Pauline E. Ranger What customers say about you is as essential as their passion when they recommend your business to friends and colleagues.
Customers must quickly grasp your business’s “idea” or concept. It is infectious if people can quickly get your company’s idea and its benefits.
As the author Seth Godin describes, “ideaviruses” can spread quickly, just like biological viruses.
The “elevator speech” is a concept that’s also called the “elevator pitch.” It’s what you’d say to a stranger in the elevator about your (or another’s) value proposition, which roughly corresponds to the attention span of most potential customers.
Your customers need to know your elevator pitch at least as well as you do.
How well does your company pitch work? When you talk about your company, do people look at you with a smile or nod in agreement? Or are they confused and leave quickly after hearing what you say?
ABC Technology Services asked us for help acquiring new clients. The company executives explained that “ABC provides network and systems management services that help companies maximize the performance and availability of their network infrastructures.”
This was a description that made you squirm. How tuning their pitch altered the game.
We first interviewed ten of their clients. We asked them to tell us what they liked best about ABC and how they’d describe ABC to their friends or colleagues. Understanding what customers say in their own words is crucial to understanding how they spread the word.
In the interviews, it became clear that ABC customers were acquired at times of crisis. Computer systems were slow, emails malfunctioned, and employees experienced frequent computer crashes. ABC quickly fixed these problems and installed monitoring software so these issues would be a thing of the past.
We then reframed ABC’s pitch using the words and experiences of their clients to emphasize the pain experienced by potential customers. We added a more casual tone since ABC’s primary source of leads came from word-of-mouth.
We changed our elevator pitch from “network management” to “You know when you’re at work and you’re pulling out your hair because of computer issues? You have a slow system, you can’t send email or receive it or you need to restart your computer frequently? We fix these problems for business.”
Pain is a simple word and context that most prospects can identify with.
ABC executives tested out their new pitch during a networking event. There was a lot of head nodding. As we witnessed at the event, a failing computer system can be easily understood as an “ideavirus.”
ABC received six leads as a result of that event.
The ideavirus spread rapidly as prospect after prospect sought out the ABC leader after hearing of them from another source. ABC is overwhelmed with work today.
How can you generate an ideavirus to help your business? Follow these steps to create an ideavirus for your business:
