Review your pitch process regularly

Your pitches and pitch process will constantly evolve as your business adapts and grows. As you gain more experience and knowledge, you can—and should—edit, change, and improve your pitches. 

With that in mind, we’re going to take you through a process to conduct regular reviews of your pitch process. You shouldn’t do it after every single pitch. Our recommendation is to start after your third pitch.

Read through your pitches again. Think about how the call went overall. You can think about or write down the answers to these questions, whichever works for you.

• How did the pitches go?

• Which had the best results?

  • How was it different from the other pitches?

  • How was it similar?

• Did you feel comfortable giving the pitch? Why is that? If not, what can you do to improve?

• What do you need to do more of?

• What do you need to do less of?

• Is there anything new you want to try?

Do the same again following your tenth pitch. Then repeat. How often you repeat this review process is up to you, but be mindful that if you review too often you could burn out, but review too little and you risk repeating a process that isn’t working.

Review an old pitch

Find an old pitch that was unsuccessful, from at least a few weeks ago. If you have one where you received some feedback, use that.

Before we jump in, let’s have a look at Mo’s review process. Mo sent a pitch to a travel magazine that wasn’t successful, but he received some feedback. 

The prospect said there wasn’t enough information in his pitch and that it might not fit the magazine’s readership. Mo will pitch the same travel magazine in a month, and this time he will add in more relevant detail and also state why the magazine’s readers will want to read the content he’s pitching.

No feedback? No problem. Approach your pitch with everything in mind that you’ve learned from the playbook and review your pitch for any weak spots.

Ask yourself these questions:

• Did you correctly identify the prospect’s pain points?

• Were the pain points big enough issues to cause a significant problem for the prospect?

• Did you explain exactly how you could solve the prospect’s problems?

• Did you demonstrate your existing work and experience? Were the examples relevant?

• Did you state what results the prospect could expect?

• Is there any grammar or sentence structure you could improve?

• Was the pitch too long or too short?

Updating your pitches doesn’t always have to mean making big changes. It could simply mean:

• Rewriting your pitch or in-person pitch script so it gets to the point quicker.

• Telling the prospect why you want to work with them only at the end of the pitch.

• Removing or adding one more example of work.

Review your old pitch and go through the above questions. Identify any weak spots and explore how you could improve on each one.

Recap

• Understood the importance of the review process.

• Built out your own review process.

• Reviewed an old pitch.