Once you have designed a great product or service, and determined the most effective path for taking it to market, selling your innovation requires a message that communicates the value proposition to prospective buyers.
Because both consumers and corporate buyers are far more sophisticated today with access to multiple sources of information – from product reviews to competitive pricing – your pitch cannot be one-dimensional. You must blend a simple, easy to remember tag line, a list of features and functions, competitive product comparisons, and a small measure of excitement.
The pitch should seek to make a direct connection between the customer’s needs/wants/desires and your innovation – demonstrating that your square peg fits into their square hole. This basic connection also helps reduce the time and cost of selling. When you try to pitch a round peg to an audience that has a square hole, no hammer can force it to fit.
The key to a great pitch is making sure you are saying the right thing, to the right person, at the right time in the conversation.
Is your sales pitch:
- Relevant
- Comprehensible
- Credible
- Urgent
Your pitch should have four functions. First, it must be relevant. You want the right people to care for the right reasons. You want to connect with people who directly experience the pain your solution is solving.
Second, your pitch needs to be comprehensible. You have to get people to understand that your product is the solution to their problem. You spent a lot more time thinking about the problem than your customer has, so it’s essential that you boil those months and years of careful consideration into a short, simple, and easy-to-understand message.
Third is credibility. In our media-saturated, PR-dominated, social media-influenced world, every smart person is considered a genius, every movie is epic, and every innovation is the stuff of Leonardo. Credibility is the function of managing expectations. If you promise the cosmos and only reach the moon, you have exceeded your expectations. It takes great courage, insight, and not a little confidence to be an innovator, but you must come with a humble approach or you risk promising something you cannot deliver. And if you fail to deliver for one customer, soon everyone will know about it in this media-saturated world.
The fourth function of your pitch is urgency – getting customers to act now. Innovators love their own ideas, talking about them with other people, and often mistaking interest for sales traction. Product feedback even from non-buyers can be important, but to cover your operating expenses and pay your mortgage, you need to determine whether the person in front of you is willing to buy. As an innovation sales professional, your job is to move people from prospects to customers.
This post is based on the book Selling Innovation, part of the Essential Startup Library from Amazon Press.