Try selling Illumineto Spark in 30 seconds
As I continue to tell friends and acquaintances about Spark, I keep hearing that “wow, it must sell itself — it has everything that a sales professional needs and wants.”
Yeaaa, rigghhhttttt. :)
I have been lucky to have sold “singular” products throughout my life — from the Nintendo Entertainment System (“It plays games!”) to USB Flash Drives (“It stores data!”).
And now my “luck” has run out (just kidding) — but, it has really caused me some difficulties in pitching our product. As a sales person, it is easy — just ask the buyer what their problem is and then tailor the answer to address their problem (and leave out all the other great stuff that the product does until later (or never)).
As a marketer speaking to a media contact, it is still “selling”, but, it requires a different tact.
(WOW — Yes, I may be saying for the first time in my career that marketing may be a bit more difficult than sales when dealing with this.)
If your lucky when dealing with someone in the media, they will have tried, checked-out, or at least read a press release. That’s if your lucky.
Most of the time, the blogger or writer or whomever will say “Tell me everything about your product”, and of course, they expect it to be in 30 seconds or less.
Of course, as a marketer, we had better have our different length elevator pitches ready, and of course, we have to start with our 30 second pitch first. Here’s Illumineto’s:
Illumineto, Inc. is a sales engagement platform provider which helps sales professionals quickly find, package and personalize the delivery of information most relevant to a prospect’s specific buying need. With Illumineto, buying cycles are reduced, aiding in pipeline acceleration and greater sales rep effectiveness. The Company’s flagship product, Illumineto Spark, is used daily by sales reps worldwide throughout their sales process, from prospecting to engaging existing deals. Illumineto Spark is a critical complement to any CRM system and integrates with all leading cloud storage and video services used by sales and marketing teams to store their sales enablement assets.
Of course, what you just read isn’t what we exactly say to an editor, but, pretty dang close.
Now think about your use of Spark — I bet if I took a survey of the 100+ readers of this post, there would be a split among all of you — with probably 30% of you saying that the “discovery of information” was important, another 30% saying that the real-time feedback was most important, another 30% saying how content can be laid out and used to engage a prospect, with the last 10% saying that the elimination of having to enter data into a CRM system being most important.
And that “survey”, for a sales person, is the simple question of asking “what is your problem?”
In marketing and when dealing with the media, we don’t have the luxury of doing a survey or asking that question— all we can do is research what the writer wrote about before and what they say they have an interest in and then “pitch” what we think they want to hear. (Which, if you’ve read previous posts of ours, that’s how to fail at selling.)
Unfortunately, we can’t ask what their #1 problem is and then build a page for them to address that problem. We have to hope, within 30 seconds, that our writer or blogger will find our offering interesting and ask questions.
There is no magical answer to pitch someone in the media — I just wanted to share with you that there may be “one time” where marketing may have it a little bit tougher then sales.
If you want to try out the product and then come with a way that you would pitch Illumineto Spark, go here. (Even the infamous Nick Caruso would have some difficulty doing this.)
