Don’t Pitch too Early

If you’re unwell and your doctor prescribed big yellow tablets, most of us would take them. In this Vlog, Grant asks; But what if your doctor was on commission for those big yellow tablets, would you still feel the same way?

If you’re unwell and you go to your doctor and they prescribed big yellow tablets as the solution, most of us would take them, assuming we will get better in the fullness of time. But what if your doctor was on commission for those big yellow tablets, would you still feel the same way?

That’s the position most people are in, in business. They may be experts in their field, but the customer knows they’ve got a vested interest in the outcome.

The solution is not to pitch too early in the sales process. Whether a customer is interacting with you on your website or in a face to face meeting, as soon as you start talking about your own solutions and what you can do for them, they go into BUYER BEWARE mode. The idea is to take people as far along the purchase journey as you can, while keeping them open minded.

There are three steps to go through before you talk about yourself or your solutions directly.
Step one is to drop insight; to give the customer the ‘Aha’ moment. That’s something they haven’t thought about, which forces them to go back to their paradigm, and their criteria of purchase, and think further about the solutions that they require.

Step two is to explain why the status quo is not an option. One of the biggest barriers to purchase is not that a customer will go to a competitor, but they won’t do anything at all. So in order to make sure that they are going to move, you need to explain why the current situation is not acceptable.

Step three is to talk about the solutions generically. Obviously you will be talking about solutions that you can offer, but by talking about them in a generic way, rather than directly relating them to you, you keep your customer open minded and stop them going to the buyer beware mode.

So for example, if I was a video production company pitching the virtues of video, I may talk about statistics and how video can increase engagement on your website without personalising it and saying how ‘I can increase engagement on your website’. It is only when your customer shows a real interest in the solutions that at that point you can talk about yourself and how you can directly assist them.

It’s not that they won’t be sceptical then, but there’ll be less sceptical because they want to know how you can directly help their business. So in any sales journey, whether it’s on our website or in a face to face meeting, make sure you don’t pitch too early. It’s not that you can’t take commission for the yellow pills, it’s just that you’ve got to do the diagnosis properly first.

There may be small changes to the spoken word in this transcript in order to facilitate the readability of the written English