The Pop-up Pitch by Dan Roam surprised me. It surprised me due to its simplicity. It surprised me due to its clarity. It surprised me due to its usefulness. It encourages us to create easy-to-follow, highly informative and persuasive seven-minute 10-page presentations which catch and hold the attention of our listeners. And the best part is it can all be accomplished within two hours.

You may be asking yourself, when will you need a seven-minute pitch? I asked myself the very same question. But I soon realized many of my presentations and workshops can be divided into seven-minute segments. In fact, according to many sources, you risk losing audience attention when it takes longer than 18 minutes to present and conclude new information to an audience. With this in mind I eagerly read this book, hoping for tricks and tidbits to make my presentation writing quicker and more effective.
The author challenges us to look at our seven-minute pitches as episodes, stories in which a challenge is presented which hooks the audience and then is skillfully solved by the presenter. Simple, clear, and useful advice.

But the challenge isn’t just any challenge. It’s a challenge that will create an emotional and intellectual pivot for your audience. In order to write the compelling episode effectively and impactfully, you’ve got to have a reliable roadmap of where you want to go and how you’re going to get there. And for that, you’re going to have to read the book.

This book is great if you are a teacher, trainer, salesperson, manager, negotiator, or someone who simply wants to be more persuasive. While the book is a bit repetitive, and it may not be reinventing the figurative “wheel” it’s straightforward practical advice that can easily be implemented by us all..

Interesting concept to improve one’s public speaking and presentation skills. I am looking forward to implementing this technique for my next big presentation. I would imagine that this book is even more effective in a physical format rather than the digital format with which I read.

The Pop-up Pitch is a fun and simple approach to creating engaging presentations. Roam’s suggestions drawing out ideas, creating a 10-page pitch and utilizing a roadmap is genius. I found the practical advice and tools from this book very useful and will integrate into my future presentations.

Highly recommend this book!

Special thanks to NetGalley, Dan Roam and Perseus Books for the advanced copy of The Pop-up Pitch. #NetGalley #ThePopupPitch

I was excited to read this book because I had read and loved "The Back of the Napkin" by Dan Roam. This book does not disappoint! Like his previous books, this is a concise practical guide to developing and delivering the perfect "pop-up" pitch or presentation. There are two tools he shares - one is the "Visual Decoder" to draw out ideas in a template to activate the visualization and story-telling part of the brain. The other tool is the "Ten Page Pitch" that helps pull together the arcs of the story to engage the audience and use persuasive story-telling. While reading the book, Roam encourages the reader to stop and practice which I did end up doing and was really pleased at how easy it was to use the tools and come up with a compelling pitch! The timing of using these tools is succinct so I felt it was definitely worth a try! I particularly liked the examples he used and when I read his daughter's example about Harry Potter, I thought the "Visual Decoder" tool would be an excellent and helpful tool to help learners summarize what they got out of a book, movie, etc. I also really liked the graphic on the Five Types of Meetings -- his ability to visually and through words create enormous clarity around concepts is why I like to read Roam's books!

I highly recommend this book!

I just reviewed The Pop-up Pitch by Dan Roam. #NetGalley I felt the book to be useless on a Kindle. It has no direction and think this book is better suited as an ARC in a physical format.