How to Prepare Yourself for the Pitch — with Danny Fontaine

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How to Prepare Yourself for the Pitch

December 6, 2023 Career Growth Creative Agency Networking Video Production

Guest Speaker

Danny Fontaine

Creative Director, UK & Ireland at IBM, and Founder of “Pitch Masters” podcast

Danny Fontaine is the go-to-market Creative Director for IBM UK and Ireland and founder of the Experiential Selling Team, a group of creatives, psychologists, storytellers, and technologists, who coach teams through the entire pitch process, as well as execute on all aspects of design and creativity. He teaches across the globe and is passionate about developing creative career paths in the corporate world.

Danny also hosts the top-ranked “Pitch Masters” podcast, where he interviews leaders in advertising, sales, and marketing to find out how they win business.

Crafting the perfect pitch requires an emotional edge — here’s how to find it.

Pitching is a given for most creative industries, and knowing how to take a standard presentation to new heights can separate a good team from a great one. Guest Danny Fontaine, a creative director at IBM and host of the top-ranked “Pitch Masters” podcast, chats about how to tell a story rather than simply design a pitch; ways to leverage emotions as a tool; and tips for leaning into the fear that comes with pitching — and pushing through it.

mentioned in this show:

Adam Morgan

Creative Leader and RCL Host

The Stoke Group

Digital Marketing and Full-Service Content Agency

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REAL CREATIVE LEADERSHIP

Season: 4

Episode: 8

Episode Title: How to Prepare Yourself for the Pitch — with Danny Fontaine

Guest Title: Danny Fontaine, Creative Director, UK & Ireland at IBM, and Founder of “Pitch Masters” podcast

Adam Morgan
Welcome everyone to another great episode of Real Creative Leadership. Today, we are going to talk about something that’s been a part of my creative path for decades, I would say. And that’s the idea of the art of the pitch. Pitching ideas, pitching campaigns, pitching anything that you need to. And every creative knows the importance of the pitch, but what goes into the pitch is only half of it.

So today we’re going to talk about what you need to do to prepare yourself for these big moments and how creative leaders can guide their teams to become experts at exciting, compelling and emotional pitches. And you know me, I love that last one. Emotions drive business—nostalgia, fear, anger. All of these are powerful emotions that can yield real results when you’re attempting to move audiences with your pitch.

And I can’t think of anyone more perfectly suited to help guide this conversation on the art of the pitch than Danny Fontaine. Danny is the creative director for the UK and Ireland for IBM. He’s also the founder of the Experiential Selling Team, which focuses on powerful communication strategies for IBM’s clients. And Danny hosts a top rated Apple podcast, Pitchmasters, which I’ve had the pleasure of being on. And it’s my pleasure to welcome you to our show today, Danny. Welcome to Real Creative Leadership.

Danny Fontaine
Oh, thank you very much. What a beautiful introduction, lovely to be here.

Adam Morgan
Oh, excellent. Yeah, we’ve had a lot of, if we start to dig into something like, if it sounds like we’ve been talking about this for a while, everyone, it’s because we’ve had several conversations on this topic. So I’m just excited we can finally have a real show here so you all can share in Danny’s wisdom on this awesome topic. All right. I’ve gotten to know you, but our audience does not know you, Danny. So why don’t you just be the first here, just give us a little bit of your background on creative leadership and pitching and all of that so that we can get to know you.

Danny Fontaine
Sure, I stumbled into where I am now. My background is in art. I did a degree in fine art, painting, and photography, and then, like most people, I couldn’t get a job for the life of me with a degree like that. And ended up in, long story short, did some teaching, ended up in consultancies. Didn’t know what consultancies were until after I was hired and figured that out. Tried every job in the agency. And one day someone said, “Would you like to try sales?” And I thought, “Absolutely no way am I ever going to wear a shiny suit and sell my soul and manipulate people into buying something they don’t want.”

And over the years, I’ve realized that sales, believe it or not, I think it’s one of the most creative parts of a business because there’s hardly any bureaucracy for a start. It’s the wild west. You can do whatever you want. There’s hardly any brand guidelines for something that’s only ever going to be seen once in a small, dark room and will never see the light of day again.

Now, of course, I’m not talking about the actual material that you’re trying to sell to a client, the artwork and the service and the product, but what you build around that, the experience you build around it, the limitless boundaries that you do around it, that is what gets me really excited. And I guess, as you can see, I get very excited talking about this. I could talk about it for hours and we haven’t got hours. So I’ll try and keep my answers quite short, but that’s where I am today. I’m at IBM and in the UK. I help to win some of the biggest, the most strategic deals by applying what I called experiential selling. So this is, how do we engage with all five senses of our audience? How do we persuade and compel using your favorite topic, emotion and creating those emotional connections?

Adam Morgan
When you put it that way, it’s true. We’re all in sales. Like, we just, the sooner we realize that and accept that. Anything with marketing, or, I don’t know, commercial creativity at brands and companies experiences, everything that you’ve just talked about, like, we’re all in sales.

Danny Fontaine
The definition of a pitch, for example—it’s not preparing a PowerPoint presentation for a one hour session to a group of men in suits. It’s using any means, speech or act to persuade someone of an idea. That’s it. it’s doing anything you like to convince someone of something. And that’s all it is.

Adam Morgan
Oh, good. I hope we can get into some stories of some of those moments of just sharing what you’ve done and maybe what I’ve done over the years of just like those cool little experiential moments that; one of my favorite stories on my podcast was your story. Let’s talk, tell me about your podcast. Let’s let everyone know about Pitchmasters so that they know what that is.

Danny Fontaine
Alright, when I first started in sales, I had no idea what I was doing, and I started reading a lot of books, and I read books on sales, and then I moved into books more on psychology, and then emotions, and neuroscience, and how we can be creative, and what does creativity mean, and then body language, and then philosophy, and a pitch encompasses all of these topics, and I read and I read and I became so overwhelmed, but eventually you read enough to form your own kind of opinions.

And I really started to think, how can I try and give back some of the most important points that I’ve learned over the years to others? That’s all I wanted to do. It’s a—I don’t make money, I don’t advertise on the podcast. I just want to help other people and talk about my favorite topic, which is pitching. So I asked a bunch of people if they wanted to come and talk to me about pitching. And these were my favorite authors, predominantly, and favorite speakers. Simon Sinek is one that everyone will know yourself. Of course, Rory Sutherland, who does amazing things in the UK. Robin Dreek, a former FBI agent, who talks about trust; just incredibly interesting people talking about every different side and angle of what is pitching and they all bring their own phenomenal stories. And I always ask them to give me your best pitching story and your worst pitching story as well, which is normally my favorite part of the episodes.

Adam Morgan
Oh, that’s interesting. I can’t remember even what story I told on your thing.

Danny Fontaine
You told this story of you were pitching to some headsets—

Adam Morgan
Oh, Plantronics.

Danny Fontaine
Plantronics. Yes. And you said, “I needed to create an anomaly,” and that was a beautiful way of putting it. Because when we pitch to people, they expect us to speak about an introduction and then an agenda and then go through some slides on technology. And then some creative and then finish on Q& A and it’s so boring that no one even pays attention.

And these poor clients, these poor audiences have to sit through five or six of these in a row. And we show up just to give them what they expect. But you showed up at Plantronics headsets and you’d pre-learned some parkour. That’s right. That’s right, and you go onto the boardroom table and you did a front flip off the table in between two of the directors, is my memory of the story.

Adam Morgan
Yes. Yes, we were pitching a TV idea and then the idea, it was supposed to be these hand-free, hands-free headsets and this was like, I don’t even know when this was, 2006 or something like that. And so one of the ideas, like what if we do a spot about parkour where you’re jumping around, grabbing, flipping, it’s like a perfect example of hands free.

And so as part of it, when I’m reading the script, yeah, I jumped up on the table and did this barrel roll flip and my legs kicked right between the two heads of two executives. And I was like, so terrified. I’m like, if I kick one of them in the face, this is over. That would have been over. Yeah. But luckily. I made it through and it turned out great. It was fun.

Danny Fontaine
They remembered it, right? Of course. But even telling the story, it’s a story that I will probably remember forever. And someone listening to this podcast right now will probably remember that little story forever as well. That’s how we get people to remember things by creating anomalies and immersing them.

Adam Morgan
The other thing that you said that just, and I know we’re going off that original question, but, you’re talking about, like, the basic structure of a pitch where it’s like problem, solution, results, like, so many presentations are in that.And sometimes I just want to be like, “Can’t I just show what’s possible? What’s the future? What’s, like, the whole thing about this big idea?” Let’s stop worrying about problem, solution, results. And let’s just talk to them about, “Here’s what we can do. Here’s where the future is going.Here’s what’s possible.” I think that’s just so much more exciting when it comes to trying to tell a story in a pitch.

Danny Fontaine
Absolutely. And the problem is, we’re so bound by what we think are the unbreakable rules of the pitch process, which is, “Man, I had this great idea. I wanted to tell them about the future of their business.But they gave me an agenda, and that’s not on it. I’m just gonna have to follow their terrible agenda instead.” Clients don’t know what they want to hear most of the time. And it’s hard to even convince my colleagues sometimes you don’t have to do what they ask you. You don’t have to do it. They, every now and then procurement might be annoyed with you, but who cares? Because if you can create that emotional connection and that impact. that experience, that’s how you go in a win work, whether or not you’ve broken a procurement rule or not.

Adam Morgan
That is so true. So I’m going to bring up another story that I just remember of a pitch that we won. And it was for a new client back when I was in agency. And the clients, like they were just super stiff. Their arms were folded. They were just, like, having none of this. And then I opened up my computer to load up the presentation. And instead I had left a video game icon. On my toolbar at the bottom and they saw the video game icon. And one was like, “He’s not even hiding it. He’s not even trying to hide his video game icon.”

And that’s the funny thing is that’s what, that was the trigger. And then we started talking about the video game. The next thing there are clients and they’ve, and I hadn’t played that game in a long time and they like bought me an account, made me go back and play it with them and hang out with them virtually for a while.And it was like, that’s what did it, was just that silly video game icon. So you never know what it is. It’s not the routine of what’s going to get you there.

Danny Fontaine
Absolutely, and there’s a few things that talk about as well. One is, if you know your audience, if we research our audience and we find out that they do like specific things, then bring them into a pitch, because that is the perfect example of how you can then hook them. But the second thing is you were being yourself at that moment in time, you were being authentic. And often we turn up to a pitch feeling like we are actors playing a part. We have to remember our lines, we have to act in a certain way, we mustn’t say this, we must say this, and we get through it as close to possible at time so that we can leave and we high five because we got through the rehearsal without fluffing a line, regardless of what impact or what happened in the room. Other than that, and actually sometimes if we are just vulnerable, which is really hard in business, if we are vulnerable and we are our authentic selves and we are truthful, then that facade falls away from us and from our audience and allows us to create that genuine—again, a genuine human, emotional connection. It’s huge.

Adam Morgan
The craft is really important. Like, we can’t just go out there and be like, “All right, we’re just going to be this rock star and have the perfect pitch.” And yes, we want to be authentic and vulnerable and all those things. But I think starting at level one, like you have to get the craft down. So talk to me more about what does it take to understand that and go through your journey of really absorbing everything about the craft?

Danny Fontaine
Yeah, I mean it works both ways. You can be absolutely perfect at the craft and not have the emotion and the vulnerability and the authenticity and it won’t work. And vice versa, you can just be a huge bubbling ball of energy without really knowing how to structure things.

And actually it comes down to psychology and understanding the human brain. That’s what I figured out. And I read all of these things, but a lot of them cross over and a lot of them start to repeat themselves and whilst it’s overwhelming, I think that, you can boil it down to a bit of a process. And really for me, the big thing with pitching more than anything else probably is storytelling and it’s this concept as well. There’s a couple of concepts here. One of my mantras is, “Emotion first, information second,” so if I can make a connection with you by telling you an emotional story—for example, getting some kind of emotional reaction from you—you will, like it or not, subconsciously have a connection with me as a human, and your subconscious will be saying, “I think I want to work with this guy.”

Even though you haven’t necessarily understood my product or my service or my creative yet, you will then want your conscious brain to agree with your subconscious brain. So you will say, “Please show me evidence so I can choose you. Please show me evidence.” Now what a lot of people do is they don’t do the emotional bit first. And they just say, “Here’s all of my evidence. And they come in cold and the human brain says, “I don’t, I didn’t ask for any evidence. And I feel like you’re trying to convince me of something, I feel like you’re trying to sell to me and actually the more you’re trying to sell to me the more I’m going to push back on you.” It’s called the backfire phenomenon. It’s a real psychological thing. It’s based on a number of unconscious, subconscious biases that we have.

So it’s really important. Emotion first, information second. And then the other thing that’s one of the quickest ways for anyone to understand how to tell a good story is that we have something in our brain called mirror neurons. And these neurons, we’ve got billions of them, and they literally, when we have an emotional experience, they remember that experience. So when we recall an emotional experience, we feel that emotion again. But mirror neurons also mean that when I recall an emotional experience… You listening? We’ll feel that emotion as well. And that’s really powerful. It’s why we cry when we watch movies, not because we’re going through that, but it’s also why we’re, someone walks in a room and they’re laughing and full of joy. And we say, “Wow, you just make me feel better.” Just when you walk in the room, it’s cause we’re all mirroring these emotions. So if you want to tell a good story, if you want your clients or your audience to be full of joy, then tell a joyful story, show joy, and they will not be able to stop themselves from feeling it. And when we tell stories, we want to think, “Okay, what are the emotions we can make our audience feel?” If I’m feeling them myself, then they will automatically feel them as well.

Adam Morgan
Okay. So the first thing you start out with is emotions first, and you gave a good example of telling an emotional story. So they feel the mirrors. Maybe just a couple more examples of how you get that emotion in there. Is it, usually just your own personal stories that you start out and be like, when I was twelve, blah, blah, blah, blah, yeah, it was that where you’re starting out? Or what? Tell me more about this.

Danny Fontaine
So you’ve got to make it relevant to what you’re trying to pitch to the client. If I’m pitching you something highly technical and actually I can think of a story from my lifetime that is a good metaphor rather than telling that technical story, then that’s a great idea. But the other thing we want to do is tell a story that makes our audience the hero. So if I’m trying to sell a service or a product to you, I’ll be talking about the problems that you might be facing in the world. And then I’ll be using contrast throughout, and this is prevalent across the greatest speeches of all time: Barack Obama’s inauguration speech, Steve Jobs launching the iPhone 2007, Martin Luther King Jr., “I Have a Dream,” one of the most—the best examples of this. You talk about the current world and the challenges in it, and then you contrast that to a glorious vision of the future and what could be.

But then you contrast again to, “But hang on a minute. There will be obstacles in your path.” And then you tell your audience, “But don’t worry because I know how to overcome them.” So you’re constantly on this emotional rollercoaster and that stems from the work of Kurt Vonnegut and Nancy Duarte as well. So both really good teachers of this kind of shape of stories, but yeah, stories come from everywhere. They come from within us and our experiences, but you can also write a story as long as you make sure that your audience is the hero of that story and never you, because no one wants to hear a story about you. They want to hear a story about them.

Adam Morgan
Crap. I told a story about me in the beginning of this podcast, so I totally failed on this then, because before, when you were talking on this topic, you said something of, “Disturb on purpose, reassure after.” So that’s like the emotion first and then your knowledge later, but it’s a different one. What do you mean by, “Disturb on purpose?”

Danny Fontaine
Yeah, it’s a tricky one because there’s a fine line between creating emotional stories and manipulating. And actually, fear, which I think you mentioned earlier, is one of the strongest emotions—fear, anger. There are negative emotions and we can use them in a pitch as well, as long as we’re not doing it to be sensationalist, as long as we’re doing it to really ensure that our audience understands the kind of impact or the weight of what’s going on. Certainly in business we can talk about the things that; I work in the technology sector, the IT sector, and the amount of clients who are happy to sit with a burning platform, just thinking it works today, so it’ll probably work tomorrow. And sometimes you have to really say, “Look, the day that your platform does stop working, your entire business will come to a halt. And this is how your customers will be affected, your finances will be affected, your stakeholders will be affected. It’ll have a huge knock on effect that will cost many more millions than just fixing the problem now.” Then that’s disturbing, and that’s fine as long as you give the assurance afterwards. “And that’s why we’ve created this plan for you, so that you will never have to face that situation.” So it’s kind of rectification after you’ve done the disturb.

Adam Morgan
That’s interesting. Also, before I move on, I just want to make a note, like you commenting on all of those famous speeches, that was fun. I just remember at one point in my life, I’m like, “I just went through this rabbit hole of just listening to all these famous speeches.” And I think that’s such an important thing to do because you, you learn a lot before you get into the pitch. What are the best in the world? Sometimes it’s, “Oh, I need to get a mentor. I need to get someone to teach me it.” But no, you don’t. They’re out there. Some of the best speeches in the whole world are out there. All you have to do is listen to them and you can extract lessons from them. So I thought that was—

Danny Fontaine
The best speeches in the world are not necessarily given by the best, most confident people. The people who, you know, who you think can just get up and talk. Some of the best speeches are from quiet, introverted people who forget their lines, and they stumble and they get things wrong and they look like they’re about to pass out. But that, again, because the audience can relate to them more than they can a Barack Obama, for example, who’s just very confident and very good at speaking.

So yeah, watch absolutely. Just, and that’s the thing these days, everything’s on YouTube. Look up, I don’t know, whatever, a hundred best speeches of all time and just pick and choose and you will be moved and just make a note when you are moved by something or someone: what did they do? What did they say? What was it: a contrast? Or was it an expression or a pause or was it the story? What was it and then try and recreate that with other people. That’s, you know, it’s a good way of doing it.

Adam Morgan
I guess a next good, interesting question is most people when they’re going to attack pitching or even public speaking, like, it’s a very similar act and they’re terrified of it. How do we get past that fear of being in front of other people and being on center stage?

Danny Fontaine
Yeah, I, this is something that I actually work with people a lot on, and again, it comes from my own process, which I’ve learned / stolen from other people. Viv Groskopp, she’s a stand up comedian and writer, and she was on my podcast, and she wrote a book called How to Own the Room, which is really powerful, and she takes lessons from lots of other people as well. But essentially, there’s a few things. First of all, it’s breathing. That’s probably the most important thing. When we forget to breathe, our heart rate goes faster and we, we’re at, we can’t speak when our mouth goes dry, all of these terrible things. And it’s very easy when the adrenaline is pumping to forget that. So when you first stand on the stage or in front of the client, pause, don’t start talking right away. It’s actually quite dramatic to just take some breaths and look at the audience and make sure that you are breathing slowly because there’s a physiological connection as well that when we slow our breathing our heart rate must slow down. It’s not like it can help it. It must slow down. Our heart can’t beat quickly if we don’t breathe quickly. So if you’re feeling shaky and nervous and your heart’s racing, breathe really slowly and do something called box breathing where you breathe in for six seconds, you hold it for six seconds, you breathe out for six seconds, and then you wait at that point for six seconds. So you’re creating a six second box, which is something I learned from actually one of my military guests. It’s what the Marines do while they’re waiting to go into a very terrifying situation. They do this thing called box breathing, so that’s really interesting.

But the other thing you could do is you could do some visualizations. One of the things Viv Groskopp taught me is that if you close your eyes and you breathe, taking a big deep breath through your nose, but imagine that the air is coming in from the ground in through the soles of your feet, and then imagine it going all the way up your body and into your brain. And then when you breathe out, push it all the way down there, visualizing all the way back into the ground as well. Now, I don’t know the science behind this, I’m not gonna lie, but it really works. And then you can do one thing that goes even further, and that is, you close your eyes, and you imagine that your brain is in your stomach. You’ve got to just imagine, and now you’re going to breathe in and the air is going to come through your feet, up your legs, past your knees, up your thighs, through your hips, through the brain in your stomach, and then continue above your brain, through your chest and into your empty skull. And then back down again.

Adam Morgan
What does that do for me? I’m trying it right now, I’m like, I’m in my stomach. At least I’m full. That’s the good news.

Danny Fontaine
You gotta try it a few times. If you do that a few times, you will massively feel less nervous. Less anxious. You will feel more prepared. And then there’s a couple of other things we could do to add to that as well, which are really great. One of them is a power pose. And, I think it’s Amy Cuddy who first, I heard talk about these. You’ve got two main power poses. One is hands on hips, ready to take on the world. And the other one is hands above head, Superman style, that kind of thing. And what you can do is close your eyes again, choose one of those poses, whichever one you feel more comfortable with, and then think back. And then we talked about neurons earlier and how they remember emotions. So think back to a time in your life where you felt fantastic, where you felt confident, where you felt like you had just absolutely been the best version of yourself. This could have been getting a job promotion. It could have been winning a sporting event. It could have been a moment in your life graduating, having a child. It could be a moment that you helped someone else and that just felt really good. But find that moment and feel those feelings as you remember it and then pull it all together.

Adam Morgan
I’d say the one thing that helped me a lot over the years, that’s really helped me not worry about that fear of being on the stage is, those bubbles that like, I don’t, I, that’s how I explain it, like, the little nervous bubbles when it’s just like those tinglies in your stomach when you’re about to get on, you’re like, those are the words. For a long time, I always had that feeling of Oh, that’s like trouble. That’s bad news. And I just trained myself to think whenever I feel those bubbles, that’s excitement. Yeah, that’s fun. And I want to do this. I want to be on this stage. I want to be pitching this thing. And so just kept, I just kept telling myself that over and over. And now today, when I feel those things, it’s like adrenaline, like that feeling of those nerves, those bubbles in my stomach. It’s just “Oh yes, there they are. That’s what I needed. That’s what I want.”

Danny Fontaine
Exactly. It’s exactly the same feelings. The other thing you can do is phrase how you pump yourself up. So if we say, “I can do it, I can do it,” then we’re trying to convince ourselves. If we ask ourselves, “Can I do this?” And we genuinely go, “Yes,” then we’re not convincing ourselves. It’s like we already know the truth. We’re confirming it because we know we can do it. Yeah, we might not want to do it. Yeah, we might be scared of it. But we can do it and I think we all know that it’s worth putting yourself through that pain and fear because of the results you get on the other side.

There’s another great book I read. Unfortunately, the author is not with us anymore, but it’s called Feel The Fear and Do It Anyway, because that’s the only way we progress in life. When have we ever done anything really brilliant in our lives that wasn’t at least a little bit scary and uncomfortable?

Adam Morgan
Yeah, that’s interesting. This has been a lot of great advice. I hope anyone listening here is just pumped and ready to breathe through their stomach, through their brain and get out there, listen to some classic speeches, go through, like, their stories and figure out something. Like there’s a lot of good skills here, I think, of getting a better pitch and being more confident. I think that’s awesome. Thank you. Thank you. That’s been great. Next, I want to talk about creative leadership because we’ve talked all about skill building, but now let’s talk about, so what does creative leadership have anything to do with pitching? Tell me about that. What do you, what are your thoughts on creative leadership and how it applies to the art?

Danny Fontaine
I think it’s got everything to do with pitching. I think that it has everything to do with it. It’s why I can be running a big part of a sales organization and an IT company with a degree in fine art. Because—it’s huge—because there’s a few different things. First of all, from a creative aspect, what we must do as leaders is ensure that we give our teams autonomy and time and space. I find that when a creative team works with a less qualified creative leader, then it’s much more about deadlines and cracking a whip and it’s a false economy because what you’ll get back is something where there’s been no passion or joy injected, no [00:28:45] creative license, no nothing. So as leaders, we must accept that if we want great creative, certainly in a pitch, then we must also make sure that our creative team has the deadlines that they need, the space that they need, and the autonomy as well, rather than being too prescriptive. I always insist that people go off and they go wild, and they diverge in their thinking as big as possible before we start to converge into a final brief. I think that’s really important.

The other thing that’s big for me is play. And, I read a book called Loonshots by a guy called Safi Bachall, and he came up with this concept of “loonshots,” whereby, if all we do is give people briefs to work on, then how will they ever accidentally discover something wonderful? And in the creative world, when we think back, Picasso and Damien Hirst and any number of artists especially, they, and musicians as well, they come up with stuff because they’re experimenting. So with my team, every week, as much as possible we have a small sub team of two or three people; and they have one week to go away and play and experiment with a topic. Everyone else has to do their brief, their IBM work, and hit the deadlines, and do the pitches. These guys go and they set themselves a topic—so it might be, we want to do something with augmented reality. Next year it will hopefully be, “We want to do something with the Vision Pro,” because we’ll all have one. But it might be, “We want to do something with 3D animation,” or whatever it is—a topic of some description that you don’t already, you’re not already an expert in or that you’ve never pushed very hard and for a week you push it and we do a Google sprint, basically a five day sprint. And at the end of it, we’ve learned loads of stuff. We’ve had fun and actually we’ve created some kind of little asset that goes in our loonshots repository. That means when we do have a pitch and some big senior client partner says “I need the next greatest, biggest, wildest, thing,” immediately you go, “Let me open up my Pandora’s box, crazy little ideas we’ve been working on and see if any of those take your fancy.” And, we’ve used loads of them in pitches now. It’s really helped us to move away from a pitch being synonymous with a PowerPoint presentation.

Adam Morgan
Oh, that’s awesome. That’s inspiring. I need to go back and try that with my team.

Danny Fontaine
Yeah, you should, we should talk about it more. Like, I’d love to hear about your experiments because the other thing we don’t do enough of, I think, is—well, maybe it’s just me, but join up as a creative community in the world of experimentation and pushing and sharing failures as much as sharing, you know, “Here’s my latest, very shiny polished finished version of something.”

Adam Morgan
Yeah, something that we do that I’ve done actually for, like, man, it’s been 15 years—just a creative workshop every Friday or every other Friday, depending on the team and just every team member assigned a week throughout the year and they have to come present on any topic they want. It could be on quilting. It could be on a side hustle that you have. It could be on your trip to wherever and what you learn from it. But that’s been awesome. I’ve just inspired the rest of you. Maybe it’s not that they have a project or something to actually work on in regards to it. But it helps your brain make those leaps to other things where you’re like, “Okay, I see those interesting patterns in quilting that may show up in a design later on, you know, we’re working on,” but I think that’s super valuable.

Danny Fontaine
Yeah, but that’s also really valuable in terms of creating bonds within your team. Yeah, community is huge. Yeah, I mean, coming back to a pitch. I’ve been in situations before where the pitch team are meeting each other for the first time, you know, as they walk into the pitch. And you know to you and I that sounds bonkers. But it happens all the time, especially in business. It’s, “ I’m the expert in the technology” and “I’m the expert in the UX” and “I’m the expert in the business,” and so we all know our parts and let’s come together and knock ’em dead. But actually you come together and there’s no vision quo. Yeah. Yeah. There’s no X- factor, there’s no chemistry, synergy, whatever you wanna call it. It’s not there. And the client feels that too. The client thinks this is a dead meeting, regardless of how good the things you’re saying are.

Adam Morgan
Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah. So I guess it’s not just bringing it back. It’s not just the emotion you’re bringing in the beginning of the story or the beginning of the pitch. It’s that interconnected emotion exudes from closeness or friendship or a shared understanding that is also there.

Danny Fontaine:
Yeah, I’m sure you’ve been in a pitch where the people you’re in the pitch with are like some of your closest friends almost, because you’ve been working with them for months on end. And you’ve been, eating takeaways at the office at 1:00 A.M. in the morning with them. It’s like when you finally rock up in front of the client, they feel that. And they think, “Boy, this is a team. This isn’t me buying services from a corporation. It’s a team. And I want that team of people.”

Adam Morgan
Yeah, that’s true.

Danny Fontaine
That’s good. It’s the team that can distinguish a win from a loss as well. Often we’re selling the same thing as our competitor in the IT world. So how is the competitor gonna choose? If we are in a commodity situation where we’re all trying to be the cheapest, they might go down that route. My company never is the cheapest, so we have to do more than that. And one of the things is, you only get these people in the room in front of you, if you choose us. We’ve got to show you, without shadow of a doubt, that these are the best people. Yeah. But that’s—that’s a real selling point.

Adam Morgan
That’s awesome. This has been fantastic. I know we’re pretty much out of time here, Danny, and I appreciate you coming on the show and this just felt less like a show and more like just a good, long conversation and back and forth of just ideas and stories And good stuff. So thank you. Thank you for sharing all this with us

Danny Fontaine
It’s my absolute pleasure. I, I, sorry if I talk too much. I think you and I could talk for many hours.

Adam Morgan
We could, but I’m sure people don’t want to hear for two or three hours. I think 45 minutes is probably a good amount. But, anyhow, thank you. Thank you. So last thing, how can people follow you and keep up with your career? Talk to them about where they can see your podcast and anything else you’ve got going on.

Danny Fontaine
Yeah, so I do quite a bit on social media. You can find me as @pitchguy on TikTok Instagram, Danny Fontaine on LinkedIn. I post a lot of things there as well. And if you go to pitchguy.co.uk, that’s a website dedicated to all of this stuff, including the podcast, or you can search for Pitchmasters on Apple, Spotify, YouTube—whatever you like, and you’ll find all of the episodes ad free for your delectation.

Adam Morgan
That’s awesome. The other thing too, is we’ve talked about a lot of books, especially you, like, just different books that you’ve read, which is great. So I would say go to Real Creative Leadership and in the notes, you’ll be able to see a list of all those books if you want, but that’s my next topic. I’ll have to pick up with you. It’s just a good book list of, yeah, we need to swap.

Danny Fontaine
Yeah. Yeah, I’d love that. Yeah.

Adam Morgan
All right. Thank you everyone for listening. This has been an awesome session. I hope you’re all pumped up and ready to go out there and tell some emotional stories. I know I am and get the team thinking about random ways of pitching ideas. So thank you so much, Danny.

Danny Fontaine:
My pleasure. See ya.

Adam Morgan
See you later.