Fix your sales pitch in under 90 seconds

Most sales pitches fail for one simple reason: they try to say too much. It’s natural to be passionate about your product or service. Of course you want to showcase the features and benefits. But if you want your audience leaning in and listening, less is always more. 

We live in what I call an AHA world. AI-focused, hyper-connected, and always-on. Distractions abound. If you can’t capture your prospect and customers’ imagination immediately, you’ll lose them to their emails, Slack messages, and TikTok feeds. 

The good news is there’s a 90-second fix that will help you craft a pitch or presentation that keeps your audience on the edge of their seats. The structure is so simple, it’s almost too good to be true. It’s the same framework the world’s best journalists use to keep their readers coming back for more and the same approach I teach leaders, sales teams, and founders who want their message to cut through.

Let’s dive in. 

Find Your Headline 

Most people start creating a pitch or presentation by opening a slide deck and dumping content into it. Or worse, opening an existing slide deck and trying to rearrange it. Don’t. Before you write a single word or think about your visuals, you need to strip your pitch down to a single sentence. 

Imagine it appearing on the front of a newspaper or at the top of a social feed. What words would you choose? Keep them short, punchy, and memorable. Ten words or fewer is a good rule of thumb.

This single line of text becomes the anchor for your entire pitch. It forces you to stay disciplined. If something doesn’t support your headline it doesn’t make the cut. 

When you look at the newspaper industry, the best headlines have an emotional element too. They don’t just present information, they engage the target audience. A weak pitch headline is forgettable: “SaaS Product Seed Round” is accurate but bland. “$10 million Opportunity To Revolutionize Fintech” is much more compelling. 

A strong headline creates energy. It signals to your audience why they should care. But its most important function is as a yardstick for your content. Test every slide, story, and statistic against it. If it’s aligned with the headline, it stays. If it doesn’t, it goes. 

Distill It Into Three Key Messages

When you look at the text of a newspaper article on the page, you’ll see the headline and a number of subheadings. If all you do is skim those, you’ll have the gist of what is being said. You don’t need to read the whole thing. That structure is a great shorthand for pitches and presentations. 

Your audience can’t absorb unlimited information. Most people walk into meetings already holding a handful of important thoughts in their heads: deadlines, dinner plans, unfinished tasks. If you give people 17 reasons why your product or service is a good fit, there’s no hope they’ll remember all of them. 

I’d like to suggest that three is the magic number. Not seven. Not five. Three.

Three ideas feel complete and satisfying. Three creates a sense of structure. Three gives your audience a map they can follow without working too hard. 

When Steve Jobs launched the iPhone back in 2007 his headline was “Apple reinvents the phone.” His three key messages were as follows: “An iPod. A phone. An internet communicator.” Eight words, three ideas, total clarity. His whole presentation was built around those unifying messages. He covered a lot of ground in his 1 hour, 42 minute presentation but those were the things he kept coming back to. 

Your three key messages are the organizing ideas that sit beneath your headline. They are what your audience will remember long after the details fade. Ask yourself: If they only kept three things from this pitch, what must they be?

This is where you need to be ruthless. Speakers often flood their audience with data points, product features, or historical context. But doing so only creates overwhelm. It is not your audience’s job to decide what matters. It’s yours.

Decide How You Want Them To Feel

With a headline and three key messages, you now have a pitch structure that is simple, repeatable, and memorable. The final step is to think about how you want people to feel. 

This is the part most people skip entirely. But it’s the one that separates forgettable communicators from compelling ones. Decisions are rarely made on logic alone. Even the most analytical audiences are influenced by the emotional resonance of the message.

Before I became a communication coach, I trained and worked as a professional actor. One of the first things actors learn is the power of emotional intention. Before stepping on stage, or in front of the camera, you decide the feeling you’re trying to generate in the audience or the other character. That choice influences your breath, your voice, your posture, and your energy. It changes how your words land.

The same principle applies in a sales conversation. Ask yourself: What emotion do I want to leave them feeling? Should they feel excited? Reassured? Educated?

There are thousands of options. Choose one. That emotion becomes the current that runs through your delivery. A pitch with emotional intention not only sounds and feels different but is far more memorable too.

Here’s the whole technique condensed:

• 20 seconds – write your headline
• 60 seconds – choose your three key messages
• 10 seconds – set your emotional intention

That’s it. In 90 seconds, you’ve clarified your message, sharpened your structure, and supercharged your delivery. It’s focused, clear, and engaging. 

And if you’d like to see this technique in action, just look at the structure of this article. It’s built exactly the way I encourage people to build their pitches: one headline, three key messages and a single emotional intention guiding the tone.

In an AHA world, simplicity isn’t a compromise. It’s a superpower.

View the full article