Sept. 28, 2026
How to Pitch Like You Don't Need the Deal (It's Not About Confidence)
Most people walk into a pitch knowing what they're presenting but not what they're actually trying to achieve — and it shows. In this episode, Chris breaks down Mission, the third piece of the Speaker-Audience-Mission framework, using AIM (Ask, Issue, Minimum) to define exactly what winning looks like before you ever open your mouth. You'll learn why neediness in a pitch isn't a mindset problem — it's what happens when you've only got one definition of success instead of three. Want to work t...
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YouTube Most people walk into a pitch knowing what they're presenting but not what they're actually trying to achieve — and it shows. In this episode, Chris breaks down Mission, the third piece of the Speaker-Audience-Mission framework, using AIM (Ask, Issue, Minimum) to define exactly what winning looks like before you ever open your mouth. You'll learn why neediness in a pitch isn't a mindset problem — it's what happens when you've only got one definition of success instead of three.
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0:00
If you want to become better at selling or pitching your ideas, something you have to understand is the art of the mission.
We call this telos.
This is what Aristotle said.
There has to be an end goal or a mission with all types of persuasion.
You can shoot an arrow at a target, but if you don't have a target, you'll never know if you hit that target.
0:19
So Part 1 and Part 2 of this series of pitch Please.
How to sell anything to anyone is all about making sure you are the best speaker for the moment and then making sure you understand your audience of the moment.
And Part 3 mission is all about understanding the end goal of the moment.
0:37
Now, this is something a lot of the best communicators have gotten quite good at, and it's why they keep showing up day after day, because they may not make successful pitches every single day.
Yet they've established their mission so well that they've developed a way that incentivizes them as communicators to keep showing up and doing it.
0:57
Again, this is often overlooked when we look at our speaker audience mission, our rhetorical triangle, or as we've called it, Sam, getting to know that rhetorical situation.
One of the things that's often overlooked is the mission.
This is a lot different than a description.
1:13
Often times people say, well, my mission is to pitch my product.
That's describing what you're going to do.
You as the speaker are going to do this to your certain audience.
That's a description.
Your mission is different.
Your mission is based on a continuum.
1:30
When we think about it in 2D pitching, the mission would be to get a yes versus a no, right?
We want to show up and we want to do as well as we can to secure a yes and to get them to join us.
But the truth of the matter is when we think about it on a 3D spectrum, there are many different outcomes.
1:51
It could be building relationships with the people you are pitching to.
It could be making sure you get a meeting next week.
You could be making sure they do say yes to a certain type of investment, but when we think about it a bit larger, it's a continuum.
And this is the truth about persuasion.
2:07
It's persuasion isn't about swinging someone from yes to no, but it's about swinging someone from absolutely no to no to maybe no to, I'm not sure to potentially yes to yes to absolutely yes.
2:23
Persuasion is all about this spectrum.
So there's a different way to think about this that I'm going to talk to you about.
But the big thing I want you to understand here is imagine a road trip.
You're the driver.
There could be people in the car, but if you don't know where you're going, it's going to be a bad road trip.
2:39
So this is about establishing your leverage and approaching the moment with an opened mindset so that we can avoid desperation sales.
If you think the only way to win is just to get this, yes, then we start to have desperation sales, or as we like to call it, Commission breath.
2:57
You can tell people are talking to you just to sell to you.
Messaging doubt, persuasion, burnout, and overall speaker fatigue.
People get fatigued whenever they have one outcome in mind and they don't get that outcome.
They get fatigued because they feel like they are continuously failing.
3:16
And as humans, it's not sustainable to show up to give all of your effort and enthusiasm and then fail.
It's just not how it goes.
You can't keep doing that over and over and then wake up the next morning excited to do it again.
We have to have some type of incentivization, some type of rewards.
3:34
That's what will ultimately make you a better communicator, better at pitching your ideas, better at pitching your product.
And here's how to set up the game.
Here's how to set up the structure so that you don't burn out and so that you don't have persuasion fatigue, so that you don't find yourself falling into desperate sales with Commission breath.
3:52
It's this right here.
It's what I call AIM.
It's the three-step process to be able to establish your mission.
AIM.
And the first big step in this is to ask.
Asking is really the key to all questions, right?
4:08
The best information, the best partnerships, the best stories, the best sales, the best clients.
It starts with a question.
How can I help you?
How can we partner?
How can you use what I have?
How can I use what you have?
It starts with a question you have to ask.
In this specific model, in the AIM model for establishing your mission, we're trying to think through all of our potential asks.
4:32
We call this deliberative rhetoric.
We are deliberating, speaking in the future about different moments, different things that are happening.
There's deliberative rhetoric, but then there's also forensics discussing the past.
And then there's also the ceremonial talking about what's happening in the moment.
4:49
Sales and pitching is a lot of deliberative, It's future.
So I want to ask you to consider what life would be like if you were a part of this, if you invested in this, if you were partnering with what we were doing.
5:04
That's another ask.
See, right now as I'm dodging Wasps and recording in the great outdoors with the sun blaring on my face, I can stand here and I can think of different asks.
But for you, I would like you to actually sit down and actually think about this.
5:20
What does this mean for me?
And whether it's 5 minutes or 10 minutes or 15 minutes, that will help you prepare what your asks are, what your asks could be.
Whenever I had my second job outside of high school, I served pizza.
5:36
I was a waiter, and I would take food to people's tables.
I would get their order and make sure they had the best experience at my restaurant so that whenever they left, they would pay their bill for their food.
And then they would also give me a tip.
And I worked so hard to get big tips 'cause I wanted more money, 'cause I was a college student.
5:54
But I was having a really hard summer because I worked at a restaurant that had a open floor concept and they also had tables on the rooftop.
And I worked in an area where the summers got very hot and people didn't want to sit on the rooftop in the blaring sun.
6:10
So I wouldn't get tables.
I would show up to work and people wouldn't tip me well because there weren't many people to tip.
So what I did was I told myself I'm not showing up to work just for good tips, because if I keep doing that, I'm going to have bad days.
6:26
I'm going to show up to work so that I can become a better communicator, so that I can make sure that every day I'm doing my best to be better at initiating conversation, to make people laugh, to make people feel like I'm expressing hospitality to them.
6:44
You know, I was in a space where I wasn't able just to go get a new job because within 5 weeks I was going to move back to my university.
But I was in a space to keep showing up and to get better at talking to people, to get better at showing up and serving and potentially make some money.
7:02
That was just one instance of how I was able to avoid growth as a communicator by burnout.
I introduced different asks, different ways that I could pursue a solution or an answer with my pitching or with how I was communicating the same things for you and your pitch.
7:21
Yes, you may want yes, a yes, or a signed term sheet or a meeting next week or being introduced to additional investors, but there are other things as well.
You're going to want the repetitions.
You're going to want to make sure you understand more about them after the pitch than you did before.
7:40
The better you can categorize and catalog this, the better you're going to be able to understand the mission of the moment, the MOM.
The second thing is impact or issue.
I'm going to take a minute away from the whiteboard.
7:55
If you are growing a business and you have an opportunity to pitch to investors, to clients or partners, then you need to know what you're doing.
So down below I have my 10 step guide of how everything works in my head in a method you can use to approach every pitch to feel a lot better about it.
8:11
That's what this series is about.
But if you want it in writing, if you want to be able to download it, you could even upload it to AI and say, hey, help me walk through my pitch.
I mean, I can work with you to walk through it even better.
AI is average, but it's better and nothing but you can use it.
So download it and the link below my guide to how you can sell anything to anyone.
8:31
Okay, back to the video.
What are the issues?
What are the objections?
We talked about this a decent amount on the previous part.
If you'd like to see any of the previous parts, I put them in the description below.
We talked about figuring out what the objections are, what the fears are, but the I here understanding the mission of the moment.
8:50
The I is understanding the biggest issue of the moment that would prevent all of this from going, all of this from happening.
What is that Django block that if we were to pull that Django block, everything would go falling down?
Many people think this is weakness, but it's actually strength.
9:06
The more you know what this thing is.
I remember meeting with somebody and they told me up front, here's the one reason why the investors wouldn't partner with us.
This is before the pitch.
They just in their head, they knew.
9:23
Here's the one reason why.
So it was our job to show up to not be completely consumed by that #1 issue, but to make sure that we were playing the game with them in mind to make sure that we are playing the game knowing here's the issue, we need to play according to it, but we also need to make sure that we're not being so consumed by that issue.
9:48
We're not able to be ourselves, right?
So being able to understand what's the ask and then also what's the issue?
And the M here is what's the minimum, what's the minimum win?
You could make this as low as just making sure you're pitching, just making sure you're putting your product out there.
10:04
Some people say play the game, don't keep track of the scoreboard, complete the repetition, get another Rep and run the play right.
What's the minimum?
What is the absolute rock bottom you leave, you feel OK with?
If you show up to every sale and you're like, I have to get them to say yes, it's going to be a hard life because there are some things you cannot control.
10:26
There are some things that they may get pulled away from in that moment.
And I know there's different sales voices out there.
There's some sales voices that say if they say no, it's completely your fault and it's all on you.
And for the most part, I think that could be true.
10:42
It is up to us to create the experience and to put people in a position to where saying yes is a no brainer.
But at the end of the day, there's also things that are out of our hands.
So if you have the idea of I'm going to show up and I'm going to make sure I get a yes, that's not a minimum.
That's a maximum, right?
10:58
Well, it's close to a maximum.
The minimum is making sure you show up to give the pitch to represent your company, to represent your organization.
Well, that's a good minimum to have.
Making sure you show up with somebody new on your team.
11:13
If you're doing a group pitch, making sure you all hit the notes right, making sure you infuse stories that talk about your origin story and why those values that are showcasing your origin story match the people you're presenting to.
There are these different minimums that you can have that regardless of whether you get a yes on the sale, you're going to feel great about because it's practice, it's repetition, it's experience.
11:42
The best communicators don't sit here and watch YouTube videos all day.
That's what we would call acquired knowledge.
The best communicators are in a different group where we call applied knowledge.
They're applying the knowledge and they know in their heads that whenever they show up and they run the play and they do the play, right, they're going to get feedback.
12:02
They may not score, but they're going to get more feedback on how to do it even better.
And they're going to build a better relationship so that if they do have another pitch to these people again, they're going to be able to do it even better next time, right?
So understanding what your asks are, it's not just one, don't think about it 2D, yes or no, think about 3D.
12:23
Maybe you are just getting them to the next step.
We would call this the spectrum of certainty to go from no, unrealistic, skeptical, unsure, it could have actually happened.
I think it did happen.
12:38
No, it did happen.
It definitely happened, right?
The spectrum of uncertainty, it's 3D.
The ask is 3D.
What's the issue that has the biggest impact?
The eye of the eye.
But what is that #1 issue that you need to make sure that's completely key to your mission.
12:55
But do not, do not forget this one thing.
And then what's the absolute minimum?
It's important for you to track all of this because this gives you leverage.
This is the part that often times people overlook.
They know about themselves as a speaker, they know about the audience, but they forget about the mission.
13:13
So if you can apply these frameworks, the AIM, then you will find yourself a bit more set apart, particularly whenever it comes to the content in the context.
You'll know what the context of the moment is, and then you'll deal less with speaker fatigue, persuasion, burnout, messaging, doubt, because there's a lot more asks on the table rather than that one, yes or no.
13:37
That was that was Part 3 of the Pitch Please series.
Now for part 4, we are going to move towards how to build trust logic in connection with your audience, starting with trust and our TLC framework.
One of the biggest components of any rhetorical situation is being able to get the audience to trust you.
13:56
So what does that mean for you and your business?
We're going to explore that more next week.
Remember, life is better when you talk to people.
If you haven't already, subscribe to the YouTube channel, subscribe to the podcast, wherever you're listening this to wherever you're listening to this at.
14:13
And if you get a moment, leave five stars, 5 stars for good service.
All right, folks, I'll see you next time.