Targeting: who is worth pitching
Qualification frameworks like BANT tell you what a good prospect looks like.
Read the guide →A pitch is a seduction: the buyer decides on trust and story, then looks for reasons.
Seduce breaks the high-value pitch into its working parts: who is worth targeting, how to prepare, what to say in the room, and how to close without begging or bullying. Alongside the craft, it names what the research on persuasion actually shows, and where the popular sales orthodoxy gets it wrong.
Read the pitch craft guides See the field guide to good and bad techniquesSix stages of winning a complex sale
Each stage carries its own mechanism, evidence and failure mode, from qualifying a prospect through to the debrief nobody wants to run.
Preparation before the room
The room is often decided before you enter it, through pre-wiring individual stakeholders ahead of the group meeting.
Read the guide →The pitch itself
Structure, story and the single thing you are actually asking for, before the slides get involved.
Read the guide →Negotiation over price and scope
Anchoring, BATNA and the moment to walk away, covered as a discipline.
Read the guide →Closing without begging or bullying
Asking for the decision, and recognising when unfair-pressure tactics cross a line the CAP Code already draws.
Read the guide →The follow-up after the room decides
A lost pitch debrief is the most reliable source of information about why you lost, and most firms skip it.
Read the guide →
The evidence, briefly
What the research says about persuasion
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LOSS AVERSION
Buyers fear losing what they have more than gaining what you offer
Losses are weighted more heavily than equivalent gains in choice experiments.
Kahneman and Tversky, 1979
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ANCHORING
The first number spoken sets the frame for every number after it
Reference points formed early are hard to shift, even when the anchor is arbitrary.
Tversky and Kahneman, 1974
See anchoring in negotiation -
STATUS IN THE ROOM
The buyer is protecting their own standing
A decision that fails in public usually costs the buyer more than it costs you.
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SOCIAL PROOF
Social proof works less reliably than most sales training assumes
Several classic findings have not held up under independent replication.
Read what replicated -
RECIPROCITY
An unasked-for favour creates an obligation
The obligation is real, and it is also the point at which using it turns coercive.
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DECISION FIRST, REASONS AFTER
Buyers decide on trust and story, then go looking for reasons
The slide deck usually supplies the justification.
How persuasion actually works
Pitches won and lost, on the public record
Real outcomes from tenders, account reviews and funding rounds, each with a source you can check.
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Somewhere specific to go next
Preparation and structure decide most pitches before anyone opens a laptop. Read what the room is actually judging, then check your own pitch against it.