Image source - Falmouth Online University Canvas & Upsplash.com
For this week’s spark activity, I share a personal anecdote about a time I pitched some of my work ideas. I will discuss the following. What went right and what went wrong. What are my personal tips for a good pitch, and is it what you say, or how you say it, who says it, or something else, that is most important.
Back in the days where I worked retail, I was an area manager for a stock taking company who I will not mention. I had spent a brief 18 months before being promoted to area manager and handling approximately 76 people. The reason for this was due to my managerial experience previously as I had worked in this position for around 12 years. To give a slight bit of back story, the office and area that I ran was the London area and we had a lot of retail accounts to look after but we were the smallest office. With only 76 people under my belt, I needed to grow the office to around 150 people but the current ways of recruiting wasn't working.
As part of my promotion, I had to give a presentation to the managing director regarding what I would be doing to help build that office and strengthen it to support the growing number of clients the business was taking on. I remember spending a good 2 months on this presentation & the night before just cramming what I could into it and backing up with test data that I had been testing over the last few weeks in regards to new recruitment methods. What I had been doing, was renting a space in the Job centres local to me and sending recruiters there to conduct interviews which would then result into people who were interested in the position staying for further questioning and paperwork. Specifics I thought of that were good for the pitch were backing up my claims with actual data and showing the improvements that were happening in the area I was managing. This included things like attrition rates, counters who completed their first shift, buddy system implementation so that new people had someone familiar with on their first day. I would say it is how you say it, confidence obviously brings a lot to any pitch. Looking at the pitch video from Made Men that was shown this week, confidence and personal experience plays a huge role. If you can relate to what you are talking to then you are more passionate about it, and that shows.
Image Source - Falmouth Online University Canvas & Unsplash.com For this week’s challenge activity, please create a pitch deck (10-20 slides) for the proof of concept you are working on, which you will present in the webinar of Week 8.
As with any communication, it’s important to consider the audience – and for this pitch document we would like you to imagine that you are presenting your game to publishers and investors. Follow the tips given in this week’s lecture and supporting materials, for example telling a story, using the rule of threes and including lots of visuals and gifs. Don’t forget to make the business case, as well as ‘wowing' the audience with your game.
This week we also started preparing our pitch deck for our game. My slides have changed somewhat during the development of them because I have since come into a partnership with Voxpop games who will be funding the development for 4 months as an exclusive for their store.
Here is a link to the pitch deck I have prepared.