Jeff Hoffman, Priceline executive, explains how to find your first customers by targeting "second slide customers" instead of broadcasting to everyone. He walks through profiling ideal buyers, using scoring sheets and cardboard personas, and why your first two pitch slides matter more than the rest.
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Next thing, second slide customers. It's in quotes because it's not a real thing. And let me explain what that means. When I ask people all the time, I say, who is going to use your product? And they say, everybody, right?
Yeah.
So an example is we were talking about your product for group travel. And a lot of times I'll say, who's going to use it? And people will say, anybody who's traveling in a group. You do not have the marketing budget for everybody. And everybody is in fact not going to use your product early on. But here's what I see. People— let's say your product was for college students. So your early marketing is for college students. And then somebody says, you know, housewives could use this. And they say, well, it's kind of written in college words. So you broaden your message to include housewives. And then someone says, well, business travelers could use this. So you flatten your message. Quit casting a wide net. At the beginning, you need to narrowcast, not broadcast, to bring in customers. And the reason I use this analogy especially— what are they, Duke?
Yeah.
I can't— I think that's Duke. Oh well, gone. The— I think Duke was the favorite on everybody's bracket, but that didn't happen. In sports, we know what this looks like. Sports fans paint themselves in their team's colors. In football, they stand outside half naked in 20-degree weather because they love their team so much. Here's what people don't realize. Every single business has those too. Somewhere in the world is somebody that loves what you're doing so much, Let me tell you how I learned that. One day we were building a new product and launching it. My sales guy was gonna go out and give sales pitches. This was not an online pitch at the time. And he had a 20-slide PowerPoint. I said, I wanna go with you today and see the sales process. We go into this first office. We're pitching to a guy. He sits there. My sales pitch, my guy, sales guy goes through 20 slides. On all 20 slides, the guy's nodding, hmm, okay, hmm, he's taking notes. At the end, he says, I like it. I'll call you guys. We get in the car. My sales guy says, that was a good sales call. And I said, why? He said, he paid attention to all 20 slides. He nodded. He took notes. He said he liked it and he's going to call us. I didn't say anything. We drove to the next sales call. We went into the office. We were on slide 2. The woman said, and I quote, oh my God, where have you been my whole life? I'll take it. You know what my sales guy said, by the way? He said, great. I just got 18 more. I was like, dude, what part of She already bought it. Stop talking. Right? Are you missing here? He was going to give 18 more slides. We went back. She said, where have you been all my life? I've been looking all over for this. I'll take one. We went back in the car. I said, you have a new job description. And my sales guy said, what's my job description now? I said, your job is to find all the second slide customers in the world. Do you know how you find second slide customers? By the way, you know how salespeople are trained when you guys get to hiring them?
No.
They go to classes called overcoming objections. Are you kidding me? You know what my own sales guy said? He said, give me 3 more weeks with the 20-slide guy. I said, in 3 weeks you could sign 15-second slide people. Why are you trying to talk people into buying your product? Somewhere in the world are people that are going to say, where have you been all my life? I've been looking all over for one of these. If you can find none of those, do something else. Go ahead.
What were we talking about? What were your 2 first slides?
Pardon?
What were the 2 first slides?
I'll talk about that afterwards. That's a really good question. I want to make sure we get through this, then we'll just open the floor. But that's a really important question because I have a really big thing in the pitching world, and I have judged thousands of pitch competitions all over the world. In fact, the thing that we have in Bahrain next week is we have the Global Entrepreneurship Congress, and we're holding the World Startup Cup with entrepreneurs from 172 countries. That's what I'll be judging next week. So I'm really big on your first 2 slides. So we can come back to that. Anyway, your job is to find second slide customers by profiling them. When you find somebody that loves your product, start learning everything you can about them. Start asking where are they from, everything about their life experiences, their business experience. I was asking things like, what's your favorite music, right? And it turned out one of our products What's your favorite color? What colors do you hate? You wouldn't be amazed, as subtle as this is, if you were to go to our website— that was in the Ubid days— guess what color it was? It was the unanimous— it was the majority favorite color of all our customers. Guess what music played on hold? Easy listening soft rock, because most of our customers for some reason circled soft rock when we said, what's your favorite kind of music? They're like, what does this have to do with anything? The answer is everything. Profile the people that fall in love with your product. And then I actually make that into a score sheet, a 100-point score sheet. So when I'm talking to you, I'm— you think I'm casually asking questions. When in my brain I'm going, minus 6, plus 7, plus 14, she's an 83, he's a 26, I'm not even going to show you the product. I'm going to find all the 80s and 90s above. Sell to second slide customers. You can only identify them by profiling them. Write it down. You know what we do? We make these cardboard cutouts. of our customer and they're in my office. And on the back of it, people come into my office. One time it was Jane the housewife. Like, Jeff, I got an idea. And I point at the cutout and I say, tell Jane. And they're like, well, Jeff, she's like a housewife. And I was like, well, then I'm not interested. Right? Now they come in my office, I see them. They have an idea they're looking at, they look over at the cardboard thing and they just leave without saying anything to me. Because it doesn't matter what you think, it doesn't matter what I think. If Jane doesn't get it, it doesn't count. Stop being blinded by your own brilliance. I can give you a whole graveyard of people who were blinded by their own brilliance. And then the Sam Waltons of the world who said, hey farmers, tell me what you want and I'll build you that.
