Is there 1 right way to pitch?

Yesterday I examined 11 ultra-successful pitches and looked for commonalities.

These were the winners of my annual “Best Pitch of the Year” competition that I run among members of my Inner Circle. And yesterday was the webinar where I shared them with all the members.

They landed outlets from the NYT and WSJ to key trade pubs to local market saturation.

I was intrigued to cull principles from them that could be applied to a grand unifying theory of “the one right way to pitch.”

But here’s what I saw:

– one that was highly customized and clearly represented a strong previous relationship with the reporter
– another that had no customization at all
– one that painstakingly detailed objective facts from third-party research to validate the newsworthiness of the proposed angle
– another that merely acknowledged the reporter’s previous work and offered a resource
– one that announced a first-time event tied to a topic hot on the media agenda
– another that was an evergreen angle that was essentially 10 years old

Now obviously, there are best practices that improve success rates in media relations. That’s why you read posts like these and go to conferences and listen to webinars. That’s why I offer training and help PR people.

But at the top level, there are nuances within those best practices that can earn you more than your share of coverage. You can actually get good enough that you can be more successful by breaking some of the rules some of the time. That’s what these Inner Circle members are doing.

But there is one thing all these winning PR pros had in common. None of the subjects they were pitching was a slam dunk – the newsworthiness wasn’t glaringly obvious. For heaven’s sake, the grand prize winner somehow had a Wall Street Journal column dedicated to her senior living center for an event they’ve been doing for years. Before these pros knew their pitches would earn responses and coverage, before they knew they’d win a pitching competition, they had some reason to doubt if their pitches were good enough. And amidst that doubt, they thought, “Let’s go for it.”

They didn’t analyze so much they were paralyzed. They used their knowledge and expertise and ACTED. Once you’ve learned the best practices, that’s the one right way to pitch.