Pitching the C-Suite
When I was a Stegner Fellow at Stanford one our workshop discussions centered around Jo Anne Beard’s brilliant essay The Fourth State of Matter. For thirteen paragraphs she discusses an old dog that needs to pee multiples times per night, the squirrels in her attic that come alive at night, all the boxes her ex-husband left the in the spare bedroom. You have no idea where she’s going, but you’re captivated—utterly and completely along for the ride. But it is, in the end, a story about grief.
In 1991, a graduate student in physics killed four faculty members, a student, and himself in a shooting spree at the University of Iowa. Beard worked as an editor for the physics journal at the university and lost many of her friends and colleagues in the attack.
I was taught to write like that: with a narrative hook. Get ‘em on the first page, get ‘em on the last. Look, I’m doing it right now, taking you down all kinds of paths that will hopefully lead somewhere meaningful, revelatory even. But that is not how you pitch the C-Suite. They don’t have time for stories.
How to pitch a C-Suite was one of the best things I learned in a course I took through UC Berkeley Extension, “Aligning Human Resource Initiatives with Business Success” (cheesy name, I know, but chock full of great information).
In the course, one of the other students shared this article, which tipped everything I knew about writing on its head. In it, the author Edouard Gruwez writes, “Directors are not seeking entertainment. They want to make the best possible decision in the shortest possible time, while taking all information and risks into account.” Instead, he recommends structuring your ask this way:
“Don’t make your narrative deductive: don’t take them through the complete analysis. Such a structure starts with detailed numbers and findings, and gradually summarizes into conclusions. It feels the natural thing to do, but it’s wrong. You think that they need to understand the details before seeing the big picture, because that is how YOU came to the conclusion. But in this way, you might lose their attention long before you even come close to that conclusion.
Make it an inductive story: start with the conclusion. Then give the 3 to 5 key arguments or elements that you want them to remember. And gradually add further detail. In my experience, an inductive approach is always more effective, even if the Board has a deductive culture.”
The course emphasized that to be strategic, and not just a pet project, all HR initiatives should align with the goals of the business. One way to structure your pitch was show how the initiative advanced various parts of the org’s business plan, the basic components of which are:
Mission / Vision: Why are we here?
Product / Service Offering: What are we selling? What are we putting in the hands of the customers?
Differentiation: How are we unique? Why would someone choose us over someone else?
Marketing approach: How do we reach our customers? How do we reach our customers? How do we make it attractive to them?
Customer / client base: Who is likely to need or want our product? Can they afford it?
Necessary resources: Who or what do we need to build this business?
Financial targets / return on investment: Pricing? Profits? Exit strategy?
It felt wild that it could be that simple, but I thought I’d give it a whirl. I copied and pasted my final project for the course, an initiative based around diversifying our hiring pipeline, and sent it to my CFO—you can read it here. I am now proud owner of LinkedIn Recruiting Seat and the pipeline for the first project is more than half women. Heck yes.
(And yes, it is highly unusual that we didn’t already have a LinkedIn Recruiter seat, but other services had worked well for a long time and why add a tool if you don’t need it?)