Nobody Wins A Pitch With The Best Solution (David Kean)

David Kean is the Co-Founder and Chair of Catalyst. David Kean spent his early career in advertising, in roles at Lowe Howard Spink, TBWA London and DDB UK, where he was Business Development Director, then seven years as European Sales Director at Omnicom, responsible for the sales performance of 70 agency businesses around Europe and lifting their pitch win rate from an average of 40% to over 70%. After Omnicom he co-founded The Caffeine Partnership. Having seen how good ad agencies were at pitching, he set out to bring the same discipline to investment banks, accountants, lawyers and management consulting firms, and wrote the book Pitching to Win. He started his first business at about 43, and for the past eight years he has run Catalyst, where he helps leaders and their teams win face to face through pitch academies, coaching and keynotes, and he has written five books on pitching, persuasion, networking and sales. He also created The Trouble Room, a live, high-pressure format that puts people from different disciplines in one room for three hours to work through three challenges together. In this conversation, David explains why most firms lose the pitches they call a must win, why clients are really buying you rather than your solution, and why, with AI everywhere, the human factor is still what wins business. Expect to learn the basics most teams get wrong before a pitch, why a close second is simply a loss, why AI can build the deck but cannot win the room, how most people spend 80% of a pitch on the solution and only 20% on the things that actually win it, why people have forgotten how to work a room since COVID, what the finalists of the English-Speaking Union's International Public Speaking Competition taught him about young talent, why he would encourage anyone to start their own business and find partners to do it with, and what kept him going when there was not enough money in the bank, and much more… - 0:00 Cold open 0:33 Welcome 0:44 From Ad Agency Pitches To Catalyst 2:33 What Most People Get Wrong About Pitching 4:07 The Client Is Buying You 5:14 The Human Advantage AI Cannot Copy 6:59 The 80/20 Rule Of Winning Pitches 9:19 Inside The Trouble Room 13:03 What Six Young Speakers Taught Him 15:02 Leaving Corporate To Start Your Own Business 19:06 The Hardest Stretch Of Running Your Own Firm - 🔗 Guest & Resources Connect with David Kean:   / dkean   Website: https://catalystcom.co.uk - Get in touch in the comments below or head to... LinkedIn:   / mikulaszach   Apply to be a guest: https://consultingrainmakers.com/ Email: mikulas.zach@agenteedigital.com