How To Pitch And Sell Yourself To Any Brand by Jon Westenberg, The Startup

You are an incredibly valuable asset. You already know it. You just don’t know how to show it.

So many of you that follow me here and that follow my content on Twitter and on LinkedIn are actually building incredibly valuable personal brands on your own. Through your products and your content.

You are creating tribes and images and ideas that have a lot more than an hour of power. They’re lasting and impactful and significant.

You’re doing it consistently and you’re doing it with inspiration, but you’re fucked if you’re doing it without one key element.

You need to learn how to pitch, close and sell yourself.

There are brands out there who are willing to back anyone that can help them communicate to their target audience. That’s the truth. That’s what ever brand is trying to tap into with every piece of marketing, every PR story, every video, every statement they make on Twitter.

They just want to talk to their demographic.

If they can’t do that, they know that their business might as well be done and dusted because it’s over. In the past couple of decades, the way to do this has changed completely. It’s now a combination of fine art, deadly exact science and relationships.

Building relationships with people when you’re a logo is incredibly hard. People have no reason to trust a logo. A logo was behind the biggest oil spill in history. Logos topple governments and burn economies to the ground. Logos destroy lives and livelihoods.

But human beings are good at building relationships. They’re often naturals at it, because a relationship itself is a tool that we evolved to use.

And that’s where you come in.

Your job, as an individual creator, is to show brands that you can build those relationships for them — by association. Here’s how to pitch:

🍕 If a brand can use your content, and your ideas and the brand that you have already built up, the relationships that you’ve already established with their target audience, they get to tap into an incredibly powerful form of communication.

🍕 Influencers knew this, but they kind of fucked it up. They approached it from a 💸 Get Money 💸 point of view, where they wanted to write shitty Instagram posts, call it a brand collaboration, and then fail to back their own work with detailed

🍕 This means that we can’t just go to brands and say “Hey, I’m a creative, gimme the money…” — that ain’t working anymore, believe me. What you need to do is create a compelling business case for why you are worth investing in, how you’re going to persuade and communicate with the brand’s target audience, where your numbers come from, and what your real-life projections for the collaboration are going to be based on.

🍕 PRESENT YOUR REALITY. Treat every single opportunity to pitch for a collaboration as if you were actively pitching a VC fund for investment. Give every brand that level of due diligence and care, show them the data and be prepared to demonstrate actual planning abilities and a marketing strategy.

🍕 Go into every meeting you can get with a pitch deck that you have put together with absolute care. Ensure that your pitch represents your brand and is something you have learned and rehearsed. You want to know how to create a good pitch? Read this by the VC Emily Rich:

Does this seem a little harder than you thought? Good.

It should be. Brands take their messaging, their marketing, their associations and their relationships incredibly seriously. They have to, because if they don’t it can be incredibly damaging for them. If you aren’t prepared to step up, they’ll know about it. So approach this with an understanding of how difficult it’s going to be.

The other thing to remember is that it won’t just be harder. It’ll take longer. It’ll take months. When you’re trying to start a relationship with anyone, it’s always the case. It’s the case between you and your audience. It’s going to be the case between you and the brands that you’re trying to pitch.

They say the right time to establish any relationship is months before you need it. When I’ve raised money in the past, that’s been true. When I’ve looked for advisors in the past, that’s been true. I begin talking people long before I know I need to talk to people, so that when the time comes, we have common ground right out of the gate.

Get out there now, start laying the foundations, and apply yourself to the pitch. Brands will take notice. Every time.

Please clap for this story if you’ve been into it, I’d love to see your reaction 🙂