How to Pitch Without Trying to Win the Room | Steve M. Cullen @ All Together Now

<p><strong>Steve M. Cullen</strong> has presented roughly 200 times a year for two decades. He&#39;ll tell you privately that a pitch is warfare, that his mother&#39;s retirement is riding on it, that the fundamental job is to be the freshest person in the room. Then he walks in and refuses to pitch at all.</p><p>Steve is a creative director and the founder of All Together Now, a studio whose entire tagline is &quot;good ideas and sunny vibes.&quot; His work is turning companies into stories, which mostly means convincing people that something that doesn&#39;t exist yet should exist. Kelly and Pia get him into the mechanics of how that actually happens: the craft skills he built by taking apart campaigns and films line by line, the Eminem lyrical-construction exercise he ran on advertising for years, and why the difference between winners and almost-winners is that winners write it down.</p><p>The back half turns inward. Steve talks about trigger journals, memento mori, the stoic virtues he actually uses, and the nightly 6pm debrief he gives his cat, which is how he discovered he&#39;d been telling himself he&#39;d failed 12 days in a row.</p><p><br></p><p><strong>In this episode:</strong></p><p>Why creative direction isn&#39;t salting the soup, it&#39;s deciding what to make with everything in the kitchen</p><p>How Steve prepares a competitive pitch so the outcome is decided before he arrives</p><p>The reason he runs a working session instead of a presentation</p><p>What a trigger journal is, and how to start one this week• Why winners write their goals down</p><p>The signature question he&#39;s asked clients for ten years, and where it came from</p><p>The one word he&#39;s banned from his vocabulary</p><p><br></p><p>New episodes of Well Said every week. Subscribe on YouTube, and follow on Spotify and Apple Podcasts.</p><p>Find Steve&#39;s studio, All Together Now, on Instagram.</p>