Speaker: Mark Gai

Mark Gai is a keynote speaker who provides many services related to personal and professional development, executive coaching, and leadership training. In addition to his wealth of career knowledge, he is the founder and creator of the podcast Speak Brave.

Today’s webinar with Mark Gai was about pitches, stories, and how to get people interested. The webinar covered the entire process of pitching from how to create them, tell them, and practice them. A good pitch tells a story that gets people emotionally invested and is the differentiator between a well-crafted pitch and a mediocre one. The reason why good pitches have a story is because stories get listeners emotionally invested, thus encouraging a conversation around the topic for them to learn more. This is important because often, even the best pitchers cannot close deals with only a 30 second to 5-minute pitch.

In an effort to teach about pitching a story, Mark also discussed what an anecdote is and why it is subpar to a story. Anecdotes are subpar because they lack emotion to strangers while a story gives it. At best anecdotes are relevant to a select few, but regardless they always lack meaningful depth to have a conversation around. Pitching a story gives you a natural opportunity to corroborate your pitch with purpose, goals, and data. This is relevant because it is related to perhaps one of the more important takeaways from this entire webinar. That being, people will not remember exactly what you said, but rather they felt about it. Stories are important because we feel something after consuming them, even if we don’t remember specifics.