How to pitch creative work with presentation coach Ben Levy

0:03Hello, everyone. Welcome to Question Everything, a podcast all about learning from the successes and the failures of those who dare to, well, question everything. This podcast is part interview, part therapy, and part price is right. We have our own game board stacked with questions that'll make even the most successful CMOs sweat. I'm your host, Ashley Wolter, CMO and partner at Curiosity. On today's episode, I sit down with Ben Levy, a pitch and presentation coach who's helped agencies, ad execs, and CMOs sell in their best ideas. On this episode, you'll learn the surefire way to turn nerves into excitement, how to sell in your best work by answering four simple questions, why the client's hidden motivations are actually your invisible brief.

0:50So grab your grappling gloves and prepare to knock out your next pitch. This episode will give you the confidence to punch above your weight class. Let's get started.

1:04Ben Levy is a presentation and pitch coach, creative director, and founder of Sell It Great, a program built to help creatives and agencies sell their best ideas with clarity and confidence. Before working with the greats at Mischief, Daroga 5, and 72 and Sunny, Ben spent 15 years creating award-winning work for brands like Coca-Cola, Liberty Mutual, Sony, and Planet Fitness. Whether he's elevating your presence, building a repeatable pitch process, or literally writing the book on perfecting the pitch, one thing's for sure, Ben will get you and your team to stop reading slides. Ben, welcome to the show.

1:43Ben Levy:Thanks for having me. I feel like maybe we should cut it here. That sounded fantastic. I mean. What's impression of me? You have an incredible reputation, I must say. And I got to spend an entire day with you. Our whole agency did really and got to know you pretty well. So I'm excited for this combo. It was so much fun. So much fun. I'm excited too. Any excuse to hang out with any of you for more time, I'm going to take it. Oh, man, I love that. So your second book just dropped. Tell me a little bit about it. How's it going? How are people receiving it? I read some reviews that were really good.

2:20Ben Levy:It's been really, really interesting. The process was very different for the second book. This one's called The Perfect Pitch Planner, and it is intended to be a workbook companion for Stop Reading Slides, the first book. So it's generally difficult for people to put me next to them and have me look over their shoulder every time they're preparing for a pitch. The planner is supposed to be a better alternative for that. Got it. Still has terrible jokes. But otherwise, it will help you go page by page, step by step through everything from a blank page to a final presentation in the same way that I do it.

3:04Love that.

3:05Ben Levy:Because there's a lot of stuff that I say and recommend and people do not have perfect recall. So it's fantastic when they grab a piece or two and it changes their approach and changes what they can do. Awesome. Awesome. So if you don't have a tiny little Ben sitting on your shoulder, then you must buy the companion piece to the first book. I'm excited to dig in. That's for sure. And I'm excited for all of our listeners to learn a lot more about your philosophies, your thinking, your career. We are going to dive into all of it today. You have to spill all of your juicy secrets. I'm terrified. All right.

3:47Well, let's get into it then. I like that. Let's pull up the game board. All right. Where do you want to go first?

3:53Ben Levy:I've never been so frightened by a series of random numbers. Let's go lucky number seven. Why don't we start there? Okay. Number seven. Most clients have an invisible brief. Tell us a little bit about this brief and explain it to us. So to understand the invisible brief, you need to recognize that a presentation, a meeting, is just another form of advertising. In an agency context, in a marketing context, we're all experts at convincing people of things. And most of these people or strangers will never meet. But then the second we walk into a meeting where we actually have some kind of context and relationship with these people, we leave all of the best practices that we know outside of the meeting room.

4:45Ben Levy:If a meeting is basically an ad for the ads you want to make, you should have a brief for that ad. And the invisible brief is a series of questions that I encourage people to ask before walking into a meeting to make sure that they've got the right audience in mind. Things like, what are the values of the people that are gonna be across the table or through the camera from you? What is the actual purpose of that meeting? It's amazing how many times we go into the room we don't actually have that laid out. So what are you trying to achieve? Do you need an approval? Do you just need to know that you're going in the right direction generally?

5:26Ben Levy:What's success really look like? What are you really aiming for? You can get further than that. You can go higher. Don't shoot yourself in the foot trying to bite off more than you can chew. Yeah. Just get the basics. Start with the basics. What is the real motivation for the people that you're meeting with? And it isn't that everyone that we meet in a business context is a cartoonish, one-dimensional villain. But when you really break it down, there's going to be one overriding force, one overriding desire that's driving them for that particular meeting. It could be that they're interested in increasing their fame or the fame of the brand.

6:11Ben Levy:It could be that they're really concerned about money, that they need to make sure sales are up. Sales are always going to be a piece of what we're talking about. But in certain meetings, that is the thing. Yeah. It could be that they're interested in power. And yes, there's like the twirling mustache, evil villain, Machiavellian power piece of that. But what I really mean is control, responsibility, impact. You'll have people who will say, look, what's important to me is that this thing is done right and that it has this outcome. And so understanding those motivations means that you're able to communicate your ideas in a way that lands for your audience.

6:56Ben Levy:We often miss is that we're never, ever presenting ideas to the people those ideas are for. right i've never received the brief that said convince the cmo of coke to drink more of his own products it's always going to be tweens with disposable income or empty nesters who want to celebrate like they're they remember celebrating when they were kids or whatever it is the it's not people who run a multinational corporation and are used to looking at marketing plants they're never the target of the brief so we come into these meetings and in our head we're locked in on the consumer who's not in the room.

7:36Ben Levy:And anytime that you've talked to somebody and you've gotten back, oh, I've never heard of this influencer. Oh, is that a thing the kids say? Or is this idea really going to land? Doesn't make sense to me. This is because you've failed to consider the invisible brief and you've wound up speaking in the consumer's language to your audience in the room and they're not the same person. And is this an actual, like, do you recommend agencies actually write this down on paper, talk about it before the meeting? Like it's an actual physical living, breathing document? Or is it just something that you kind of think of, you know, and you kind of walk into the room?

8:15And I think ideally, it, it becomes second nature in the

8:19Ben Levy:beginning when people first learn about it. Yeah, I do recommend have the question somewhere, write them down. I mean, that's what the planner will help you do. I don't want to give the strategy department a second task. They're not supposed to be sitting there and figuring out, scratching their heads, right? What is the brief for this thing? If you can't quickly answer it, then that's probably a sign that you're not prepared for the meeting. Do more of that prep work that you need in order to really set yourself up for success. But it shouldn't be the kind of thing that takes deliberation and let's write it down and be absolutely sure unless you feel like, well, I'm handing this off to somebody new.

9:00Ben Levy:Let them know what they're in for. Yeah. I mean, we did a really quick exercise. Just pick one client. And within that client team, you've got four or five different motivations. Each person is kind of coming in to the meeting who's motivated by something differently. Job security, sales, brand fame, as you said. And so thinking through how you even position your ideas to them and speak to them in their own language, I think leads to you selling braver, bigger work. Fundamentally, this is about relationships and trust. So you're talking to people who have approval power. They need to understand what's in it for them.

9:40Ben Levy:And not in a way like they don't care what's good for the consumer, but in a way that because they care about what's good for the consumer in a particular perspective, through a particular lens, you need to help them see it clearly. And that's going to be tapping into what their various motivations or values are or what their goals are. Great. Great advice. All right. Let's go back to the board. Let's go 10. All right. What is the single most powerful tool we have as a presenter and how do we use it? Like this.

10:16Yeah.

10:17Ben Levy:Silence is the single most powerful tool a presenter has. far and away the strongest thing in your repertoire and we generally are terrible at using it because silence is uncomfortable yeah doubly so if you're in a remote presentation where it feels like any second of silence or any pause is somebody having an audio issue or your screen froze or whatever it may be. But the truth is that the most confident thing you can do is stop talking. It doesn't have to be for long, but if you get comfortable with silence, you not only reduce filler words because ums and uhs come out because we're uncomfortable with the break in sound, but you also emphasize whatever the last thing is that you said.

11:11so silence the way that our brains process silence they essentially run back over the last thing we

11:19Ben Levy:heard so it's if you imagine that you've just underlined and highlighted whatever the last statement was that you made so sometimes people will get excited and they'll speak really loudly or they'll they'll pound on the table they'll be dramatic in some way when really if you want to underscore your point if you want to put an exclamation point at the end of whatever your statement is the best thing you can do is say it and stop talking um i am here for this in so many ways i often tell the team there's power in a pause just let it sit there and sometimes we talk our way out of it out of things like you land a point and then you keep going and you won't shut up and it's like no just end it and let's let them react like let them talk first it's it's a really powerful strategic move that's very overlooked and uncomfortable at times also the sort of thing that if you're going to use it warn everybody else who's going to be on the call on your side because early on i remember after i learned this and got more comfortable with it there would be times where I would specifically refrain from answering something or from allow that silence to build if I asked a question because I wanted the client to be the one to answer it and other people on my team would panic and they would jump in and try to fill that silence like it was a live grenade no no no just not for you Ben's glitching yeah yeah oh god he froze go go go no guys oh All right.

12:57Ben Levy:I appreciate it, but stop that. Don't do that again. So yeah, I will frequently warn people right before we get on the call. I'm going to ask questions. I want them to answer. Don't answer them. And you'll still see people sort of get the shakes and start sweating. How do you recommend, so people who are uncomfortable pausing or stopping, do you recommend practicing? Is there like a technique or anything or just go and try it? One of my favorite things to do is play the um game. And I say one of my favorite things to do, but really it's to make other people play it. And that is where pick a topic and record yourself for two minutes talking about it, everything you can think to say.

13:43Ben Levy:The rule is you can't say um. If you do, you're done. that forces you to be okay with silence because when you run out of words on a topic a lot of people's first instinct is to go uh as they look for the next one you need to just hold that silence or you'll never make it through two minutes the more that you do that the more comfortable you'll become with it the other thing that i think is really valuable and people never want to do is watch yourself playing the game. And those moments where you pause and try to figure out what you're going to say next, take yourself out of that moment emotionally.

14:30Ben Levy:You're going to feel awkward. You're going to hate it. You're going to see yourself on camera and hate that. But try to be a dispassionate, objective observer and ask yourself if that person in that moment looks like they're confused or looks thoughtful because people get really nervous about silence they think oh my god i'm supposed to have the answer i look stupid they're all laughing at me i need to figure it out i need to figure it out i need to figure it out and it just becomes the spiral but actually that process where your thinking looks thoughtful. No one ever believes me. That's why you have to record yourself and then watch it back.

15:12Ben Levy:And once you realize that, it takes a lot of the pressure off because everyone would like it if the people they're talking to appear to be thinking about the actual conversation happening as opposed to just trying to riff for an answer and get over it. I got to tell just a really short story, but I remember very early on in my career, we were rehearsing for a huge client meeting and I'm probably 23 and a half or something. I'm very, very young. And so it was a really big deal for me and I'm rehearsing and you've got an SVP on this side and a president on this side and everyone's judging you. And I get done and I walk over and my boss pulls me aside and shows me his piece of paper and he had 22 tally marks.

15:56And he said, you said, um, 22 times. And I would have bet you a million dollars. I didn't say it once. I had no idea it was standing in my way. And I remember going home and practicing in front of the mirror and practicing in front of my dog and going on video, doing everything I could to eliminate that word out of my vocabulary, at least for that meeting. And pausing was how I did it because it allowed my brain to catch up to the thought that I wanted to say next. I knew what I wanted to say. I knew the topic really well, but I was just getting so ahead of myself and I didn't say, um, the next day.

16:33And he remembered that. And that was when I first started to get into business development too, because I think the presentation went so well. They were like, Oh, she might be okay at this

16:43Ben Levy:thing the beginning of my career a very unfair standard that exists where we we never seem to get that opportunity until somebody else gets like a stomach flu and then you only get one like every two years yeah so if you nail it it's oh great that's your thing now yeah and then if you don't which would be totally natural because how many times have you gotten to do this before that yeah you're like oh i guess i gotta wait another two years for someone to get sick like This is not, there's no plan for this. I think, I think things are getting better and I'm trying to help out how I can. But it's, yeah, there's so much in those early days where, um, was not my biggest problem, but having any sense of comfort or confidence.

17:31Ben Levy:And I was just trying to downplay my own existence as much as possible. and I was thinking just the work is here choose the work I'm just I'm just here to move the the slides along like ask me if you have a question but this is what we've been doing and you look back and realize oh you looked like you couldn't care less about it you looked completely disconnected from any of this like no passion no interest no nothing at the time I was just let the earth swallow me whole. I just want to be anywhere but here. I just don't want to be in this position. Why are you making me do this? Yeah. Yeah. Just, I don't, I feel like I've done something wrong and I'm being punished.

18:15That's right. That's right. I mean, I think our bodies, how we show up, the passion, our inflections, it all plays a role in how an idea is perceived and can help sell in good work.

18:25Ben Levy:So much. Yep. So much. All right. Let's go back to the board let's go 12 all right i feel like there should be some strategic thought i'm putting into this and it's uh it's really just a random number generator that's powered by adhd one day i'm gonna do a post or something on the psychology of how people pick numbers because it is absolutely fascinating to see each guest and and how they do it and the creatives versus the strategy everybody is just a little different i love it all right so this question is sponsored by our friends at mischief. I know Greg Hahn wrote the foreword in your book.

18:56So I reached out to my friend Ollie, who I know you know very well, and said, if you could ask him one question, what would it be? And here's his question. So presenting can be emotional. What's your go-to move for shaking off the nerves before a big presentation?

19:14Ben Levy:There's two. So the easier one, the quicker one is I pick some music that gets me pumped. Like I've, I'll, I'll do, I'll do walk on music. I'll listen to before coming into it. I mean, it's, it's music is like a, a hack for humans to change your mood and your energy level. And that's just really simple. And, and it's, it's like the worst stuff too. It's like some kind of pop clubhouse, like something with a, you know, with a solid base behind it. like i can tell you not to go show tunes because then it's going to be in my head the whole time that's okay my anybody from my company who's listening to this right now is like crying laughing because my pump up song is from the trolls movie and i get made fun of so much but i mean i can't stop this feeling is like such a good song i get so high justin timberlake i I am so happy listening to that song.

20:16And oh, my gosh, they make fun of me so much.

20:20Ben Levy:I have I can't even remember who the artist is. The song is literally called Let's Go. It's probably my most common. And I think those are the only two words in it, too. It's just perfect. It's not like good music, but it's great walk on music. So that's one way to do it, because that'll elevate your mood. It'll change how you're feeling. You'll have energy. It'll wake you up. the other thing is nerves are a lie that we tell ourselves nerves are not real and i really love to share this with people because it's like saying that santa is real nerves are not real responses that we have in our body that we are calling nerves if you stop and think about them they're what my my leg used to shake all the time right i would have an elevated heart rate i know a lot of people their mouth will go dry yeah some people will shake or their their voice will catch you get you get fidgety yeah now if you think about a time when you were excited and anticipating something if you think about getting ready to ride a roller coaster or you're seeing a friend you haven't seen for a year and a half.

21:40Ben Levy:How do you feel in your body? Same way. Sometimes you feel like antsy, like you got a lot of energy. You almost start to shake. You feel like your heart rate gets elevated. You want to run to them. Your mouth gets dry. It's the same physiological response. The only difference is how your mind chooses to interpret those signals. So adrenaline is real. Adrenaline is what's causing those symptoms. But whether they are a sign that you should run or a sign that you should start to party is entirely up to your brain and how you choose to interpret it. So smart. And if you start to reframe that in your own head, if you can catch yourself before having a big talk and go, okay, this is not nerves.

22:30Ben Levy:This is actually, this means like I'm ready for this thing. Like I want to do it. Let's go. Do that four or five times. It's amazing how quickly you can rewire that response. and it's funny that that question came from mischief because the first time that i ever went and and spoke at mischief i was there i was in my hotel room the night before and i actually had a moment of going it's weird my heart is racing what is going on and then caught myself and went oh no that's what okay i'm like this that's a big thing like i'm excited for this. This is cool. I love that so much for so many reasons. I get asked a lot by people, do you get nervous?

23:16And I, my answer is always no, I don't get nervous, but I didn't really know why. And I think you just explained it to me. I, I get some of those feelings, but I don't ever describe it as nerves. And so I think now I have a good answer for that. I am excited. I do get excited. I get, you know, maybe a little jittery or my heart will race, but it's never, I would never describe it as nervous. So that's really smart. And I think, yeah, we have to rewire our brains because we are built for this and we're ready for this. And, you know, all of our experiences led to these little micro moments too.

23:52Ben Levy:And there may be people who listen to this or watch this who are going, nope, sorry, my nerves are way too bad. I, this, I'm full blown panic. What you're talking about is not real. And there is a difference between what we're talking about right now with that adrenaline and those symptoms and actual panic. Yeah. So the times that we have seen someone fall apart publicly, the times where they shake visibly or you hear someone's voice crack, that's not nerves, that's panic. Yeah. And that started as the kind of thing that you and I are talking about right now with just a racing heart or maybe someone sweating more than normal, whatever it may be.