Not surprisingly this headline in the Guardian last week caught my eye. The article  that followed was about Alex Ross whose book, The Rest is Noise, had just won this year’s Guardian first book award, not at first glance relevant to pitchcoach!

 With composers ranging from John Cage to Schoenberg, the subject of the  book was 20th century music, contemporary and modern classical, an art form regarded by many as too technical,  too difficult and ‘inacessible’. Not in the words of this author!

Comments from judges included: “Everytime I felt overwhelmed by the technicalities, along came a sublime metaphor or simile that would light up the prose”.  Or this from the Economist, “No other critic can so effectively explain why you like a piece, or beguile you to reconsider it, or prompt you to hurry online and buy a recording”.

Nicholas Kenyon, who initiated Proms in the Park said “At a time when people are still talking about 20th century music as if it were a problem, here is a lucid and entertaining book……it’s the ideal mix of enthusiasm and information”.

The relevance?  Many business proposals call for detailed, technical, difficult, lengthy sumissions in document form to fulfil the brief.

In the pitch you need to ‘beguile’.