Emotions over Facts

Quick reminder the deadline to apply to my accelerator is in 24 hours. This is the last email I’ll send before the deadline. The accelerator is highly selective, I’ve taken less than 5 of the 90+ applicants but, if you get in, the companies I’ve worked with in the last month have raised $4.8M in combined funding (including deals signed but still in due diligence).

Emotions vs Facts

Let’s start with a real story from my life. This is the story about how just 1 year into my legal practice, I was able to take clients from one of the top lawyers in my city.

When I first entered legal practice, I was lucky enough to handpick the firm I worked for. By then I’d already built a multi-million dollar startup, worked for top VCs and gotten three degrees. I was very fortunate.

I decided to work for one of the top startup lawyers in the city. My goal was to stay involved in the startup scene and to continue learning about the industry from a new perspective.

To land that job, I used the same pitching skills I teach you to cold-call that lawyer and talk my way into a job. They weren’t even hiring. But that is a story for another newsletter.

A few months into my job, I realized that I probably wasn’t going to stay past my 1-year contract. The pay wasn’t high enough, I didn’t love the 9-5 and I missed pitching.

I felt I had gone from a value add job where I was helping the best people and ideas gain funding and revolutionize the world to a value suck job where I was charging $20k+ to entrepreneurs that couldn’t afford it and creating obstacles to innovations.

During my time there I noticed something else. Most clients came to the firm because of this lawyer’s reputation. But once they got there, while those above me were very blunt and fact focused, I often took the time to tell my story and to hear the clients’ stories about who they were, why they were with us and what their goals were. I went beyond just the information I needed for the job and built real human connections.

When I left the firm, I reached out to some of these clients and went for dinner, lunch, coffee, etc. I had a chance to just continue building a relationship.

Many of them then decided to leave that firm and work with me, someone who had only practiced law for 1 year, had no team behind me and was working from home over a well-respected and recognized lawyer with a firm behind them that they already worked with.

WHY? That doesn’t make any logical sense.

Emotions over Facts

When you have a strong emotional connection with someone they will overlook the facts.

This is how companies like WeWork who pitched the great emotionally driven idea of the “We” generation that would irradicate loneliness where able to raise billions of dollars despite having horrible financials. Anyone who looked at the facts would have run away but so many where captured by the emotion.

How is this harming you?

If your pitch is big on data, numbers, logic and facts then you are not taking advantage of your ability to make money by leveraging emotions.

In fact, you are actively preventing investors from making a decision and leaving it all to the facts.

You may be thinking, “well I have great data and facts”. That may be true but the risk is that someone with worse figures comes along with a great emotional pitch and takes the money you needed from that VC.

How can you leverage this?

1. Limit the facts/figures in your pitch and your deck. How often did you hear Steve Jobs throwing around numbers?

2. The only numbers in your pitch deck should be the ones that fuel your narrative. If you are talking about loneliness then you can say that 60% of Americans are lonely. If you are talking about how people love your product you can say that you have 50,000 users with 90% rating it 5-stars.

3. Think about how people will react emotionally to each word you say. Don’t say anything without understanding the emotion impact that it will have on the listener.

Want me to help you find your company’s strategic story?

Having a strong narrative can help you raise $500,000+. Click Apply if you are a startup looking to raise in the next 12 months and want to join my accelerator program.