Pitching Ideas

I have a confession to make… I don’t like the title of this post… it’s not my title, but one that all the contributors to this site have to write a post on. It’s not the word ‘idea’, but the word ‘pitching’ that make be squirm… because for me it sums up the dark side of selling… rolling up and doing a ‘pitch’. For me it has all the wrong connotations.

Sales Definition of the word ‘pitch’ – an attempt to persuade somebody to accept or buy something… unwanted telephone sales pitches at inconvenient times.

However, if I take the ‘pitching ideas’ to mean focusing your efforts and resources on proactively helping the customer solve their business issues then this has some legs. It’s the word proactive that I like – means you will be identifying potential issues and offering help maybe before the customer has had the opportunity to identify the issue themselves. You are therefore at the beginning of the customer’s buying process and you will be best placed to influence the decision making process. All well and good, but how should one approach the subject?

If we think of the idea as a solution then as we all know… we need to identify the problem. It was as Bertrand Russell, that English Logician & Philosopher, once said…

“The greatest challenge to any thinker is stating the problem in a way that will allow a solution.”

and just to add another view I’ll quote G K Chesterton the Novelist & Poet who also said…

“It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It’s that they can’t see the problem.”

Therefore we need to help our customer explore their need. We need to get them to understand they have a problem and that we have a solution and for me there is no better way of doing this then using the Business Imperative. I wrote about this in a previous post – Motivating the Buyer – and suggest you have a quick gander at that post because it has everything you need for pitching your idea… oops… I mean presenting your solution to a problem that they don’t yet know they had!

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