Your polished elevator pitch might be killing deals. A VP of Customer Experience dismissed a vendor for being too generalist, even though they solved her specific problem. Lead with a narrow problem statement instead, then discover fit before mentioning your platform.
Everyone in sales is familiar with the elevator pitch. The problem is your marketing approved elevator pitch is literally losing you deals. I was on a call a while ago with a grade AE and a contact that perfectly fit our icp. They were the VP of Customer experience for a company selling customer experience software. The call was going great until they asked us what we'd do. The rep went into what we called our experience management pitch. The marketing approved board approved persuasive, high level overview that paints an incredible picture of how we could help tie together customer, product, brand and employee experience all together. Marketing would have cried how beautiful it was because the pitch was perfect. Unfortunately, the response was not. The guy goes, yeah, you know what? I'm only focused right now on customer experience. And it sounds like that's just one of the four things you do. I don't think this is the right fit. Now, we tried to salvage the call, but we failed because once a buyer makes that initial decision, it's really difficult to overcome. The buyer actually had a specific problem tied to customer experience that we could have solved. But our pitch made him think we were a generalist solution and wouldn't have had the focus needed to solve his problem. Here's how we should have answered his what do you do? Question. We should have said, we help VPs of CEX reduce customer churn by understanding every key experience they provide their customers. Now we'd love to better understand how you're doing that today and gone into deeper discovery. I can imagine some of my former executive team just yelling at me right now. But Kyle, our ability to do CX ex PXS in one platform is the massive differentiator. That's what you should pitch. The problem is, nobody cares about your differentiators until they think you can actually solve a problem that they care about. Had we nailed their problem, we then could have slammed the deal home with our valuable differentiator. But by leading with the platform story, we failed to answer the buyer's most important question. How can you specifically help me? In sales, you're best off to forget the pitch and solve a problem. Then your buyer will actually care about that beautiful marketing message that you're learning. Forget the pitch. Solve a problem.
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