During this year’s Future Insights Live conference, a few hand-selected attendees had the opportunity to pitch their mobile or web app to a panel of judges that included, among others, Jason Calacanis, angel investor and founder of the video learning site Mahalo.com, and Jason Nazar, founder of the document resource site, DocStoc.com. After hearing the pitches, the panel asked each presenter questions in order to better understand the apps and the company’s business models.
Through their questions and commentary, they provided the following tips on how to successfully pitch a business and/or product. Although the guidance was for pitching to investors, these same tips apply when speaking to, or marketing to, your customer base.
- During development and pitching, don’t try to be all things to all people. You’ll end up diluting the value or benefit of your product and fail to meaningfully connecting to anyone.
- Describe your product or service in a way that presents a solution to a problem or existing need; don’t simply read off a list of features. By focusing on the core audience and speaking to their main need (see tip #1 above), you’ll be able to frame your product or service in a way that makes it compelling to that audience. That, in turn, does better at motivating action (to buy, to share, etc.)
- Use real-life or persona-based examples to tell your product’s or service’s story. Give it context so that it is relatable; people will be able to better visualize your product or service as something that fills their need; solves their problem; as something that can be easily integrated into their life.
- Use your authentic voice when you are explaining your product or service; show that you have passion/enthusiasm for what you’ve developed. Face it, no matter how exciting a thing is, if it’s presented in a neutral–what I really mean is boring–way, not a lot of people are going to jump out of their seats to support it. If you can’t even get animated about what you’ve developed, how can you expect others to be excited about it?
- Listen to the questions you are asked (with deep concentration); then provide a specific, concise answer. You will lose people’s attention fast if you can’t deliver the information they expect or if you take them down a random path they did not anticipate.
- Plan to iterate and develop based on user needs; don’t make changes based on emotion or assumptions. You may LOVE feature XYZ of your product or service and think that it’s exactly what people need (even though they may not realize it yet). But, if you don’t pay attention to what the market is telling you, you may lose momentum and be passed up by someone else that knows how to listen better than you.
Take a look at your business and marketing processes to date. How can you improve on communicating the purpose and value of your business, product, or service to targeted audiences? Based on your own experience, do you have additional tips to offer?
Email marketers all over the world are pulling their hair out A/B testing subject lines & images within email versions to try to increase open rates & CTR but 95% of them aren’t thinking a more basic element of marketing: Coordination. I just received this email from a company that I evaluated last year, and because I get 100+ emails daily, I normally would have scanned the email and moved on to the next marketing email in my inbox, but something resonated with me about this email. I suddenly realized that I received a mailed flyer yesterday from the same company, and it was still hanging around on my desk. I took the time to both look through the direct mail piece which had an intriguing gift card offer, and the complementary email with the same imagery and branding, and realized that I was thinking very critically about the value of their software. In other words, the email worked!
