Pitch Anything by Oren Klaff

Long before I had even $1 million to buy and sell deals with, before I hired cognitive scientists and neuroscientists to show me the foundations of human attention, and before I had $400M of deals under me, I was flying blind in the world of deal making.
I consulted every resource I could think of to find better ways to pitch a deal.

I’m not embarrassed to say I read the books of sales trainer Tom Hopkins. I read The Craft of Argument by Joseph Williams and Multimind by Robert Ornstein. I met with famed financier Ivan Boesky – he was considered a master pitchman. But no real method was revealed by these meetings. I even got a gig as an analyst for a well known billionaire. That just set me back.

Of course, I scoured the Internet. But not only did I not find THE answer, the only material I did find on pitching was coming out of the selling guru’s like Tony Robbins. That was a clear waste of time.

Neuroeconomics combines neuroscience, economics, and psychology to study how people make decisions. It looks at the role of the brain when we evaluate decisions, categorize risks and rewards, and interact with each other. This was my first exposure to a credible group of people studying the same thing as me – how the brain responds to financial offers. This was the first time I came to believe a unified algorithm for pitching could be developed and used.

As I chased down every useable theory in the field of Neuroeconomics, I began to understand that I was on my way to the answer to both how I could better forge a connection with the people I was pitching to, and, as it turns out, understanding the big idea that makes up the foundation of this website.