What are your customers doing when your marketing or sales messages show up in their lives? Sitting there waiting, minds clear, all prepared to devote their full attention to what you have to say?
Of course not!
Any time your customers encounter your marketing or sales messages, you can be sure that they already have a deep, rich, personal narrative happening in their minds. Your challenge: Become part of that story without interrupting it. Have a look at today’s newsletter, Don’t Knock Her Story Out Of Her Hands.
This article focuses on one of the most important principles of ditching the pitch: If your customer doesn’t want to hear your sales pitch, how do you get the customer to understand your story, and find it compelling?
These Ditch the Pitch Habits can help you whether you are selling widgets, selling ideas, raising money, convincing bosses, renting office space … etc. … anytime you need to persuade someone, you’re better off ditching the pitch!
It’s time for Ditch the Pitch Habits #3 and #4 – Say Yes and Explore and Heighten in my series of The Seven Ditch the Pitch Habits. These habits are about creating mutual agreement and affirmation with your customer … pay attention to them and you will know How to Propel a Sales Conversation Forward.
In a scene from the movie The Social Network, the story of the early days of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg and his partner Eduardo Saverin are riding in a taxi after their first sushi-restaurant meeting with Napster founder Sean Parker. Eduardo had been lobbying to sell ads on Facebook, and Mark had been resisting because he thought it was too early. (Facebook had 75,000 members at that point, in 19 colleges.) The issue comes up again during the cab ride, and Mark reminds Eduardo that Parker had said that being “cool” was the best thing Facebook had going for it, and ads could ruin that. Mark then quoted Parker directly: “Selling ads would be like throwing a party and having it end at 11PM.”
Eduardo responds that he has to worry about paying for the party, and Mark shoots back this line: “There won’t be a party if it’s not cool.”
This is a great lesson for ditching the pitch: Don’t turn a genuine encounter into a sales conversation too quickly. Be patient. Earn the trust of the person you are dealing with, and you will earn the right to have your discussion evolve into a sales conversation. And never, ever, let it turn into a sales pitch.
Imagine being invited to play golf by a friend who sells insurance, and realizing by the 3rd hole that the only reason he invited you was to pitch you life insurance. Imagine talking to a neighbor at your street’s block party, and realizing that his enthusiasm for the conversation is really just eagerness to sell you new siding for your house. In either case it might be possible to turn you into a customer, but not if they do it too quickly. Once you see the sales pitch coming, you duck.
In hindsight, it’s interesting to see that Facebook now has many “uncool” things about it that it didn’t have back in its early days – ads, stretching the limits of using member data, open to everyone (not just college students). Facebook clearly gets away with this – it’s the #2 trafficked website on the Internet (after Google.) But Zuckerberg and Parker were right, the party would have never happened if it hadn’t been cool first.
Have patience. Let’s the party get going. Relax and have a good time with your customer. You’ll know when it’s time to start selling.
Everyone can ditch the pitch and learn to be more persuasive, whether you are a sales star, a sales neophyte, or someone who is not in a sales job but needs to persuade people to do things or agree with you. These two habits lay the foundation for great sales conversations. Start using them now!
Improvising sales conversations – ditching the pitch – isn’t difficult, if you form the right habits. In today’s newsletter, The Seven Ditch the Pitch Habits, I share an overview of those habits.
Like the rest of our lives, practice and continued use is the key to creating great habits. The best time to start practicing these habits? Now!
And … you’ll see how the director of comedy studies at Second City and a professor of otolaryngology at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine arrive at the same conclusions.
Sales people are often too smart for their own good. They quickly figure out exactly what their customer needs, and then tell the customer everything … all at once.
"When Steve Yastrow writes, I pay close attention" - Tom Peters
"I had to buy two copies. The first one is so dog-eared and underlined I couldn't read it any longer." - Seth Godin
Steve is the author of Brand Harmony and the newly published We:
The Ideal Customer Relationship. Learn more and order direct from our Products
page, or from Amazon.
In addition to writing, I spend most of my work time helping companies unleash their potential by creating better connections with their customers. This happens through my speaking events and through Yastrow & Company consulting engagements, where my team and I help companies figure out who they intend to be in the future, and then engage the entire company in creating that future through strong "We" customer relationships.
Before starting Yastrow & Company in the mid-90s I was vice-president of resort marketing for Hyatt Hotels. My experiences in the hotel business showed me clearly that most marketing doesn’t happen in the marketing department. Customers are paying attention to all interactions with a company, not just the promises made in traditional "marketing communications."
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