Perfecting Your Pitch

How to Succeed in Business and Life by Finding Words That Work

By: Ronald M. Shapiro

Narrated by: Steven Menasche

A New York Times best-selling author reveals how to find the right words for every situation. Whether you are making a budget request, interviewing for a job, ending a relationship, or talking to children about divorce, the crux of success in those and other crucial situations is planned, effective communication.

And yet, it is the tool people most often fail to use. In Perfecting Your Pitch, expert consultant and negotiator Ronald M. Shapiro presents his system of scripting, outlined efficiently as the Three D’s: Draft, Devil’s Advocate, Deliver.

Using real-life examples, Shapiro walks listeners step-by-step through the process of creating an effective message, preparing for counterarguments, and delivering the results with confidence and grace across a broad range of situations. He also provides an excellent menu of stories and model scripts for communication challenges affecting business, family, friends and consumers.

Perfecting Your Pitch introduces a simple but powerful system we can all use for great results.

©2013 Ronald M. Shapiro (P)2013 Gildan Media LLC

Less than expected but not bad

The key premise of this book is simple - write down what you would like to say, review it with a trusted person for feedback or yourself as devil's advocate, and then deliver what you want to say. Ronald Shapiro refers to this process as the three D’s: Draft, Devil’s Advocate, Deliver. The book provides myriad scenarios for this process, from business transactions to purchase negotiations to family issues. While Shapiro provides examples in these scenarios, there are of course no magic words to get what you want. Using empathy, probing to see what is important to the other person/side, and removing emotion from the pitch are all sound advice. In general the book is fine, but I don't think it quite matches the subtitle of 'finding words that work'. Instead it provides a process with some examples, which as I reflect on it is more useful in general. The breadth of scenarios presented make this more of a reference book than a straight read-through.

seven hours!! hard to finish - grueling at times

This book could have easily been written in one or two hours. After the author gets the point across, he tries to set up examples of the same thing for different scenarios and situations. Very redundant; after the method was shown and the examples were given, he should have stopped there, but after about 5 hours, this began to hurt. I could NOT finish it. He could have explained that there is a method and let people create their own circumstances, but it seems the author wanted to create everyone's circumstances. After a while, it was like listening to a broken record. My thoughts were that he was going to focus on perfecting your pitch for business, like an elevator pitch or refined marketing statement, but this author creates letters and pitches for every situation, from firing people, to how to talk to kids to getting a divorce, with a pre-prepared pitch. Every situation is different, and I don't care how much you prepare; circumstances and topics change during a meeting or conversation; that's why this method is NOT applicable to every situation. not for me. You have to be able to think on your feet. The basic principle is good, but leave it at that. You don't need to narrate a pitch for every scenario. That would be very ineffective.

Odd book

Way too much irrelevant details that makes the story redundant and rather confusing. He gets lost in his own attempt at making a point.