Ben Watkins: make people care about your business

Start with somebody who wants something

Watkins describes character, circumstance, and content as ingredients of a story. The audience needs a person to follow and enough context to understand what is at stake.

For a business pitch, his logline exercise is to identify the customer, their goal, and the obstacle. That gives a listener a situation they can picture before the pitch gets into how the product works.

His 4 pillars

The first is attention. Surprise, an emotional opening, or a precise call to a particular audience can make someone listen.

Then comes emotional investment. What happens to the person in the story has to matter. Teaching adds something the audience can take away. Anticipation gives them a question they want answered.

These are Watkins's working principles as a storyteller. His claim that purchases depend on emotion includes a recollection of a classified document he encountered while researching Burn Notice. The document is unavailable here. That anecdote supplies no independently checkable evidence for the claim.

Decide what to leave out

Watkins distinguishes information that moves a story forward from details that can wait. Giving the audience every explanation immediately can remove their reason to ask another question.

In a pitch, the listener's question is useful feedback. It shows which part of the story they have followed and what they need next. A prepared speaker can expand that detail without starting the whole explanation again.

He also talks about reducing the amount a potential partner has to imagine. A prototype, an audience, or a piece of finished work makes a proposal easier to assess. Producing that proof costs time and money, and his own experiences include the financial risk of acting before a deal is secured.