The Perfect Pitch: The Right Questions

You haven’t really tested your product until you try to sell it. You can be the most visionary product manager in the world, yet you still wouldn’t know if the customer will like it or not. Selling the product is the first real validation you get from your customer, anything less is just noise.

To sell a product, in an ideal world, you should have two things.

• Product-Market fit
• The right sales pitch

So, let’s assume together that you have a good product, you still can screw things up by doing a lousy job in your sales pitch.

To build the perfect pitch, you will need to

• Understand the buyer
• Build the story

In this article, I will focus on understanding your buyer, and I will leave building the pitch story to the next article

First you need to choose the buyers’ group you will target with this campaign. You can check my article Choosing Your First Customer.

Once you do, it’s time to build the business case

Understand the buyer

This is the most important part in the sales process yet surprisingly the most underrated. You need to understand the business process that is linked to your product.

The Pareto principle

Also known as the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity which states that, for many events, about 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes

You don’t need to be a business process consultant to understand business case nor I expect you to spend months in research. It’s more of a one week type of task. You want to follow the 80/20 rule where you get the 80% of the results using only 20% of your effort.

By using the right resources and focusing your effort to the right areas, you will be able to create a solution offering that will capture the customer interest and you will be able to brand yourself as an industry expert

“A wise man’s question contains half the answer”

Solomon Ibn Gabirol

Ask the right questions

The easiest way to understand the industry is by finding an insider or an expert in the field, and prepare a list of questions to ask them. Always remember that most of the time they will not be able to tell you how to approach the customer or what is the optimal solution, yet they will be able to give you a lot of information about the industry details. Your question list shouldn’t be complicated. Below is the questions list I use to prepare my slaes pitch

• Who are the main actors in this business case?
• What do you call each actor?
• Is there any specific jargon used in this business case?
• What are the main challenges?
• What is the hardest part in the business process? The longest part? The part with the most human errors?
• What is the cost of the process?
• What is the cost of not acting/not automating the process?
• What is the cost of human errors for this process?
• Who are the involved departments?
• Who does initiate the process?
• Are there any standard forms?
• Who is the real owner of the process?
• What is the success criteria? What is the failure criteria?
• What are the KPIs attached to this process?
• What are the main systems that I need to integrate with if any?
• How does this process impact revenue? Customer satisfaction? Growth? Cost? Retention? Churn?
• Are there any unofficial rules I should consider? Resistance from employees? Conflict between departments? Undesirable exposure or transparency?

After you answer these questions, you will have all the needed information to build your story around the product for this specific buyer which I will discuss with you in the following article