How to Recover From a Failed Pitch Using WethosAI
WethosAI — https://wethos.ai/resources/videos/recover-from-a-failed-pitch
Source video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BhgDCEAhzSA

WethosAI is a platform that has infused decades of behavioral science with AI in order to get a very deep understanding of yourself and the people that you work with and what that allows us to do is to communicate more effectively together, make better decisions together and lead to much more productive outcomes. So in this particular scenario, what I wanted to share with you is that I'm a little bummed as I just pitched a new product idea that I thought was great to our CTO Alen and unfortunately it was met with some skepticism and pushback.

Typically what that would mean in an environment without WethosAI is that idea would probably die somewhere. There'd be a lot of disappointment, maybe some grumbling to colleagues and as often happens things would spiral out of control a little bit. Rather than find myself falling into that trap, what I'm going to do is leverage the WethosAI platform and figure out why my pitch to Alen perhaps didn't land how I wanted it to land.

So I'm going to engage with a key part of the WethosAI platform and that is our executive coach XO. So I'm going to ask XO for some advice and guidance. So I'm just going to type in this simple prompt and I'm going to say, "Hey, I proposed this new product idea to our CTO Alen. It didn't really land. So let's see what XO has to say about that."

So it has a deep understanding like I said of myself and Alen as well as the scenario at hand that I just told it. So now it's going to give me a breakdown to say, "Well, what happened?" As you can see here, visionary and people-focused and Alen is very much results-driven and action-orientated. But here's where things get really interesting.

The bot's giving me a strategic framework for the next conversation here, taking into account everything it knows about me, all of my traits, all of my biases, everything it knows about Alen, all of Alen's traits, and Alen's biases, and putting together a plan for me in order to reframe the discussion. So, we can see here that I should lead with a why, but I should back it by data.

And here's my natural tendency to talk about the what if, but I should shift here by starting connect the idea to a past success or present-day problem because of Alen having something called an availability heuristic, which means that he tends to give more weight to more recent information. Then I get some guidance around how to frame the plan, appealing to his ideals of fast action.

And then, because of my optimism bias where I think, "Hey, this is going to be easy. Everything's going to be great. People are going to love it." is to turn that down and present a more balanced view. So, now I can say, "Great. How should I best prepare for this next discussion?" So, now XO has told me kind of where things may have been missed in communication and how I framed it.

It's allowed me to understand Alen a lot better. So, now I've asked it for a concrete plan as to how I can approach my next meeting with Alen to talk about the idea. So, for example, what problem does this solve? Where's the data points? Because Alen is much more data-driven than I am. And then, because he likes fast action and concrete steps, to outline the first steps of an action plan here, it gives me predictions on how the conversation would go, how I can anticipate that flow, so that I'm prepared to answer any of the questions that previously might have thrown me off.

And then here's some advice and coaching for me just to adopt the right mindset. So go in with the right mindset with this conversation with Alen, concrete steps that I can take here knowing Alen in depth like XO does. And now I feel empowered as an employee that I can go back and I can reframe and repitch the idea in a language that Alen is going to understand more succinctly, that appeals much much more to his particular style.

So that is where XO can really assist in converting situations where an employee may feel disheartened, a little disenfranchised, to provide them with the understanding and guidance as to why that might have happened. And then give the concrete plan about how to have another go. And what does that mean overall for the company? Well, it means this great idea that perhaps didn't land in pitch one is not going to go to the graveyard, but actually it has a much greater chance of success.