A Little Pitch Formula

I just finished reading the book Obviously Awesome by April Dunford — realizing a little too late that I should have been using it as a workbook. So I took some time go go back through and apply each of the lessons to our business.

Super-short summary: Great book on how to communicate your product/service to the consumer. If you can position yourself properly, customers will have a greater understanding of who you are, what you do, and why they should pay for it.

One part that stood out to me was a how-to on making the pitch. I played with it a little and developed a quick formula that we'll look to follow in our next sales opportunity.

(AFTER you've had an initial discussion to determine the customer's problem/needs and possible solutions...)

1. Educate them on why their current solution doesn't meet their needs - quantify the value to them.

In our case, your evaluation software stinks, it's costing you time [thousands of work-hours], money [thousands of dollars per manager], and employee development [loss of satisfaction and turnover expenses].

2. Show you exceed the criteria for the product category - you satisfy their basic needs and then some.

Our software allows you to conduct evaluations, but also it's completely automated and requires no effort to operate.

3. Bring Awareness to the costs of not solving the problem - you need to show them hard dollars before you can convince them to purchase.

We'd show them that they have a team of 100 people with five managers and that their current processes are objectively costing them more than $15,000 in manager salaries. We would then present our pricing in comparison and show them how much money and time they would save.

It makes so much sense once you see it! I'm sure there will be tweaks to the process but we'll definitely be following this structure moving forward.