By Whitney Satin
American Idol has dominated the airwaves for a number of years now. While Simon Cowell’s outrageous lambasting of singing hopefuls is a draw for some, sales reps and marketers should pay attention for another (somewhat surprising) reason: Idol’s crowdsourcing of talent through multi-round competition is a powerful way to improve the delivery of your sales pitch. Sound far-fetched? Stay tuned…
B2B marketers pay close attention to how customers consume the content they produce, often engineering a learning journey so customers gradually internalize how the supplier’s unique benefits solve major customer pain points. This journey includes the sales conversation between reps and customers, which we’ve found should follow a specific sequence that builds emotional commitment to the supplier’s vision and solution. The following three principles should serve as the backbone to any sales pitch that Marketing creates:
- Provoke: Reframe the customer’s initial assumptions or expose areas of underappreciated risk.
- Expose: Break down the underlying problems behind this previously unknown or underappreciated issue and show how they impact the customer’s business objectives.
- Resolve: Build back the customer’s confidence with an eye to how your products and services solve the exposed issue.
Of course, Marketing doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and the effectiveness of the pitch rests squarely on the shoulders of the reps who actually have to deliver it … but not all reps are created equal. The ability to deliver the same pitch while setting the appropriate tone will likely vary from rep to rep, and Marketing needs to look for ways to hardwire certain delivery cadences into the pitch.
Enter American Idol. The team at Neopost (global supplier of mailing systems, postage scales, logistics services) came up with a clever way to socialize to the broader sales force what elements of a well-executed pitch actually look like. Marketing provides reps with a standardized set of raw materials to go off and create their best version of a pitch that reframes and challenges customer assumptions. Neopost then hosts its very own “Neo-Idol”: a multi-round competition in which reps submit a short video of their very best pitch for online display.
Each rep views more than 30 peer pitches, voting on which one should progress to the following rounds (in a slight departure from American Idol format, there is no live debate/mockery based on a rep’s performance … sorry all you Simon fans out there). By exposing reps to a variety of pitches throughout the competition, Marketing “engineers” message agility since reps have now seen a number of compelling ways to present Neopost insights. And while Neo-Idol may not result in a record contract, it does produce a rep-vetted pitch that allows for customization within the guardrails of what reps themselves have expressed as the makings of a successful sales interaction.
MLC members: access a number of tools and templates to help you build a more effective sales pitch; or, learn more about Neo-Idol and other ways to deliver insight at one of our upcoming executive networking sessions.
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