How to Pitch Your Innovative Idea to Your Company

The company you work for has a problem, and you’ve got a brilliant idea to address it. You have a feeling this could be a Big Solve, and you’re fired up to get started. The problem? Getting buy-in.

While your idea may serve up millions of dollars in revenue or margin – or be truly ground-breaking for your industry – you’re going to need to get investment, and not just the cash kind. Anything that’s as big as you’re imagining will need some funds – and some folks – to work on it. To get innovation off the ground, as the Hamilton song goes, you’ll need to have the votes. 

Innovation presents a paradox for many organizations: they need it to survive, and yet it is risky to do. In fact, 40% of companies reject innovation because of a fear of failure.  

Too often, great ideas die on the desk, a casualty of a single decision-maker or an executive cabal wielding the power to make or break vital disruption. They may think they’re innovative, but in truth they may be focused on the next quarter, worried about stepping on someone’s toes, or woefully under-resourced as is. Worse yet, they may not be smart enough to understand a winning idea, or empowered enough to achieve it — the Peter Principle still applies in the C-suite.

If you find your creative spark in danger of being extinguished by a wet blanket of a management team or company culture, you’re not alone. In this colloquium for industry leaders hosted by Harvard Business School, executives explored roadblocks to innovation, and leadership’s role in fostering, or floundering, creative ideas:

 Intuit cofounder Scott Cook, for example, wondered whether management was “a net positive or a net negative” for creativity. “If there is a bottleneck in organizational creativity,” he asked, “might it be at the top of the bottle?” 

What’s worse, in a highly distributed workforce with hybrid or remote work options, you may find yourself further hamstrung without the in-person face time you’ve historically relied upon to build the trust within your organization, leading to the deep relationships that you know would be helpful before you pitch.

Don’t Work Around the Nay-Sayers, Work With Them

Just because someone leads your team – or even a whole company – doesn’t mean they’re forward-thinking enough to recognize effective, well-vetted innovation when they see it. That said, you may not be giving people enough credit for how helpful they could be to your idea once they’re on board.

You could, of course, try an end-run around the resistors, but sooner or later, you’re going to need to get their buy-in. And, although they may not be a big-picture thinker, people hold jobs for a reason: They do have some zone of genius. In order to get your idea approved, you’re going to want to get inside their head, speak their language, and appeal to their unique strengths to craft a pitch they (almost) could have thought of themselves.

Use Their Type to Find the Talk Track 

The first step toward a breakthrough when pitching an idea to a colleague? Analyzing, and appreciating, their leadership strengths and their management type. Deloitte categorized leaders into four primary types: Pioneers, Guardians, Drivers, and Integrators. Pioneers – perhaps this is you – serve as the bold, big picture visionaries, bringing disruptive ideas to the team. Guardians protect stability, order, and consistency, which are required for reliability and scalability. Drivers propel progress, move quickly, and focus on results, while Integrators build bridges across groups and gain consensus.

Whichever roles you and your coworker play individually, together you can form a dynamic duo when working together to bring innovation to life. This initial problem of a non-visionary counterpart might serve as the solution, long-term: If both of you were Pioneers, who’d ensure the consistent execution?

The solution lies in working with your team, rather than at cross-purposes. Where to begin?

Why Didn’t I Think of That?

Before you give your revolutionary PowerPoint vision deck its moment in the sun, you’ll want to begin by scheduling a pre-session with your stakeholders (or the Board, if you're the CEO) to make sure you understand their long-range, big-picture vision. If they're not visionary, you’ll likely hear a lot about execution. Don’t be discouraged if they’re down in the weeds, but do make a note of the specific words they’re using — you’re going to steal them to use them strategically in your eventual pitch. For instance, the Driver focused on execution is going to need hear that your solve is focused on results, so you’ll need to hammer that home. The Guardian will need to hear themes of consistency and repeatability. You get the idea.

Now taking it a step further, you’ll need to anchor your pitch in something this colleague already knows about and about which they feel proud. You can position your idea as the next evolution of the great work the person has already begun. You’ll likely get pushback; a typical reply may sound like, “Aren’t we already doing this?” While of course you’re not, you’ll need to find a way to help folks see your vision as a natural extension and not a total lane change. To this end, it is also helpful to reassure the non-visionary type that there’s an “operational excellence” executional component to your idea.

Get Buy-In For the Problem Before You Seek Buy-In For the Solution

As you hone your pitch, try to position your idea as a problem that needs solving, rather than an entire end-to-end solution that needs to be accepted in full. By now, you’ve been diligently considering this idea for days, weeks, or months. At this point, many people have so much conviction in their idea that they present it as the only way to solve the problem and they get too far ahead of everyone else in the room. You’ll need to take a breath, get buy-in for the upstream problem, as well as the assumptions that led you to your idea, and be ready to slowly walk your colleague through the idea’s evolution as if they’re on the ground floor with you.

Tie the End Result to Something Your Company Cares About: Money

In line with a 2021 Deloitte study on Innovation, you’ll need to organize your thinking around “why” this Pitch matters, financially. Is this a cost play, a revenue play, or both? Of the organizations that they studied, the ones that leveraged innovation as an offensive strategy to achieve better financial performance saw their innovation turn into faster growth.

Your fellow leaders will need to see past the idea itself and beyond to a future, juicy bonus check when the company outperforms its targets because of your plan. To cement that vision, you’ll need to have thought through not just potential revenue and margin impact from your work, but other KPIs that fall within your idea's domain. If you can tie your pitch to both short-term efficiencies and long-term metrics and money results, you’re much more likely to get the go-ahead.

Make Other People the Hero

While you know that other people would never come up with this idea, you’ll need to perform a sleight-of-hand maneuver to put your colleagues in the driver’s seat of the initiative. To do that, you can leverage the art of storytelling to improve your pitch’s chances. If your story has a beginning (The Problem), a middle (The Solution), and an end (Success Implementation!), then your audience needs to be the hero of the journey.

Develop your pitch so they can easily evangelize it to their peers; make it “sticky,” a talking-point slogan that’s sort of like a bumper sticker that they’re willing to put on their car and drive around within the organization. Not only should they feel like they thought of the idea themselves, but they should be able to talk and feel proud about it as if they did.

Most people resist this idea, feeling like it would take all of the joy out of the solve if they diffuse the credit. Or, they worry that people will take the idea and derail it within their own department, never to see the light of day. Ultimately, the choice is up to you: You’ll need to accept that this future career win depends on your short-term sacrifice of recognition to let others feel good in the moment. Rest assured that sooner or later, people will know that both the idea and the execution came from you.

Timing is Everything

If your child has ever asked you to get poster board at 10PM before the next day’s science fair, or someone puts a last-minute meeting on your calendar for 7AM, you know there’s a right and a wrong time for everything. Similarly, you need to find a time when your colleague is in the mood to hear a new vision—not 8 a.m. on Monday when you’ve spent the weekend getting fired up about your idea, not 4:30 on Friday afternoon when you think they’ve cleared their plate, and certainly not during the week of a major company launch.

Spend a month or two doing everything you can to deliver on any back items your team wants, so that by the time you're bringing a new idea to the table, you’re in good graces and you’re not late on other initiatives.

Pitching Innovation is Iterative

Many times, when people think of pitching an idea, they think of presenting their pitch all at once, giving it their all, and getting the green light, but the reality is far more iterative than that. In fact, you’re going to need to pitch your idea continuously, refining as you go.

Go into pitching your idea knowing that you’re going to need to present it in pieces, over multiple sessions. Your team won’t immediately “get it”— expecting they will, and planning for a one-and-done pitch, will only set you up for disappointment. You’ll need to create “sound bites” you can introduce in your micro-pitches and revisit individually as relevant to reinforce your point.

If a colleague touches on the problem in an unrelated meeting, for instance, you can deploy the appropriate sound bite and start to link it back to the problem as stated by others. Done repeatedly, this will validate the problem as well as embed the solution in your team's mind. Be ready to try, try again. It may take only a few meetings, or it may take more, but you’ll need to pitch as many times as it takes to overcome the resistance that is unfortunately just part of the process.

Keep Trying, Your Time Will Come

If you’re a big-picture thinker and you’re feeling defeated, take heart, and keep trying. One executive I worked with pitched a big idea five years before its time, with countless peers and leaders telling him it was absurd. Many years later, this well-known company not only has embraced the idea but rebranded around it and made several acquisitions to support it.

Takeaway

While pitching an innovative idea, you’ll get more traction when you see it as a longer process and you bring others into the process as an ally.

When you sympathize with your stakeholders' limitations and concerns, you analyze how they think in order to inform your pitch, and you tie your idea to results, you’re much more likely to gain buy-in for your solve. By mapping the problem and solution to multiple touchpoints within your organization, making your idea easily digestible, and picking the right moment(s), you can work with your colleagues rather than against them to drive home winning innovation for your organization.