Everybody has a product. Everyone has an offer and a perspective. But the one that matters is the perspective of a customer. The philosophy of the customer is quite simple – Is the value that you’re delivering to me worth more than the money that’s in my pocket? That’s it.
But, unfortunately, what happens in most companies is that when it comes to understanding their value proposition from a customer’s standpoint, they guess. And they like to guess because they have industry experience or technology experience or whatever.
However, the reality is, when they put a product out there, it’s a hypothesis. So mostly a sales pitch starts with something on the lines of – ‘Look at our product. We are great at doing A, B or C. And we are different from our competition because of x, y and z. Blah blah’
Yes, they might say super specific things, but the real problem is they never ask customers. Most sales pitches are never derived from customer’s words. One of my favourite sayings is –anything that doesn’t come from a customer’s mouth is nothing more than educated guesswork.
Why do I say that conviction? It’s because I was smacked in the face. In the last 17 years, not once, what the companies considered as their value, matched with what the customers value. And that’s why I believe that companies expose themselves to a tremendous amount of risk when they start with ‘I have a product.’
The need for change in a sales pitch when you tackle the VP of NO
Here’s an interesting situation you might relate to. You might have been working closely with someone in your target account, who is your internal champion in that company. You equip them with all the information, to get things going.
And after all your hard work, when you go for an in-person sales meeting, if you notice, one or two key decision-makers never come to those meetings, and yet they have the power to stall things from going forward.
I typically like to call them, the VP of No. Typically they might be someone who has high power in the organization. Or they could be the economic buyer who signs the check, or it could be one of the oldest employees who’s been around or someone that has outsized influence and can convince people not to do something.
And now your internal champion has to talk to the person (the VP of No) who didn’t show up in that meeting and didn’t hear whatever you had to say. And typically, the conversation between your champion and the VP of No goes like this:
The VP of No: Don’t we have, so-and-so all ready?
And your champion tries to describe the solution more.
The VP of No: But don’t we have X, Y, and Z, which does that? I don’t understand why this is different from anything we’re doing now.
At that point, your champion decides whether they are going to die on the hill for you that day, or going to save their political capital to live and fight another day. And they back down.
So how do you handle the VP of No? Simple. You’ve got to create a micro-podcast or some non-degradable asset.
Here’s an example of what I mean. There was a client of mine who had a software company. They were the market leader in being the ERP for small businesses. They were the most expensive and yet they did not give a money-back guarantee as all their competitors did.
Their CEO was asked to fly to England, by a large consumer products prospect, to get advice on how to set up the ERP for their new division.
They flew him on British air first class, which is ridiculously expensive. Once he got there and spent two days giving advice, they invited him to the Executive’s desk and told him, “The real reason you’re here is that we can’t find any software to do what we need to do for less than $2 million. And this trip was to check you out. So what we want to do is we want to invest in your company. We’re not going to take any equity. We were hoping you could make a half a dozen changes to the ERP that would work best for our business.
And in exchange for that, you’re going to give us a perpetual royalty, free license forever. And the CEO of the ERP company was surprised. And then they wrote a checkout, on the spot. And they said, ‘Now, do you think we are serious?’
And that customer was Unilever. Take a guess, how many sales guys in the ERP company knew this story? Zero.
So we decided to record the story and send it out to prospects, using an intern. That was our sales pitch. And all of a sudden, the company started closing more deals.
The story of something magical or the secret sauce of your company is the story of a customer. And that kind of story or sales pitch would never be brushed aside by the VP of No.
All you’ll have to do is ask 5 or 10 customers to tell you what they didn’t understand when they bought your product, and what would have made them sign the deal faster.
And when your prospect listens to such things, it doesn’t feel like someone’s selling something, and all of a sudden, the amount of value and authority attached to that becomes game-changing.
Would that change in sales pitch get someone who is an average performer in sales to perform well?
There are typically two kinds of sales reps– the first kind of representatives are the ones who can explain clearly what they did, why they did it and like to teach others.
The second kind of reps are the ones who can’t explain.
But to put things in perspective, an average salesperson can become a rockstar if they can focus on what’s important to customers. What a customer remembers about the selling process is often very different than what those sales reps will say they did in the first place. You need to reverse engineer the customer’s language, the magic words, and the stories that mattered to them and make it part of your sales pitch.
So if you want to level-up the performance of an average sales rep, you might want to create the right questions and ask your existing customers. Questions like –Why did you buy from us, though you had three service providers shortlisted? What do you think our secret sauce is? What advice would you give to another prospect like you to help them avoid all the bumps and bruises you got along the way?
By doing that, you will be surprised in a positive sense about what your product or service can do for them.
The reason why most content and sales pitches sell nothing
First of all, most content isn’t aimed at addressing objections. It doesn’t even dream of addressing customer questions. It is just megaphone broadcasting. And don’t get me wrong. What I’m saying isn’t an indictment to content, marketers. I’m not saying everybody does this, but I’ve been part of several organizations who don’t get it.
I was in a boardroom once where they were considering using a marketing agency. And I asked them –Who is going to write the content for you, that you think is going to change the game for you? And the answer I got was – the content marketing team.
And here’s what I asked them upon that response – Do you think your game-changing content is going to come from someone who has never sold anything, never had a conversation with a customer? And we’re going to magically invent something in that cubicle on a laptop that will help people buy more?
So, the point – most content is just stuff, and not addressing objections. If it hasn’t been proven that it matters to a customer, it’s just stuff. Being audience-centric means being authentic. No marketing stuff, no acronyms.
Every offer is a hypothesis. Every value proposition, every sales pitch is a hypothesis. It needs to be validated by a customer. It’s not just about flooding people into your top of the funnel.
Closing notes
I want to close this post by sharing a personal story.
My family in upstate New York raises bees. At one point we had 72 hives, those 72 hives had somewhere between 2.1 -3.5 million bees, which would generate a ton of honey a year.
Here’s the thing. If you bum rush that hive and come too fast, they will call in reinforcements, and they will swarm you.
It would help if you approached the hive gently. Bees are willing to share their honey. You open the lid; you smoke them, use anesthetic. They’ll take you to let you take some of the honey, and they won’t bite you for that. But here’s the thing you can’t take more than 50% of the honey in the hive. You know why ’cause the hive will die.
Customers are like bees. If you rush it to them, they’re going to sting you. It’s their house, their hive. They’re paying us money, which they are willing to share. And in fact, my colleagues and I are often shocked by how generous customers are and how grateful they are to be able to share their story.
Prioritize relationships, and trust over everything.
