Pitching for beginners

By Vårin Vaskinn, Gunhild Marie Roald and Gunn-Berit Neergård, facilitators of the Engage UNIPED module “Entrepreneurship for better teaching”

Engage your students in a fun, interactive, and low-threshold pitching exercise designed to build their real-world skills. This activity combines a brief theoretical introduction to pitching with a hands-on exercise where students create and present pitches based on randomly drawn word combinations.

Duration:
2-3 hours

Focus:
Pitching for those without prior experience

Activity:
Group

Keywords:
Introduction, Pitching, Exercise

About the exercise

With this exercise will you take your students through a fun, interactive and low threshold pitching exercise. Having the skill to pitch as a student are helpful when entering the “real-world”. In this exercise has to parts, in part one is the students theoretically will be introduced pitching. Though a short introduction lecture including what a pitch is, what it should include and how to do a pitch. The second part is the main part of this exercise, here will the students pitch a combination of two words that they have drawn in the start of the exercise.

Learning objectives

The students know what a pitch is and what is should include
The students have practical experience with pitching
The students get to know their class a bit better

Usage suggestions

This exercise can be used in specific entrepreneurship and innovation courses or early in the education to have students talk together. This exercise is not limited to business schools, with small moderations can other areas such as teaching, healthcare and engineering do this exercise as well. There is no limitation to the group size, the limitations lie in the amount of time you are willing to use, space you have access to and words you can come up with. However, we do not recommend doing this exercise digitally.

Materials list and physical space

Materials:

Two cups or boxes
Pen
Paper

Physical space:

Physical space that is big enough for the number of students

Group rooms for group-pitching

Pre-work required by students

There is no required pre-work nor specific knowledge the students need beforehand. The lectures will give them the needed introduction, and its content is included in the description below.

Theoretical foundations

Pitching a business idea has been recognized as a core entrepreneurial skill, as this activity are from an entrepreneurial view point linked to influencing investors to commit and raise funding (Clark, 2008). Even though pitching has strong links to entrepreneurship theory and entrepreneurial activities, is this a skill that is useful in other settings of work-life.

Time plan

Part One

During this introductory part of the exercise, the lecture will present the students with the following elements:

Why they should learn to pitch
What a pitch is and how it differs from a presentation
What should and can be included in a pitch
How to pitch – focusing on the use of voice, articulation, and body language

This lecture shouldn’t be too long. The goal is to give the students an overview of the topic so that they have a background for the main exercise.

Part Two

This is the main part of the exercise, where the students will practically learn how to pitch. This exercise is based on the idea that pitching something you are passionate about is scarier (for people new to pitching) and requires more preparation than pitching something that makes no sense.

Preparation:

Two cups or boxes
Pen and small sheets of paper
On the notes, you will write two types of words. For instance, when we have done this exercise, the words have been different animals in one cup and things in the other. You are free to change the grouping of the words to fit your group of students. We recommend that you think about what might intrigue or spark interest for your students.

Examples of other categories of words to match can be:

Human body parts and things
Car parts and animals
Geometrical figures and animals

Through the lecture, the students are introduced to the basic elements of pitching and will, through this exercise, try to combine theoretical knowledge with practical application.

To start, the students will be asked to come up and draw two notes, one from each cup. After they have drawn these notes, they will go back to their seats where they will get 15-30 minutes to combine these two words and create a sales pitch for that combination.

After they are done creating the pitch, they will go into smaller groups of 4-6 people and present the pitch to their group. Each student will receive feedback from the other students, providing key learning points to develop their pitch further. Once all students have pitched, the group will decide who will pitch in front of the whole class. Once those pitches are done in plenary, we recommend some reflections on the exercise.

Post-work for students

A key takeaway to highlight to the students, are that they can use this process in later stages of a project, to be able to switch from a “bad idea” earlier, and quickly get on to a new idea or path.

They should also be made aware of how their problem development using the “Problem tree” actually simplified the task of finding good ideas – they made their “fuzzy problem” more concrete.

Key takeaways

The students know what a pitch is and what it should include.

The students have practical experience with pitching.

The students get to know their class a bit better.