Pitch Perfect
The year 2007 witnessed one of the best sales pitches of all time. It was an era in which smartphones were smart, but not glamorous. On January 7, when Steve Jobs strode on to the main platform at the Moscone Center in San Francisco, it all changed.
The product he was unveiling to the world had many bells and whistles. But it also had its own set of problems. Jobs was faced with a tight-rope walk over uncharted waters. He had to make something complicated sound uncomplicated. He had to bring about a perception of mass palatability for a product that was pretty much in the Innovator category of technology adoption. And he had to do all of this inside an hour and a half.
Knowledgeable. Humorous. Avuncular. Charismatic. Entertaining. Jobs was all of that — and more — as he turned the whole sales pitch into a movie of sorts, one that made an enthralled, enraptured audience laugh 51 times. Half a year before officially hitting retail-outlet shelves, the iPhone was as sold as sold can get.
From a sales perspective, Jobs had taken just 81 minutes to showcase the true power that influence holds on customers, when it’s done right.
Electric Sell
It’s not like Jobs pulled out a dozen real rabbits out of a wide-brimmed hat that day to convince the world that the iPhone was a true game-changer. What he did, though, was something that pretty much serves as the foundation for sales-based influence.
A few minutes into the keynote, Jobs uses an XY diagram to split competitor smartphones into three categories:
1) Not So Smart
2) Hard To Use
3) Not So Smart And Hard To Use
It obviously tickled the audience’s collective funny-bone. But Jobs’ main intention behind doing this was on these lines:
1) Present his version of the market’s status quo: Though the likes of Treo, Moto Q, and E62 were technologically advanced for those days, Jobs wanted his audience to perceive that each of these phones had their own disadvantages. He shows the market’s status quo as one that has left customers at a disadvantage.
2) Position iPhone as the sole product that can change said status quo: Jobs wastes no time in introducing the iPhone, and goes on to show that it is both Smart and Easy To Use. He wanted to push forward the message that the iPhone was the only product that was the best of both worlds.
3) Emphasise on iPhone’s positioning as status-quo-breaker: After introducing that two-axis diagram, Jobs keeps bringing up the drawbacks of his competition, and then elaborates on how the iPhone has the upper hand on that front.
Human nature is wired to reflexively lean towards loss aversion. Most of us will work twice as hard to not lose something rather than put in half of the same effort to gain something.
Also, while doing sales pitches, most of us look at a build-up that stresses on our past successes as a logical beginning.
What Jobs did was understand these inherent traits, and then marry them together for making a compelling case for an already-compelling product. He made sure that his customers knew that the market’s status quo was that of them being at a loss. Then without wasting time, he introduced the iPhone as the logical step forward; an aspect he kept reinforcing throughout the keynote speech.
A good understanding of basic human tendencies are the first step towards building sales approaches that can have the right kind of influence on customers.
The Personal Persona
Focussed case studies of great sales pitches are a good place to start to get an idea of the nitty-gritty of influencing customers. But it’s important to realise that at the end of the day, human interactions are the building blocks for any sales deal.
Keeping that in mind, for any aspiring salesperson, the emotional and cognitive attributes listed below are key to having a good influence on customers:
1) Listening skills.
2) Interpersonal aptitude.
3) Product understanding.
4) Humility.
5) Inquisitiveness.
6) Empathy.
7) Honesty.
8) Emotional Intelligence.
9) Optimism.
10) Brevity.
While they do contribute to the process in varying degrees, these traits do not make up an exhaustive trait-list for customer influence.
Dale Carnegie, though, does have enough and more dedicated resources for you to dive deep into this topic.
At the end of the day, as the educator had summed up pretty succinctly a long time ago: “Success in dealing with people depends on a sympathetic grasp of the other person’s viewpoint”.