Pitch Anything: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal: An Innovative Method for Presenting, Persuading, and Winning the Deal by Oren Klaff

here—don’t leave it out, or I guarantee that you wil encounter unpredictable responses.

Chapter 3
Status

    Status plays an important role in frame control. How others view you is critical to your ability to establish the dominant frame and hold onto the power you take when you win the frame col ision. But most people in business and social interactions view status incorrectly. You don’t earn status by being polite, by obeying the established power rituals of business, or by engaging in friendly smal talk before a meeting starts. What these behaviors might earn you is a reputation for being “nice.” They do nothing for your social position—except reduce it.
    Another common mistake is underestimating the value of status. People confuse status with charisma or ego, which are entirely different things.
    And they mistakenly believe that working to raise one’s social value is foolish or just an act of peacocking. Nothing could be further from the truth.
    Unless you are a celebrity, a tycoon, or the guy who just landed your company the largest deal it has ever done, in most cases you enter a new business setting with a low social position. The harder you try to fit into this social scene, the lower your perceived social value becomes.
    Yet fitting in and having high social status are essential. Every interaction is affected by pecking order—who is the dominant group member and who are the subordinates. And the moment you enter a room to pitch is a beautiful example of how the social animal inside you works. In those first moments, the alpha and beta social positions are up for grabs. But it’s not a physical skirmish—it’s the rapid and sometimes instant assessment of each other’s social position. When it comes down to finding the alpha, nobody takes the time to draft a balance sheet of who owns the most assets, who commands the most wealth, and who is the most popular. It’s a subconscious and instant recognition of status.
    Within seconds, we each need to decide, for the sake of our own self-preservation, who in this room is the dominant alpha? And if it turns out that someone else is the dominant alpha and we are the beta, there is a second, even more valuable question: In the short amount of time we have to orient ourselves in this social interaction, can we switch out of the beta position and take the alpha?
    People wil judge your social status almost immediately, and changing their perception is not easy. But it’s important because your social status is the platform from which you must pitch.
    If you are pitching from a lower-level platform, or low social status, your ability to persuade others wil be diminished, and your pitch wil be difficult, no matter how great your idea or product. However, if you hold high social status, even on a temporary basis, your power to convince others wil be strong, and your pitch wil go easily.
    What I am saying—and what I have proven to myself and to others—is that you can alter the way people think about you by creating situational status. Let’s look at how situational status plays out in a familiar social structure, one we have al encountered at one time or another.
    The French Waiter

    French waiters are respected throughout the world for their skil in control ing social dynamics. From the moment you enter their world, they set the frame and control the timing and sequence events according to their wishes. They wipe your status instantly, redistribute it as they choose, and control the frame throughout the exchange. You regain control only after the check has been paid, the tip has been left, and you’re ushered out the front door.
    I watched the waiters work their frame magic a few years ago on a bustling boulevard in Paris. I stopped in at Brasserie Lipp on the Boulevard Saint-Germain-des-Pres. My waiter was Benoit, who started there busing tables and washing dishes and moved his way up to head waiter. His father worked at this famous Left Bank boîfite