Put your pitch-er-ee on the spot
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This past Thursday I was invited to go to the Northeastern Entrepreneurship Club's Demo Day. At the event, over a dozen companies demoed their products and services to a crowd of hundreds of people. It was an awesome night, and I think serves as a great model for entrepreneurship and youth in the city of Boston. The gang at NEU have done a tremendous job over the past few years and everyone in the city of Boston takes notice. Great work guys. WOO WOOOO!
Now. I'm gonna throw some old knowledge at you that I'm sure you've heard a thousand times: it is important to pitch, and repitch, and repitch again in order to get better and better at delivering your value prop to others.
However, if you're having trouble figuring out what your value prop is in the mind's of your customers, try this: The next time that you pitch your company to someone, tell them before you start pitching that after you have finished speaking, you'd like them to repeat back to YOU the pitch you just told them.
I'll tell you what happens (or at least what I've seen happen).
By putting someone on the spot and asking them to pitch what you said back to you, you immediately grasp your viewers' attention like you've never seen before. It's like giving someone a test. It immediately grabs the other person's attention. They zone everything else out.
Now, say your pitch, and ask for them to say the pitch back. And get ready to take real good notes.
Almost always the pitch will be different than what you said. However, what is interesting (and what you should most certainly write down) are the SPECIFIC WORDS that the person chooses to repeat and emphasize back to you over and over again.
If it takes YOU (the entrepreneur) two sentences to deliver your pitch, it will likely take the person you are pitching four sentences or more. Pay close attention to the words that are repeated as they try to state the pitch back to you. Remember, you've said your pitch dozens if not hundreds of times, and your listener hasn't. Encourage them to keep going. Write their repeated words down. And thank them.
Run this exercise with a number of different people.
From what I've found, the words that consistently resonate with your customer base are the ones that are repeated more often than the words that are ignored. These are the words that resonate most with your customers. You should encourage the use of these words, and eliminate words that confuse people / are too "big" / are hard to pronounce / or are too scientific.
I've seen brave students get up in front of crowds of people and pitch their ideas. I've seen some do their homework, and I've seen some get slaughtered. And as someone who has done their homework before and also has been slaughtered before, I'm here to tell you it aint no thanggg. You learn from each pitch, and you move on. Get creative with new ways to learn from others when pitching so that you can get to your core value prop. If nothing else, some of the pitches you hear back will make you laugh!
My name is Ryan Durkin. I write so that I will never forget where I came from and what I stand for. I hope that this will motivate young people to realize their potential and become more productive than they ever imagined. That would make me truly happy.
