A Start-up Journey (Damn the Know-It-Alls)

This is the 14th post in this series, click here to read the first one.

If you offer a product or service to egomaniacs… I feel for you. Both our platforms’ primary market targets are either public speakers or others who are comfortable presenting so most are egomaniacs, who by definition are “Know-it-alls”. Before you can even open your mouth, they already know everything you are about to say because, of course, they are so much smarter than you.

How much different would the world be if everybody was able to set aside their narrow, self-absorbed views and actually “listen” to someone else for just a minute? I’m guilty. Especially if you call me out-of-the-blue and want to pitch me on something that is in my wheelhouse. I am not actually listening to the whole of what you are saying, I am listening for keywords to shortcut back to my current knowledge. I want to quickly reconcile whatever you are pitching to my existing understanding, opinion and biases, so that I can save you all that explaining, get off the phone and get back to my online Mahjong game that the timer is running out on after telling you that I have to go because I have six people on hold. Within 45 seconds, our conversation has dissipated from my brain.

As I have said many times in this series, there are no new ideas, and your’s like any others are variations of existing things. Don’t get me wrong, you may have completely “re-invented” the space, but the space was already there. I think a lot of entrepreneurs get sucked into the sales pitch shortcut of saying things like “Our service is similar to Google, only better”. Oops, you just lost. You just saved me from having to listen by giving me all the context I need in your first sentence. You would have been much better off forcing me to parse keywords from your pitch as I was at least partially having to listen for them. But in an effort to get me to understand too quickly (because you know I am in a hurry to get back to that Mahjong game), you tried to take a shortcut.

Oh, its frustrating all right. You know you have a better mousetrap… not just a little better, but a lot better. But your target has been using the other mousetrap for years. You know you’re dead-in-the-water if you start by comparing similarities, you have to start by contrasting. Okay, you have a better mousetrap… what’s better about it? Great, you got a whole list of things. Of those things, which is the one thing that “most” of your target market will perk up to? The item, that while parsing your pitch for keywords, your prospect’s brain suddenly gets snagged on something you said. Their brain continues to try to tug away to get back to their understanding, but you caught their pant-leg in your chain… guess what? Now you actually have their attention.  In our case, ironically, it seems to be the ability to have full video in their webinars. I have learned to bring that up very early in my pitches now.

Next Post: Crisis Management

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