Ditch the Pitch – Page 10 – Yastrow & Company

It’s not about you

Who does your customer care more about, you or herself? Don’t ever forget this, for a minute. Your customer doesn’t really care about you. Your customer cares about herself. If you want her to be interested in you, you MUST ensure that the conversation is about her, not about you. Ditch the pitch. Don’t talk […]

Commitment Compass, Ditch the Pitch, We Relationships
Mar 09, 2010
7 Comments
By Steve Yastrow

Improvise your success!

Improvise Your Success! Training procedures. Employee behavior policies. Customer service scripts. Secret shoppers ensuring employees follow the scripts. Elevator pitches. Sales presentation templates. All important ingredients for a successful business, right? Not so fast. Sure, for some functions in business, such as running an assembly line or filling out compliance documents, consistency and policy are […]

Tear up your elevator pitch

Do you have an elevator pitch? It’s that 30-second, well-crafted self-description you would deliver if you found yourself on an elevator with an important, prospective customer. If you have an elevator pitch, tear it up into little pieces. But don’t throw those little pieces away. Your elevator pitch has lots of valuable pieces in it, […]

The End of the Sales Pitch

Stop “pitching” when you sell. It’s so one-way. Instead of the sales pitch, think about the sales conversation. Most successful selling isn’t about convincing. It’s about diagnosing. If you are pitching, it is only a coincidence if the pitch you toss at your customer lands in the right place. Unlike a sales pitch, a good […]

I gave you a gift and you looked away

(My usual caveat: This is not a customer service story. It is a relationship-building-encounter-missed-opportunity story. Much more interesting. Bad customer service stories have become boring.) I had just arrived in San Antonio the evening before a speech, flying back to the states from overseas. I walked down the beautiful San Antonio Riverwalk and found a […]

Outtakes

Things are rarely perfect the first time. I used to write songs with a good friend of mine. We had a problem. If an idea wasn’t perfect, the first time we played it or sang it, he focused on how the idea wasn’t good enough to be in a song. He couldn’t move forward. He […]

The Path of a Business Conversation

Visualize a flock of birds taking off … they start out heading northwest, as they leave the ground. By about 50 feet in the air they have fallen into formation and, en masse, they suddenly turn southwest and head on their way. What would have happened if, right on takeoff, some of the birds thought, […]

What should we say to call someone out?

Every day we’re on the phone with people, and we notice they are going through emails, or surfing the web, while talking with us. Everyone I speak with has this experience, regularly. How do we notice this? Because we notice that the person we are speaking with is not engaged with us. We notice that […]

The Conversationometer

It’s Day 2 of my 17-day odyssey, sharing ideas with people from Seattle to Mauritius. I’m writing while on a flight from Seattle to Newark, 25 rows behind Rudy Giuliani, who is sitting in the aisle seat in the first row of first class. Rudy got on the plane early, and did a great job […]

“I Majored in Sales” … Not!

My friend Steve Subar, CEO of Open Kernel Labs, made an interesting point over dinner the other night. “Do you realize you can’t major in selling at any business schools? You can major in accounting, or marketing, or finance, or economics, but not in selling.” To test Steve’s assertion, I did a little searching. It […]

Get Beyond the Gilding

This week’s Time Magazine reviews Geoffrey Miller’s book Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior. The book makes the case that much of our behavior can be traced to self-advertisement in the pursuit of mates. One quoted section in the review caught my attention. The reviewer titled this paragraph, “On the futility of consumer capitalism: “We […]

Genuine Dialogue-ometer

I often ask audience members to describe what genuine dialogue feels like. Here’s some of what I hear: “Give and take.” “Flowing.” “Paying attention to what each other says.” “Learning from each other.” “Listening.” … and many more like that. Genuine dialogue is a necessary component of a relationship-building encounter. (Check out my free ebook, […]

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