Whether you’re an IT leader, product manager, marketer, or innovator, you’re constantly pitching new ideas. But let’s be honest—executives can be brutal.
While your palms are sweating, dying over your pitch, they’re thinking:
- How does this impact revenue?
- What’s the risk?
- Will this really make a difference?
- Dear God, if I hear the word AI again, I’ll shoot myself.
And if you start with slides full of data, you’ve already lost them.
Relatable Problem: Leadership keeps pushing back on your product ideas, and you’re not sure how to win them over.
Pro Tip: Use the Skeptic’s Story Framework to shift their mindset:
- Start with a shared pain: Identify a problem they already recognize. Make it count in dollars, competitive threats and real loss aversion.
- Show the cost of inaction: What happens if they do nothing? Hint at the reputational risk of inertia.
- Introduce a surprising shift: What’s a new insight they haven’t considered? Use the “Imagine if…” opening to get them to see a brighter future than today’s status quo offering.
- Prove impact with a quick win: What’s one small result that hints at big success?
Example:
You’ve found it. The breakthrough you and your team at a logistics company have been working on for months. Now, you need buy-in for the amazing, AI-driven route optimization system you’re dying to deploy..
Instead of showing spreadsheets, he told this:
“Right now, every delivery delay costs us $50,000 per day. And every day, our teams manually adjust routes—costing time and fuel. Not only that, we’re losing drivers to our competitors and The Street knows it. But imagine if we could predict delays before they happen? One pilot city saw a 12% reduction in delivery time within two weeks, and the teams and our customers are over the moon. Imagine that at scale.”
The executives leaned in. The funding was approved.
If your product story starts with their pain—not your feature—you’ll turn skeptics into believers.
