7 Chapter 7: Shark Tank
In this class you will be asked to give a speech as if you’re participating in the popular television show Shark Tank. We’ve changed up this assignment a little bit from how it works on the show. You are not supporting a product but instead are asking a panel of your classmates to support a charity. The trickiest part of this assignment is not that you’re trying to persuade your classmates that you have a good idea. Most charities are worth support. Instead, the difficulty of this assignment is your panel only has a set amount of money to invest. They must decide on one, out of several good options, to invest in.
In preparing for your Shark Tank presentation, you need to focus on this limited resource element. Keep in mind that you must highlight why is your proposal better than all of the others. To do this, you do not need to bash the other proposals. For example, you do not need to claim that kittens are useless in order to prove that we should give money to puppies. Instead, you should be able to prove one of several things.
- a) Your need is more immediate
- b) Your need is unique and special
- c) While the other organizations get money from many places your organization can only possibly get money from the panel.
- d) Terrible things will happen if your organization does not get the money immediately.
To help make their decision, the panel of investors, also known as “the sharks,” will be asking you questions. You should prepare for these questions by fully researching basic information about the organization that you’re presenting. Additionally research the controversial information about your organization. Then, when going into a questioning period, be prepared to face softball (easy) questions such as when was this organization founded. As well as the much more difficult questions like “what was your organization’s response to the chaos that occurred last weekend?” Or “how is your organization overcome the difficulties which they faced last year which resulted in terrible press coverage?” Having done extensive research, you should be able to easy accept and respond to these questions.
Editing Your Pitch
After you’ve drafted your pitch, you will need to practice and edit. Practicing will allow you to smooth out the bumps in your presentation. You’ll find yourself giving the presentation quicker with more emphasis and perhaps more drama or other ways to bring in the audience. While this practice will smooth out your speech, it may also make the speech go quicker. Remember that in a competitive space such as pitch making competition giving a speech that is too short can make it seem like you do not have enough information. Or it could seem that your product or proposal is not as worthy as the other ones. It is therefore important after you’ve been practicing your presentation to time it yet again and to make sure that you are still filling the full-time allocation. If you are not you need to do 2 things you either need to make sure that you’re not giving your speech too quickly or you need to find a way to fill in a little bit more information
If you need to develop more information, the best way to do so is to think about what tricky questions do you anticipate that the panelists will ask to you. Then, you want to anticipate those answers and bury the information within your speech. This might be thought of as getting ahead of any problems that might occur during the presentation or might be in the back of the mind of the audience. For example, if your organization was caught up in a scandal two years ago in which a director took off with all of the funding for an event you may want to acknowledge that scandal during your presentation. You can say something as simple as:
“You may remember my organization from the news several years ago there was an amazing drama in which the CEO took off with all of the money that had been donated to the children’s charity. That was an incredibly unfortunate event, but I would like to remind you that he is now in jail on an excessively long sentence. We have brought in external regulators to make sure that no one else was taking funds illegally. And our programming and community support have been revised. From this redevelopment we not only have come out with better fiscal policy, we actually are offering better community programs as well.”
In this way you are acknowledging that the audience may rightly be concerned about the past record of your organization. And you are getting ahead of the narrative by letting them know what has been done what will be done differently and how they can be sure that these types of problems will not happen again.
Another way in which you can fill up more of your speech time is to work on including better data. You might also give citations for that data. For example, when introducing features you might include a statistic but you don’t really have to give very much background about where this statistic came from you can simply say the 2002 census said X and then move on. However when making a pitch you do want to provide statistics and the background of where those statistics came from so if you’re trying to prove that everyone would be healthier if they ate your particular product you might want to give some sort of medical background for that. You could say “doctor Hahn has proven that eating my product every day will make you healthier.” And if your audience knows who doctor Hahn is and they respect her as a medical authority your claim is useful.
However most of your audience members would not know who this random doctor was they wouldn’t know what she was a doctor of and if she was really even a medical doctor at all. You could bolster your claim by which we mean that you could improve your claim that your product will make you healthier by making the person who is supporting your claim your backer seems stronger. In this case you might tell us that doctor Hahn is the leading expert in child nutrition. Or that she is the professor at a prestigious medical institution. Or that her research has been backed by leading organizations such as the National Institute of health. Notice in giving this backing that we’re actually giving backing about the person who said this statistic as well as the statistic this is different than the ways in which you present reference information in a paper. In a written essay you might write “Doctor Hahn said in the Journal of Medical Affairs in 2002 blah blah blah..” or you might go even sorter and write “Fact x (Hahn, 2002). In these written examples if the reader really cared they’d give flip to the end of your paper look at your work cited and figure out where your information was coming from however we can’t do that during your presentation therefore if you want your audience members to fully appreciate the citations which you are providing for them you must give them the reason in which they care about those citations. Providing the individual’s name organization funding backers all can help to improve the ethos of the source that you are using and through that improve your own personal ethos as well.
