I’ve watched thousands of sales people over the past 30 years working hard to “tell their story”. That is typically referred to as the Elevator Pitch. It really troubles me at times to see how hard they work on creating that ‘perfect’ 30-second pitch on how great they are, how great their products or services are, how great their company is and on and on.
Honestly, I have to confess that that was me several years ago. We would sit around the boardroom and work on the next greatest elevator pitch, arming our sales people and ourselves, with the “latest and best version”.
So what’s the problem with this?
When you step back and understand that every company is trying to claim that they are the best, have the best products, service, 24/7 support, are #1 and on and on, they all tend to sound the same. In other words, they are commoditizing their value proposition because they sound the same as every other company they compete against.
These attempts to claim credibility often fall on deaf ears. That’s because in a competitive marketplace, everyone claims to be a leader and your competitors will all claim to be better than you! Rather than trying to “claim” credibility, an innovative approach is to “earn” Credibility. If we re-engineer your elevator pitch using a positioning strategy, this will give you a significant competitive advantage and exponentially increase the number of opportunities you'll have to provide valuable solutions.
The traditional elevator pitch puts sellers in an extremely weak position. If you sound the same as everyone else, then you will forfeit your competitive position in the marketplace.
I’ll have more for you on our next blog about how you can earn Credibility which differentiates you from your competition and puts you in a much stronger competitive position.
