Pitch Meeting Bingo — Entrepreneur Edition

3 min readJul 16, 2018

Make predictable meetings exciting for you and your team!

Entrepreneurs! Here’s a great way to have fun when sitting in meeting with a typical corporate customer, or even some potential investors, advisors and partners.

These meetings are, by design, not with innovators or visionaries. Half the time, the participants utter the most predictable and inane comments. We see right through their attempts to appear helpful, savvy or superior — but it’s frustrating because you really can’t say anything. Until now.

First, see if you recognize any of these typical comments:

“The only problem with that is …”
(and then they point out the most minor flaws, in order to seem smart)
“I don’t get it “
(sigh. you’ve already dumbed it down to the preschool level)
“Let’s set up another meeting … “
(nothing like putting off actions and decisions for another 3 months)
“Send me an email and I’ll introduce you”
(yeah, when?)
“Send me some documentation”
(you won’t even read a 3 sentence email, and now you want to read documentation?!)
“Why anyone would want to … ?”
(the motto of the tech laggard)
“Have you ever heard of ABC competitor? “
(this is meant to challenge you, but often is used as a way to make the other person feel superior …)
“We’re already doing that”
(they probably weren’t doing anything — but now that you explained it to them …)
“Do you know [this important person] ..?”
(important person, that they know you don’t know)
“How is this different than … ?”
“Come back when you have: ____”
(More traction. Better Metrics. More validation, more .. more .)

Play BS Bingo

Now, instead of being frustrated and bored during — you can have some fun during these meetings. Here’s how it works:

Print off a bingo card for every member of your team. Each one is unique and random.
Every time someone in the meeting utters one of these phrases — mark off the box on your card if it appears.
When someone completes a row or column or diagonal -they’ve won.

Shouting out BS Bingo!

Here’s the tricky part. Ordinarily the winner would shout “BS Bingo!” but you don’t want to freak out the non-players in the room. So I suggest you shout out a word or phrase that would seem perfectly normal in almost any meeting:

This way, there’s a 95% chance your exclamation will make sense compared with anything else that is being discussed in that meeting.

Pitch Meeting Bingo

So print off cards for your team right before you go to that pitch meeting or customer meeting — this way you can secretly play the game while enduring predictable comments from non-entrepreneurs.

Have fun!

# # #