Pitch It

Overview

The Why

Reinforced Values
Be Principled
Opportunity
Passion

The purpose of Pitch It is to help students experiment with different product or service concepts and then try to convince customers to choose their idea based on the perception of value. This activity requires students to be creative, think quickly, and be persuasive.

Pitch It affords students the opportunity to practice ideation, customer focus, persuasive speaking, and pitching.

Intro

As any good salesperson knows, it is important to target your pitch toward your customer. In this activity, your creativity combined with your pitching skills will truly test how well you can convince a customer that they must purchase your product. Your job is to create a new product or service that the identified customer would be interested in purchasing. Your solution must combine elements from at least 3 of the random objects given.

Social and Emotional Skills

1. In this activity, students will utilize awareness of self to understand their advantages to pitch a product. This activity may identify both strengths and weaknesses and allow the student to determine how to complement their weaknesses for optimal performance.

2. In this activity, students will utilize their knowledge of the audience to present a product. Students may adjust their perspectives to empathize with the audience. As well, students will utilize social awareness to present feedback in an appropriate manner.

Preparation

• Determine how you will share the activity with your students.
  • Options to consider:

• • • Provide the pre-selected customer/objects worksheet and post via your electronic platform.
    • In a virtual collaborative platform, do this activity as a whole class.
• You will also want to decide how you will incentivize your students (pay the winners). You have to decide what will work best for your student population and take your virtual delivery medium into consideration.
• Decide how students will vote for their favorite pitch. Students cannot vote for themselves.
  • Here are some ideas: input their vote in the chat, use polling features within the platform, students post video pitch using Flipgrid to social media and use likes or comments to gain votes, etc.
• Decide how you would like students to respond to any of the debrief questions after they complete the activity and how they would do so.  
• Post the activity to your classroom platform for students to access and complete or set up a Zoom session to walk through the activity with students.

Directions

NOTE: These directions are written for a collaborative session with students virtually – if not collaborating as a class virtually, you can post pieces of the directions online with the resources listed above.

• Explain to your students that they will have to really think outside the box with this one. Nothing is off-limits here (everything must be legal and school appropriate). Nothing is impossible!
• Ask for 5 students to volunteer to pitch for this round.
• Using a random objects generator, create a list of objects for each student.
  • Remind them to write them down so they can reference them as they brainstorm and pitch.
• Select the customer card and share the customer with the students who are pitching.
  • You can act as the customer or you can select a student to act as the customer and determine the winner.
• Explain that each player combines two of the word pieces from the five they selected to create a product for the customer. Allow two minutes for players to brainstorm and prep their pitch.
• Each player pitches his/her product to the customer. The pitch should only last 30 seconds.
• Using the voting method you selected in preparing for this activity, allow the class to pick the best product for the customer.
• Incentivize your winner as you determined in your preparation for the activity.
• Play continues following those same steps.
• You can play as many rounds as you have time for.

Debrief

Students can complete the debrief on paper by answering the following questions or in a group setting via Zoom (either as a full class or in breakouts) to discuss their learnings.

• What made you pitch the products you pitched? (Customer focus, persuasive pitch)
• Did you change your strategy as the rounds progressed? (Adjusting to the market)
• What was the hardest part about this activity? Why?
• Who had the most unusual pitch? Who used the typical style of pitch (e.g. late-night TV infomercial)?
• Who had the most creative product or service to pitch? Did they also make the most money? Why or why not?
• Did you consider the needs of your customer in ideating your product? Were there any obstacles to pitching an idea to meet the needs of your customer?
• In what way(s) did the product you pitched improve the life of your customer?
• In this activity, you had a limited amount of time to think about your ideas and pitch them. Does this present any challenges to being principled in your pitch? If yes, how important is leading a principled life in one’s personal and work life, to creating behaviors that are principled at all times?