? And how do you get it? What’s the value of it? Why would you want it? And how do you keep it?

So let me tie this back into the kind of marketing you’re talking about. Deals are all about attention. If I come in with a deal and I can hold your attention for four hours, like literally I have some ray or pill or potion to force you to pay attention to me for four hours straight, like really pay attention with all your focus and concentration and energy, I will sell you that deal. Everybody will. The most novice dealmaker in the world will sell you a deal or a product, if they can get you to pay attention for that long. But the thing is, the span of human attention on the Internet – in a room it might be 20 minutes, on the Internet it might be 20 seconds. So frame control is about owning attention.

So now you don’t have to worry about “Am I creating intrigue? Am I using images? Am I being visual?” Those are all tools, what you are trying to achieve is frame control. When you have frame control, people are reacting to you and you have attention. And when you have somebody’s attention, you can tell them the narrative and the proof points about your product, and you can pitch your product and you can get a deal done. Or maybe in the terms you guy’s use, you can sell a product. Frame control is the most important skill you will ever learn, either online or in a person-to-person context.

Susan Bratton: So how do you get frame control?

Oren Klaff: Okay, I want to use an example that I use quite frequently because it’s so easy to see. In the environment that I go into, which tends to be a board room or a conference room, so I will come in and I have a deal to pitch. We’re raising $5 million for a healthcare company, and they have a product that purifies blood faster than the other competing products. What we’re trying to do is bring in a big physical poster board, you know those boards that are 20 inches by 30 inches, and we’ll put it face down. We’ll put a little sticker on the top that says, “Critical deal info for Michael Coffin, CEO.” And we set that near Michael Coffin CEO. And we begin to pitch of course. So eventually he’ll reach for it and the moment he reaches for it…

Susan Bratton: You slap his hand.

Oren Klaff: I slap his hand away and I say, “Not right now Michael. This is my time. We’re on my agenda. We’re unfolding this meeting the way I’m doing it and when I’m ready I’ll show you this.” So what is that? Now you can’t do that mean and you can’t do that in a shrill way, but if you do that with a smile and you make it social and fun, it is fundamentally a denial and a defiance done in a social way. And that is one very cool fun way to get frame control. Now I don’t think that translates exactly online, but you can see now how the frame control can shift and how you can get the frame back from the CEO of a major corporation. So what you want to do, I mean lets just frame this whole thing out. When you first interact with someone coming to your site or your landing page, they have all the power. The second they land, they have all the power. They have the money, they have the decision-making ability, and they can leave. And your job, they have frame control the second they land. Your job is to start getting frame control to where they see they are reacting to you. They see the world through your lens. You’re telling them, “No, that’s not how it’s going to go. This is my site. This is my landing page. We’re going to be doing things my way, and I’m the prize. You’re going to be earning your way into my deal.” But you’ve got to do it fun and social in the ways that we’ve talked about.

Susan Bratton: I like it. The other piece of this – and this is really, we’ve got to wind it down here for the timeframe – hot cognitions. That’s the other emotional piece where you’re getting your prospect enrolled at an emotional level based on their desire to do the right thing, be successful, whatever it might be. You’ll say these better than I am. So once you’ve got frame control and you’ve prized yourself, you’ve set an emotional hook point. You’re telling a story. You’re dropping intrigue pings and alternating those. I’m just trying to make this really simple, alternating those with the proof points.

The next thing is that you need to get them to not just “I didn’t run away and I’m not scared, and now I’m, you’ve got me under your spell.” Now you have to motivate them. We’re not trying to get them to make a rational decision; we’re trying to get them to make an emotional decision, and this is where hot cognitions come in to play, to move them from just being prized and framed by you and hooked by a story, to wanting to take action. Do I have that right?

Oren Klaff: You do. Let me jump in here. The two processes of the mind that don’t work together are emotion and analytics.

Susan Bratton: Right, you want to keep them out of analytics.

Oren Klaff: Of course you do. But lets talk about that for a minute. You want to keep them out of it, but what I think a lot of people don’t understand is the, it’s called the paradigmatic thinking. We won’t use the jargon. Analytical thinking, which is a cold process – math, statistics. Oh my god, it’s the most cold process you could ever use. Math, statistics, linguistics, physics, finance, that’s all cold decision-making, decision matrix, decision-matrix are cold processes. They’re slow, they’re cold and they’re disconnected, and they’re disenfranchised from the human connection. On the other side are the hot processes – wanting, needing, excitement, desire. So you never put your wife or your girlfriend or your boyfriend or hopefully not your car through a cold analytical process.

Sometimes you could do all this analysis about what kind of car you see, and you’re looking at an Audi and a BMW and it’s a cool little sports car and you’re trying to choose between one of them, and then you see a truck and you just buy it. That’s a hot cognition. I’ll tell you a story about that when we’re offline one time, but that’s great. So when you are checking out of a supermarket many times they have this little coin thing that you give to charity where they say, “Would you like to add $1 for the dogs with no eyes, and the tailless cats and the gorillas of Borneo that have cancer of the eyeball,” and it’s hugely empathetic. Those don’t work well because when people are at the supermarket shopping they’re thinking about, “This is $5, this is $3. I’ve got to cook all of this. It’s costing me $50 to make a meal. I’m spending $300.” They’re in cold analytical process. And you try and shift someone over quickly to providing $1 for a gorilla with cancer of the eyeball, and it doesn’t take because those two parts of the mind won’t work together.

So I have a friend who’s an online marketer and he always uses these statistics, “30% of people decide to do this and 79% of people love to do this, and of this 79%…” Although those are good compelling points he’s making, he’s jolting people into cold analytical processes. So hot cognitions as opposed to a cold cognition is about triggering emotional, and you have tools to use, time constraints, scarcity, value, value proposition of living longer, getting more, making life easier. So you know to do those things, and you guys do those anyway, but I see in many of these online marketing is even though they’re trying to sell benefits like that with these big upsides, they use cold processes to sell important benefits. So when you understand that math, statistics, physics and financial examples are cold processes, and they’re not good for getting to the decision-making hook point. And the hook point, maybe that’s the last thing we can do. The hook point is an incredibly important term that I want to define.

Susan Bratton: Yeah I have to say, that was the least clear thing in the book for me was the hook point.

Oren Klaff: Okay so we’re going to do it now in a very clear way.

Susan Bratton: But wait Oren, before you go to hook point, I just want to ask a clarifying question about hot cognitions. So in Pitch Anything you gave four examples of hot cognitions – intrigue, moral authority, which is the one I used for my real time emotional patters. I used moral authority; I said, “Do you want to be in service to people by understanding, do you want to help more people by having the skill, you already have it, do you want to just start using it so you can help more people?” That was essentially what I found to be the best hot cognition there. So timeframe, moral authority, prizing and intrigue in the book, those are the things that you said were examples of hot cognitions, but I got to thinking about it because I’ve interviewed Joe Sugarman, and he wrote the 29 – he says there’s 31 now – persuasion triggers. These are the things that trigger us emotional like, I’ll give you an example. One of them is collect all ten. I mean that is a number, but it’s more like, “I got to have it all. I need to own every one of these, ‘cause if I own two or five, it’s not all ten, I need all ten.” Those kinds of things are emotional reactions and he’s got 30 odd of them.

Do you think that your hot cognitions could map to that kind of thinking?

Oren Klaff: 100%. Anything that triggers a positive emotional response is a hot cognition. But we got to calm down, like we can’t, this has got to fit in the grand architecture of a pitch. You can’t just go in and fire off emotional triggers like playing Whack-A-Mole.

Susan Bratton: Well we as marketers understand what the fundamental emotional triggers are for a particular prospect with regard to our product or service. We understand emotionally what they desire. If we don’t, we shouldn’t have the job. So we understand that that’s why I wanted to know, are there more than four hot cognitions in the Oren world, and you’re saying, “Oh hell yeah, there’s plenty.” I just wanted to make that clear.

Oren Klaff: There’s plenty. So we’re going to talk about hook point. In my view of these interactions, your job is to add value. You got to add value. So there’s only, value can only flow two ways; you can take value or you can add value. So for example, I believe questions take value. So when you see – have you ever seen two people on a date and they’re just, one’s just asking the other questions, “So where you from? Where do you live? What school did you go to? What kind of car do you drive? What do you like?” What is this, a fucking job interview? It’s a date, right?  You want to add value by saying things that are interesting, providing insight, providing interesting social context, providing information, and I know you guys do that, right? You have to add value in order to engage with someone. That’s really what a landing page is about is adding some value and then seeing some benefit.

But what you’ll see in human interactions is when you have added so much value and you have put a time constraint on yourself and you’ve prized yourself and you are a high status individual with some local celebrity status, eventually somebody goes, “Wow! I have got a lot,” and they don’t say that, they don’t have that mechanical thought. It occurs within them.

Susan Bratton: They feel sated.

Oren Klaff: Yes, “I have got so much here, it is time for me to give back,” and that is the point that they will make a blog post, make a Twitter forward, I like Facebook. They will give back, and at that point that somebody is no longer just kind of rolling along with your pitch or your sale or your marketing, but starts to engage, that is the hook point. And that is the point when you yourself can really become engaged with that person. And what I love about it is it’s at that point, when you’ve reached the hook point, you’ve added so much value and they’re starting to add value to you and what you have, that you can stop marketing, stop selling, stop pitching and you can just be with that person for a little bit, and you have provided them so much value, you allow them to have frame control. You give it back. You react to them. You just calibrate to each other, and then you allow a flow of dialogue and likes and Twitters and back and forth, and there’s no way to screw this up if you’ve done everything else right. And beyond that, there’s no close.

Susan Bratton: Right, you’ve made an assumptive close the entire time by prizing and framing yourself. It’s theirs to have or not. It’s theirs to screw up if they don’t behave themselves. So you make them work for it, and once they’ve emotionally connected with you, then they’re onboard and they’re in full support of the deal, and then you work out the analytical pieces of it after that.

Oren Klaff: So you have it exactly right. To be crystal clear, the hook point is the point in which you have added so much value, the person feels obligated to provide some value back to you. And beyond that, there’s a calibration period where you just cannot screw it up, and then you kind of go back into, “Hey, a time constraint, we’ve got to wrap this up.” And of the $500 million now that I’ve closed with investors and buyers, I have no closes. I don’t know any. Here’s my close. You read? “So I guess we should follow up with some paperwork. Either have your guys send it or we’ll send it over, and we’ll catch up on Monday.” That’s my close. Because there’s no close besides leaving, and maintaining your time constraint and being authentic to it so you don’t blow it by being needy for the deal, so you leave on time. But the hook point, when you recognize it, is when now you move into the finishing of the deal. And it’s, in some ways, beyond – I mean it’s all-important, but you start recognizing it. And it might be that first like, it might be that first Twitter forward, it might be that first Facebook comment, but that’s the hook point, and that’s at the point where you start to wrap things up.

Susan Bratton: Good! I love it! Thank you. It was a lot of fun to talk about Pitch Anything in the constraint that I gave you, which was a virtual space, a virtual online space. I appreciate it. And I think that we tend to follow, marketers tend to follow some pretty old school formulations for asking for the order, and I think that you’ve simplified it, added a lot more raw emotion into it and given people the courage to prize themselves who might not have had the courage to prize themselves before. So thank you for everything. You wrote a great book, and I hope it’s doing extraordinarily well for you.

Oren Klaff: Thanks. Well I’d love to know what markets follow you because as I’m surfing through the Internet now, I’m nervous I’m going to be buying a lot more stuff over the next 60 days than I was before.

Susan Bratton: Well I can tell you that if there’s anyone on DishyMix who’s, if any of my DishyMix listeners make anything, they would just give it to you Oren. Oh and speaking about – I just want to say one thing – speaking about, I have a copy of Pitch Anything from Oren for you if you go to my Facebook fan page, which is of course DishyMix and you just write a comment on there, I’ll pick my favorite comment and I’ll send one DishyMix listener a copy of Pitch Anything: The Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading and Winning the Deal. Go ahead Oren, what were you going to say?

Oren Klaff: Two things. I’m going to throw, pick a second best comment and I’ll send one signed for someone, you can have a little bit more.

Susan Bratton: That’d be nice. Thank you.

Oren Klaff: Sure. ‘Cause my publisher gets mad and never do anything to help the book, so if I can help get one extra book out there…

Susan Bratton: So you’re going to get an autographed copy and my copy, well my second copy ‘cause I bought one and then Oren sent me one. So I have a copy and I have a signed copy for you. Go to DishyMix fan page on Facebook and we’ll pick two. Go ahead, what’s number two?

Oren Klaff: The second thing is if at some point you feel like you’ve got the perfect, someone from your audience and we need to do a tear down, and so apply this to a marketing effort that somebody is doing. We can try and do a tear down. We can see it happening real time, ‘cause I don’t want anybody to go away thinking this is somehow a theoretical process. This is fundamental to what I’ve created in the world. And by the way, there’s 35 companies out there that I’ve raised money for in this process that today would not exist if we hadn’t used this to go out and get the capital for them. So this is the real deal. So if somebody feels challenged, but they have something important that they need to give to the world and you think it’s real, it’s authentic, then lets try and do a tear down and fix what they have and build it back up with this process.

Susan Bratton: That’s a fantastic offer. I will definitely, definitely come to you with something really juicy. Fantastic! Well Oren, thank you so much. You’re way more handsome in person than you are in the back of your book cover, so it’s particularly been delightful. I’m your host…

Oren Klaff: And that right there is frame control at its best.

Susan Bratton: Well you know what’s so funny, here’s what I was thinking about, I lost our frame control in the beginning. I actually let you have it because in the beginning you said, we got on the connection and you said something about, “Please don’t ask me to give example midway ‘cause that blows out my mind,” and I was like, “Yeah, I’m totally the same way. I’ve got a million examples when someone asks me, I can’t remember them. So I have a mind like yours in that way.” And I said something, I could have said, “Well I can’t make you any promises. I’m here to get good information, and I have a show to do and my audience relies on me to get the best information,” or whatever. I could have said no to you and held the frame. But what I did was I gave you the frame because what I said was, “Oren, I’m here to make you look good. Don’t worry.” And in that way I gave you the floor. And so I think it’s fun to look at the frames and I think it takes some balls to own the frame. And I think in some ways, if you’re not a confident extroverted marketer who truly believes in the product that you have, it’s very difficult to prize. And I agree with you that prizing is a key component here. So if prizing is your struggle, you really are going to have to figure out why you can help someone in a way that no one else can and then take the floor, just take the floor.

All right darling, we’re going to go. This was DishyMix. Oren Klaff, you were fantastic. I knew you would be. I loved your book. Thank you so much for adding so much to my world and to my DishyMix listener’s world’s.

Oren Klaff: Thanks Susan. It was great.

Susan Bratton: All right. I’m your host, Susan Bratton. Thanks again for listening in. Have a fantastic day and I’ll connect with you at the next episode. Take care.