How a product pitch can help your team align on product vision
At clever.gy we have been onboarding new people every week for the past month. We believe that having a strong product culture at the company is key to our success. To accomplish this, we empower every employee at the company to become a potential clever.gy ambassador with family or friends. At the end of the day, you never know when you are going to meet your next customer, partner, or investor. How do we accomplish that? By practicing a product pitch.
Every new employee at clever.gy pitches the product to the rest of the team at the end of their first month on the company to ensure that they fully understand what problem we are trying to solve, where are we heading and what do we want to build.
A product pitch is a short presentation explaining how your product solves customers’ problems and why someone should buy/invest in it. It’s also knowns as an “elevator pitch” because it should fit in an elevator ride. A product pitch has to be aspirational and to the point. It needs to catch the audience’s attention and have a clearly defined call to action. If it is properly conducted, anyone can become a potential investor or your next customer.
A good pitch can be structured in four different parts:
- Problem
- Vision
- Solution
- Call to action
Focus on the problem
⛔️ No one wants to hear about your new app
There are more than 2.11 million apps in the App Store and a lot of buzz about the next Spotify or Netflix. If you want to draw the audience’s attention don’t start with your app. Going over the features, the screens, and the awesome algorithms that you are developing are not going to get you there.
If you want people to become invested in your product, first you need their buy-in on the problem that you are trying to solve.
You need to clearly state the problem that you are trying to solve.
Providing numbers, telling personal stories, or even joking about the pains of the problem are great ways to engage your audience with the product. Everyone has problems but if you state them in simple terms the audience will be more likely to become engaged for the rest of the presentation.
As a company, we need to have a clear vision of the problem that we are trying to solve. Marketing, sales, product design, engineering, HR, … The whole team needs to understand why we are coming to the office every day. There is a great video from Ash Maurya about how great companies focus on problems instead of solutions.
Defining and communicating a painful problem helps us connect with the audience
State the vision clearly
You’ve done it, you can see it on their faces. They are raging! Oh, that problem! Curse that problem! Why did you even mention it? You are now on the same page, the problem is clear and they want it to be solved. It’s time to pull out the big guns. Sell them a world where the problem is gone. All the pain is substituted by an amazing experience. A world so incredible that could fulfill their wildest dreams.
🌈 The vision shouldn’t contain the company or the product on it. It’s a promise of a better world.
There is a lot of controversy regarding a company’s vision and mission. When stating the vision in the pitch forget about the company’s wording and focus on the bigger cause. When I speak about this topic, I like to refer to this video of Simon Sinek where he defines the concept of Just cause. Helping your potential customer relate to this just cause will increase their level of empathy for the product.
😍 Telling an inspiring vision will help you sell your product in the next phase of the pitch
Explain how the vision is full-filled with the product
This is the tricky part, the customer has been through a rollercoaster of emotions, and you want to leave them wanting more. Remember, no one wants to hear about your new app unless it gets rid of that nasty problem. It’s important to be pragmatic in this part. Don’t spend a lot of time on the features and services that your product provides, just show how your product leads to the vision previously sold. Unless the audience is techie, they won’t care about your microservices architecture, your front-end stack, or the blockchain you are running your product on. All they need to know is what it does and how to get it.
📢 Structuring the functionality of the product in the same way that you structure the problem, will help your audience understand your product benefits faster
Include one call to action
The elevator stops and the person smiles back — Thank you for the story — leaning towards the exit of the elevator. Your one last chance.
If they:
- Don’t relate to the pain points you described.
- Don’t care for the vision you stated.
- Don’t think the product is a good idea.
It’s ok, you gave it a shot, took your chances and you missed. It is not a big deal!
But if at the end of the ride they:
- Engaged with the problem.
- Were inspired by the vision.
- And wanted to buy the product.
It would be horrible if you let them go without the opportunity to invest in it.
‼️ That’s why the call to action is the most important part of the pitch
As an ambassador of the company, what goal do you want to achieve when the elevator reaches the top? Is it his contact information to send a follow-up email? Do you want feedback? Do you want a new user to download the app?
Think about what you want to achieve with the conversation.
💡 A well-defined call to action will turn an informal conversation into meaningful opportunities
Now let’s pitch why employees should pitch the product pitch to the team
Running out of cash is the number one problem that startups face today. It is often the case that money is allocated to noncritical activities. Day-to-day decisions can make the company drift away from priorities and over time lead to bankruptcy.
What if the whole team could look out for the company’s best interests? Cutting expenses shouldn’t be the answer, but to improve the product and sell it. Imagine the marketing team generating fewer but more qualified leads, product design delivering fewer items for developers to develop, and developers solving mainstream problems instead of edge cases. And most importantly, picture your whole team validating ideas and selling through family and friends. That would be the dream.
By ensuring that every member of the company has a good grip on what problems the product tackles and the company’s goals, their daily decisions will be more aligned across teams. Although preparing a good product pitch takes valuable time from the first days of work, it pays off in a long-term vision.
So what are you waiting for? Start making your team pitch your product to ensure you meet your next challenge!
You can read more about how we create a healthy product culture at clever.gy in our Monthly log book.
