What is Your Elevator Pitch?
To pitch, or not to pitch, that is the question….
To this very day, when someone asks me or someone in my purview what their “elevator pitch is” I shudder. Its guaranteed to garner a visceral reaction every time.
Why? Well let me explain.
I have two prominent scars from my early days in Sales:
- I messed up my elevator pitch so badly in my ‘sales enablement’ class, I thought I was going to get fired on the spot!
- “Sell me this Pen” – yes, I was actually asked this question in an interview once – I did terribly.
In both cases, the premise was all about the pitch.
Fast forward to today, (unfortunately) the pitch is alive and well.
Here is what happens when we pitch.
Buyer comes into your market with a problem they are looking to solve. Sales rep asks a few questions to ‘Qualify’ them (usually self-serving the reps desire to ‘sell’ something) and launches into their pitch.
In the moments ahead, the Prospect spends the entire time trying to connect their problem to your solution. The problem with this is, the customer starts to lose interest and start multi-tasking as the rep pushes forward with their script.
This is one of the reasons close rates are so dire. There are many other reasons, but this is certainly one of them.
But lets say if you WIN the deal? What then?
This is where things get really interesting because the Sales Team DOES NOT KNOW WHY THEY BOUGHT!
Maybe the Implementation or CS team get to an understanding of why they bought through their discovery, however doing (re) Discovery is a horrible customer experience and they are already off on the wrong foot.
The reality is, there are a lot of the customers on your platform where you have no idea how you are making them successful or not.
You have no idea if you are solving their problem.
Compounding this issue is most CS motion that is centered around ‘meh’ metrics (or meh-trics lol) like adoption and usage.
Customer Success means you are driving a metric or metrics in a positive direction.
Revenue Leaders – do some digging because pitching could be the less obvious problem that is killing your growth.
SELL ME THIS PEN!
