Shoemoney - Skills To Pay The Bills

Posted: 15 Aug 2013 07:24 AM PDT

This is a mini series on how to keep people interested in your product or service and in each one I will break it down to our primal instincts. When pitched something everyones brain is filtering information and deciding should I kill it, eat it, or mate with it. In this series I will demonstrate how I do it for articles, video marketing, face to face marketing, and landing pages. When its done I will probably put the whole thing into a pdf and try to sell it to you or new readers in a $99 ebook who missed this series and don’t know its free on my blog.

Face To Face Pitching

While this might not be as sexy as the pervious 2 other tips it contains the most important information I can give you. So pay attention. If you attend a trade show, then you have invested a lot of money. If you get a booth and staff it ,then your in for minimum $10k and some companies have told me they have spent over $100k for their booth, staff, travel expenses, hosting a party, etc. Recently, I have re-focused my goals from getting shifted with friends to finding qualifying clients for the PAR Program. I take more staff because a lot of the time I get bogged down by fans. I’m kind of a big deal.

Multi-tasking

Most people have multitasking wrong. For instance: if my wife and I are watching Dexter and she is on her laptop shopping at Zappos – she will ask me to rewind parts MULTIPLE times. If you’re talking to someone face to face explaining your product or service and they look away then you’re done. They couldn’t give a shit what you’re doing. There is a VERY small chance you will bring them back to eat it and eventually have sex with it. Here are my tips from my last year of experience talking to people about the PAR Program. It’s been a very educational experience.

Isolation

Don’t talk to people in the middle of the conference hall. Now I am not saying snub everyone but if your attending the Affiliate Summit there are 5,000 people going. In 2 days it’s going to be hectic to locate people that you can do business with so don’t waste time.

If you can isolate them, your odds of having sex with them are MUCH higher. Much like if I make my wife turn off her computer and watch TV or turn off the TV when we are having a conversation.

So when your cruising the halls or manning a booth and you spot someone’s name badge that is qualified to be your customer… Ask them for a moment of their time and set an appointment somewhere outside of the expo hall OR set an appointment with someone else in your company to meet with them.

DO NOT START THE CONVERSATION IN THE EXPO HALL.

I can’t emphasize that point enough. The odds someone they know walks by or in my case it’s someone that is a fan and recognizes me. If either party looses eye contact with you then you’re done.

Sidenote: See my post here on tips to ditch people at a conferences. Don’t go too shallow.

Don’t go too deep (skip once, I lose you)

My biggest problem is my enthusiasm.

“Our product is so amazing that I get amped and in the beginning had companies that were totally ready to go but then pulled out because I overwhelmed them. “We are an enterprise level platform that acquires emails via popups, exit layovers, exit popups, white papers you can give away, contests or other ways you can gather emails of people interested in your product or service. Once these emails are acquired, we then do a bunch of background analytics through various api’s and our own patent pending proprietary methods. Through these methods we know where they live, their twitter, google plus, facebook, linked in, and over 150 other data points. We also know their interests, likes, and what other people say they are interested/experts in through endorsements on linked in and klout. You can also programmatically engage a user that comes into your list completely automatically tweeting to them, suggesting they like your page, facebook, and linked in friend request depending on the persons privacy settings. Once a user’s email is acquired, we put them in a sequence where a bunch of value added emails are sent completely automated to get them as a customer. Once they are a customer then we place them in another list or what we like to call “retention”. This allows you to pass a dollar value to us or an arbitrary number so you can track your true dollar value by all of the demographics we collect. For instance: if the person is on a certain social network they are worth this much to you. If they are interested in advertising they are worth this much to you. We also have full scale email reporting that gets away from the old legacy data of opens and clicks that could not be more misleading because mobile devices open everything and firewalls and antivirus software count as clicks. What we do instead is measure user engagement by ranking your users by open/click/site visit so you can easily so who is actively engaging with your company. We also are the only platform on the market that is PCI compliant being we have financial and medical clients. We also have passed the highest security ratings from 3rd party auditors and continue to engage them routinely for security compliance internally and externally. We also insure 100% email deliverability because we have thousands of accounts setup with all major providers and test emails from your sequence every 10 minutes. We also register every client with return path and pay the fees for you to whitelist your domain and IP. What do you think ?”

Now you might have made it through that because it’s written… But imagine me saying that over 5 minutes. I usually lose people around social media.

Not going enough into it

Me, “We have an email platform with social media also”.

Them? “huh”

Then every question they ask only leads to more questions.

Now I have to tell you my only experience with this has been people pitching me.

If you tell me something from a high level I am going to say, “do you have a card? Cool – thanks”. I don’t have time to play 20 questions.

So the question you’re dying to ask is, ok ShoeMoney since you know it all let’s here your pitch for the PAR Program.

Here it is:

I start by asking a series of key questions:

I have heard of your company but can you tell me what you guys do?
What makes you different than your competition here?
How did you guys start?
Do you guys have any press?
Do you guys have any case studies?
If someone were to see another person with YOUR company’s shirt on and walk up to them and say, “Hey I know that company they do X”. What would you want that person to say?
What is your company’s main source of traffic? How many unique visitors do you get per month?

First off everyone loves to talk about what they do.

Now it’s my turn

“Man I gotta tell ya I am sold. In fact as soon as we are done I am gonna order your product.

What we do for our clients is take a one time website visitor that came to your site because they were interested in your product or service and turn them into a life long customer everything for you A-Z.”

You just sold me on your product but how do you do that with a one time website visitor? That’s what we do and we do it through a series of emails that have that same conversation that you just had with me.

When are you looking to get started?”

They will obviously have questions but the questions will be very targeted and depending on what they answered before I can put them at ease.

Closer:

“Well you definitely qualify and I am really excited to dive into your company more and communicate your story to a person who just visits your site one time. Let me send you over an IO and we can get started next week.”

It’s that easy. The biggest thing you DON’T want to do is let users draw their own conclusions. Like how many people they are going to have to hire to use your service. YES we do everything for them period, but there is no reason to go into that.

Any question that leads to that you can simply talk about case studies and other clients in their vertical and how successful they are with it and you’re happy to provide them with references and case studies (we have a lot of these).

Well that is my experience for this series on how to get users to eat, kill, or have sex with your product. Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think.

This is Part 3 in the series. You can see the first 2 parts here:

http://www.shoemoney.com/2013/08/05/eat-it-kill-it-or-have-sex-with-it