Last time we talked about intelligent pitching we talked about knowing what your audience is thinking, how you move them to the place where you want them to think, and how you do that at every step in a pitch, and that's what makes an intelligent pitch. But audiences are different, and while it's hard to generalize, I think there's some things that all customer pitches have in common and something that all investor pitches have in common. And in this topic, we're gonna talk about customer pitches. So, what is it that customers wanna know? First of all, the bad old way, the typical customer pitch. When a customer starts out, they ask me to define my problems. I don't know what they're talking about. I don't know why they're calling me. I'm not sure what the matter is. I have a very hard time defining my problem. I'm certainly not gonna start with my daughter's braces, cuz I don't know these people from a hole in the ground. They then move to a burning market need argument for some solution that they're selling. So they say, haven't you ever considered that you need public company research in order to do your job? Or, doesn't everyone need public company research in order to do their job? It then dwells on the great features of the solution, so it has this great feature or that great feature. I'm sure you'll like it. And it stays on the great features for probably 60% of the pitch. There's very little attention to the fit between me and the vendor. There's very little attention to what competitors are doing, or might be doing, or what I might be doing now. There's very little attention to costs and ROI, and the ask, if any, the money, how much it's gonna cost, what I'm gonna have to do, waits until the end. There's a recipe for disaster. It's a very bad pitch. What's wrong with it? I have a thing called the person at a party test, and I imagine if somebody came up to you at a party and said the things that someone says in a pitch, how would you feel about it? So this customer pitch is roughly the equivalent of somebody coming up to you at a party and saying, what are you're current dating concerns? And you say, that's a hard question to answer. You don't know where their coming from. You don't know how to answer the question. They then go on and tell you about a proprietary date formula that they've invented. Lots of research shows that eating in an Italian restaurant and going out to a jazz concert is vital to building relationships. Well, you may hate pizza, and you may not like jazz, but you're being fit into a formula here. You're being pitched a solution and you're being told about its great features, and eventually they come out and they ask you for a trial date, to check out the applicability of the formula to you. What would you make of such a pitch? I tell you what my reaction would be, I'd try to get away from this person as soon as I could, which is of course the reaction a lot of people have to customer pitches. It's the wrong approach. So what's an intelligent customer pitch? Well, what's on customers' minds? I'm not an expert in this matter, although I've been a customer and I've sold to customers, but I think four things are pretty strongly on most customer's minds. The first, and probably the most important is, does this person have the right the solution for my problem? The second thing is, is there chemistry between me and this person? Is this a person that I like? Is this a person I could see doing business with. We've talked about how cold calls are a kind of relationship. A pitch is a kind of relationship, and you're establishing the parameters of the relationship. Is this a person that you'd like to continue to relate to? So how much is the total cost going to be? And then, what's the end state? When we get to the end of the road, when we finish the solution, what are things, how are things going to be different? How are things gonna look? Give me a picture of what the end state looks like so that I can imagine it. An emotional kind of connection to, am I gonna be happier? Am I gonna be richer? Am I gonna be, whatever. So, right solution. Most client problems are multi factorial and most vendors are trying to apply their solution to all problems. So if you break out of that frame and try to help the client understand how the various solutions might fit together, you're doing them a service, and you're establishing your credibility, and you're establishing good chemistry. I love Progressive Insurance, who say, we'll help you pick out the best policy, even if it's not ours. That's a great promise. If vendors gave that promise when they gave a customer pitch, I want to find the best solution for you, and even if it's not ours, I'll recommend it to you. That's a very powerful promise. That will reassure them that you are not only a good person and that there's good chemistry, but that they're gonna find the right solution for you. You're gonna find the right solution for them. The need for chemistry is emotional, it's not intellectual. No matter how many times you call me by my first name, you're not establishing chemistry with me. You can't serve tout it or promise it, you have to actually imply it. Some people go for rah rah stuff, that's fine, I don't. And, but if they do and you supply it to them, that's good, but I think it's always fairly safe to be straightforward, honorable, kind, empathic and do what you say. If you do those things, I think your likely to get chemistry with most people, and stuff like rah rah and calling me by my first name and all that kind of jazz, that may work with some people, but so will honorable, straightforward, kind, empathic, and doing what you say, and it's a lot more durable. In terms of costs and ROI, I think customers want a cost promise, so the best kind of cost promise is probably, it's gonna cost you X. A really great promise is, it will cost you no more than X, so there's a ceiling on it. And a good promise is, here's how we're gonna figure out how much it will cost. We have an algorithm, here's the details of the algorithm, so here's how we'll figure it. That's okay. You don't want your customer to have to figure out too much, but knowing that there's a procedure, and that they can have visibility into it gives them a bit of a cost promise. So the best is the flat rate, great is no more than something, and good is, here's how we figure it out. In terms of ROI, most customers are pretty jaded about ROI promises. It's best to have some kind of range for ROI and say it's based on an algorithm, so customers who have done this experience savings of 45 to 80% or 25 to 50%, depending on how much they use the reiteration module, okay. That kind of thing. We'll tell customers, at least give them some visibility into the process, and reassure them that they're not just being handed an argument made out of air, but and argument that has some substance to it. So that's about cost and ROI. Finally, the end state, they want a vivid picture of the end state, of what will I look like, what will my organization look like? What will it be, what will it do when this is all over? How will this result from the project? And also, they probably they want to know what could happen that would be bad, and how will you prevent bad things from happening? So you can erase a bad thing if you say to them, but that won't happen because we'll do Y. So you create the end state and you show them what it is in some vivid picture, and you win their sympathy in that way. Those are the four key things that I think are on customers' minds. If your pitch incorporates those four things I think you're gonna do well. Is this the right solution? Do I have chemistry with this seller? Can I afford this solution? And again, affording is more than just money. And how does this impact my end state? Thank you.
