The first two minutes

For anyone with a pitch, a first client call, a networking conversation, or an interview that they only get one pass at.

Most preparation for a pitch, a client call, or an interview goes into the middle. The examples, the numbers, the tell-me-about-a-time answers or the case for why you're worth the money. Almost none goes into the ninety seconds at the start, which people treat as throat clearing before the real thing begins.

The best evidence on this comes from hiring research, since that is where it has been studied most rigorously. But a client sizing you up on a first call and an interviewer sizing up a candidate are running the same basic judgment, and the research does not treat the opening as throat clearing.

The opening minutes track the outcome

Murray Barrick, Brian Swider and Greg Stewart followed candidates through structured interviews and reported the results in the Journal of Applied Psychology in 2010. Candidates who made a better initial impression during the rapport-building stage went on to receive higher interviewer ratings, correlation of .42, and more internship offers, correlation of .22. The mechanism is not specific to hiring: it is what happens whenever one person forms an early judgment of another and that judgment gets asked to hold for the rest of the conversation.

The finding that changed how I coach this is the next one. That early read carried over to a separate interviewer, including one who skipped the rapport-building stage entirely. And when different interviewers were doing the rating, liking and similarity stopped predicting anything — what carried was an early judgment of competence. The opening was not working as charm. It was working as evidence.

That fits a much older line of research. Nalini Ambady and Robert Rosenthal showed that very brief observations of behavior carry a surprising amount of information about how a person will be judged. People form a usable impression from a thin slice, whether or not anyone intends them to.

And the instrument measuring you is blunter than it looks

In 2022 Paul Sackett, Charlene Zhang, Christopher Berry and Filip Lievens re-ran the numbers behind decades of hiring research in the Journal of Applied Psychology. They found that standard statistical corrections had been overstating how well selection methods predict job performance, and cut mean validity estimates by roughly .10 to .20. The ranking mostly survived, and structured interviews came out at the top of it.

Two things follow. The interview is the most-used tool for judging a candidate, and a pitch meeting or first client call works the same way for judging a business, so both are worth preparing seriously. And the instrument is still a weak predictor in absolute terms, which means a well-prepared opening is not gaming a precise instrument. It is supplying signal to an imprecise one.

Prepare the first ninety seconds like a line you have to deliver

Three sentences and one question. Say them out loud, standing up, until they stop sounding written.

1. Who you are in one line, in the language of the room. Not your business's history in order. “I run pricing and quotes for a two-person landscaping crew, so most of my day is talking people through numbers they weren't expecting.”
2. Why this room. One specific thing about them or their business, and it has to be something you could only know if you looked. Not “I admire your commitment to quality.”
3. One clean handoff. “I have a couple of questions about what you need whenever it fits, but I would rather hear the problem in your words first.”

Then a real question, and a follow-up to whatever they answer. The follow-up is the part that lands, for the reason described in the piece on asking for the business.

Four ways people spend the opening badly

• Apologizing. For the traffic, for being nervous, for the state of your resume. It is the first content you give them and it is all about your deficits.
• Answering the small talk in one word. “Good, thanks” is a closed door. Two sentences and a question back is not chattiness, it is the rapport stage doing its job.
• Starting chronologically. “So I graduated in 2019 and then…” puts your most relevant sentence eight minutes in.
• Preparing silently. Rehearsing in your head trains recognition, not delivery. The first time your opening leaves your mouth should not be in the room.

Where this research is thin

These are correlations from structured interviews, a good deal of it in campus and internship recruiting, not from studies of sales pitches or client calls specifically. Nobody randomly assigned candidates to make better first impressions, so the causal story is inferred rather than proven, and a strong opening does not rescue a bad fit or a bad price. The claim I am willing to make is narrower, and it generalizes: the opening minutes are not neutral, they carry into later judgments and into judgments by people who were not there, and almost nobody rehearses them.

Common questions

Does the first-impression research on interviews apply to sales pitches and client calls?

The specific studies were done on structured job interviews, so treat the exact numbers as about hiring. But the mechanism — an early judgment of competence that carries into later ratings, including by people who were not present for the opening — is a general feature of how people judge each other quickly, not something unique to interviews.

What should the first ninety seconds of a pitch or client call include?

Three things: who you are in one line using the room's language, one specific detail about them or their business that proves you looked, and a clean handoff into a real question. Then a follow-up question to whatever they answer.

What is the biggest mistake people make in the opening of a pitch or interview?

Apologizing for something — being late, being nervous, an imperfect resume or proposal. That is the first content the other person receives, and it is entirely about your deficits before you have said anything about what you can do for them.

If you want to put a number on it

The calculator has a branch for the deal you are trying to close, or the step up you are trying to reach. What it's worth →

Sources

• Barrick, M. R., Swider, B. W., & Stewart, G. L. (2010). Initial evaluations in the interview: relationships with subsequent interviewer evaluations and employment offers. Journal of Applied Psychology, 95(6), 1163–1172. Peer-reviewed.
• Sackett, P. R., Zhang, C., Berry, C. M., & Lievens, F. (2022). Revisiting meta-analytic estimates of validity in personnel selection. Journal of Applied Psychology, 107(11), 2040–2068. Peer-reviewed.
• Ambady, N., & Rosenthal, R. (1992). Thin slices of expressive behavior as predictors of interpersonal consequences: a meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 111(2), 256–274. Peer-reviewed.