Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me!
Look at me!
In the hunt for visibility, the space is overflowing with “Look at me” messages.
The irony being that what gets our attention is the exact opposite: “I see you”.
(Here’s a great example of that.)
Why didn’t you make it bolder?
Bold promises are a competitive advantage. Too often, though, we leave that advantage to the bullshitters.
Bullshitters don’t care for keeping their promises. They care for getting the deal. And so, they will make whatever promise their customers need to hear to close the deal, the bolder the better. These marketers are super creative at coming up with excuses why they couldn’t keep the promise. For them, it’s about the deal, not the promise.
And yet, it’s who you have to compete with. The good news is this: When you make bold promises, you care to actually keep them. Instead of being creative with excuses, you get creative with keeping them.
Honest marketers often struggle with making bolder promises because they are not 100% sure to be able to keep them. The problem is when you keep this 100% in your comfort zone.
So, here’s a challenge: Which promise can you make outside of your comfort zone? What would need to be true so that you can be sure to keep it?
Two very different ways to create an offer:
No. 1: Leave as many doors open as possible and make sure that there’s something in it for everyone even if that means that it’s not perfect for any specific person.
No. 2: Close as many doors as possible and make sure that it’s perfect for one specific person even if that means that it doesn’t appeal to most.
Which one do you choose?
PS: There’s no right or wrong here. It’s a choice. But it’s best to make it a conscious choice.
Some pitch situations quickly turn into a status game.
The pitching party feels high status because they feel like they’ve really nailed it and have an extraordinarily brilliant product. It’s going to change the world (which might be true).
The decision maker feels high status because they get to decide about the proposal and they want you to know that they have the final say. They are extraordinarily brilliant in identifying trends (which might be true).
Inevitably, both desires for higher status clash when one of the parties makes a claim that the other just must dispute – because, well, they know it better (which might be true).
The world, however, couldn’t care less about who’s right and who’s not. Or about who’s in charge and who’s not. They care about which ideas see the light of day. And so, the right idea in the wrong meeting room likely isn’t worth much when the parties have status as their top priority.
Change happens easier if we ban status from the meeting room.
If the other party doesn’t see it that way, you might be better off looking for a different partner.
“I’ll send you the slides.”
The fairy tale about the double use of presentation slides as handouts goes something like this: Without any extra effort from your side, the audience can review what you said plus they are reminded of you when they look at the slides.
Which is exactly the problem: when they look at it. Which, of course, is mostly never.
Handouts are rarely fun. They are cumbersome to read and often plain impractical as a reference: Who wants to sift through 30 pages of loosely structured, badly designed info that would have easily fit on one page if written down concisely?
There might be more useful handouts than your slides, don’t you think?
Apart from that one page summary, here are some random ideas that have a better chance of being looked at:
Do you manufacture tools? Why don’t you leave a couple of them so your customers can try them at home – and be reminded of you when they do (which they’ll do if they are actually useful tools).
Do you provide customized services? Why don’t you close the laptop, analyze your customer’s struggles using paper and pen, sketch possible solutions and leave the sketch with the customer (but don’t forget to take a picture so you can write an appropriate proposal).
Are you a designer or artist? Why don’t you leave your customers something that’s a pure joy to look at, let’s say a poster. You can greatly increase the chance of them actually putting it on the wall when it contains useful knowledge, e.g. “Three ways to make your message more relatable” or “The history of app design” – you get the idea.
Are you a consultant? Everything you know can be found on the internet in one way or the other. However, actually finding it is difficult. Why don’t you just assemble a reference handbook for your clients that is so well written that they find what they are looking for faster than on the internet and can understand it more easily. They are not hiring you for the knowledge but for your skills in helping them make the knowledge work for them.
If you want to be memorable with your handouts, give your customers something they will enjoy looking at or using often. Sure, that’s extra effort. And no, it’s not guaranteed that this effort will pay off.
But: nothing creates more trust than providing real value.
PS: Whatever you choose to leave as a handout, don’t forget to place your contact info on it.
Who doesn’t like a sexy slogan for their product, one that matches the big player’s most creative ads.
And so, a lot of marketing agencies are paid a lot of money to go looking for fancy and spectacular.
Only that, most of the time, the sexiest slogans are neither fancy nor spectacular. They are relevant and tangible. Using plain English.
A thousand songs in your pocket. Melts in your mouth, not in your hands. And many more just paint a picture of what the product promises in the most vivid way.
These slogans make the customers see – and then feel – how the future will look like if they buy the product. In plain English.
Empathy is a lot more valuable to find sexy slogans than a big budget. Relevance creates resonance. And resonance creates results.
It’s the least liked part of any project pitch: the risks of the project. What if these risks will lead the decision makers to shy away from approving the project?
What’s easily overlooked is that the problem is not that there is a risk. The problem is when there’s no appropriate plan to deal with the risk.
Any decent decision maker understands that business decisions come with a risk. We make decisions not because there is no risk but because we are confident to be able to deal with the risk.
Show me that you understand the risk, be transparent about what can happen at worst and make me see that you know how to deal with it.
That’s a much more convincing pitch than trying to hide the risk and hoping that nobody will recognize it.
When done right, the risk part is actually the best part where you can prove that you know what you’re doing.
In 1995, Bill Gates really struggled to make a case for the Internet:
Funny isn’t it? The CEO of the dominant software company can’t clearly say what the benefits of one of the most significant technological advances in mankind actually are.
Now, here’s a question to you: 26 years later and knowing what you know now, would you do any better? Could you answer Letterman’s question about what’s the big deal about the Internet in a TV compatible way?
As Letterman said: It’s easy to criticise something you don’t fully understand. And yet, that’s exactly the position that our customers are in. They don’t fully understand the thing we’re trying to explain to them. And one of their most pressing questions is this: So, what’s the big deal about this?
It’s easy to make fun of one of the most successful businessmen in history. But again, would you do better? Or more precisely, do you do better for the things you sell?
(PS: This fall, I’m launching the “Leaders Light the Path” masterclass which helps you do better. Get notified here.)
We tend to think about sales as a competition. About winning the pitch, making the sale, and getting the deal. And when we do get it, the deal is the end to the story, isn’t it? (A happy end for that matter!)
But what if you considered it to be the beginning of the story? The inciting incident of a story about a long-lasting relationship with a client …
Would that change the way that you approach your pitch? Your ad? Your conversation?
For many of my clients it does. Instead of using up trust to make a deal they shift to building trust to enter into a relationship. It immediately rules out hyperbole and favours the truth.
Telling a true story about the things that you care about is what builds trust. Investing the empathy to relate it to what matters to our audience is what creates resonance. And resonance has no end. There is no winning. The whole point is to keep resonating.
“No, thanks!”
That’s my answer when a salesperson asks me whether I want him to walk me through his sales deck. “No, thanks, I’ve already researched your company info before the meeting.”
Time’s precious. I don’t want to waste time with info that I can more efficiently get before a meeting. I invited that person because I already believe that there might be common ground and that it might be a fit.
So, when we meet, I want to dig deeper. I want to understand how this service or product would be just the right solution to my problem. I just don’t have time to figure that out myself after suffering through 27 slides of generic marketing messages. I don’t care for how large your building is and how many other departments you have.
John Caples, the famous copywriter, said it like this:
“The most frequent reason for unsuccessful advertising is advertisers who are so full of their own accomplishments that they forger to tell us why we should buy.”
Sales decks are often full of own accomplishments and the only thing they talk about is themselves. Yet, when you want to sell something, it’s not about you. We know that you want to sell. It’s about us. It’s about why we should buy. Why is this for us? We care for whether you understand our business. Whether you see our problem and feel our pain. And whether your medicine will work. We don’t want a lecture about how great you are but a conversation about why we are a great fit.
