One of the key factors to winning pitches is understanding the people.

Maybe because people like simplicity there seems to be a tendency among more inexperienced people to adopt the one size fits all mentality of “treat everyone in the way that you would like to be treated yourself.” The problem with this, particularly in a pitch is that the odds are stacked heavily against you (3 times out of 4 you will fail!).

Anyone who is in the world of business development or leadership would testify to this and knows that everyone likes to be treated differently. Despite each one of us being completely unique there are two attributes that are considered more important than others: 

Assertiveness and emotiveness (the degree to which you express emotion). 

Back in the late 1960’s Bolton and Bolton came up with a model plotting assertiveness against emotiveness and four styles emerge.

Next time, we will look at the attributes of the different styles.