People hate being sold to.
When prospects suspect that's happening, they switch off.
In this article, we explain how to use the Revolving Door Pitch to keep prospects engaged.
The Elevator Pitch
But first, let's recap on the Elevator Pitch.
This is the 30-second pitch used to articulate your company’s value proposition, which should include:
- What your company does
- What common challenges your products/services help to solve
- Which types of clients benefit the most from your products/services
- Why your company is best placed to help (and what results can your clients expect)
- How your clients typically benefit from working with you
Here’s a Discoveroo example:
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At Discoveroo, (1) we provide done-for-you sales outreach (2) to help busy B2B sales teams build pipeline faster.
(3) Many of the SaaS companies we work with (4) have seen response rates improve by 84%.
(5) What we do differently to other lead gen agencies is use highly personalised messaging to achieve an average lead rate of 4.4%.
This means our customers can spend less time prospecting and more time qualifying new deals and winning more customers.
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The idea with this kind of pitch, of course, is that you’re able to fully recite it while in an elevator with a prospect before the doors open and they can escape.
While the elevator pitch is an essential weapon to have in your arsenal, it’s often too long-winded to be reeled off in its entirety during a Discovery call, especially at the beginning.
The Revolving Door Pitch
“Talk to someone about themselves and they'll listen for hours.”
― Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
Therefore, try dissecting your Elevator Pitch into bite-size chunks, and use these nuggets to form informative questions.
We call this technique the Revolving Door Pitch.
Exactly the same principle as the Elevator Pitch, but in much less time i.e. short enough to be finished by the time the door rotates them out the other side.
The Revolving Door Pitch allows you to trickle out key parts of your value proposition while keeping it conversational and inviting your prospect to participate.
Inform them first, then invite them to talk about their situation.
Here’s an example:
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We help B2B sales leaders reduce time spent on finding new opportunities, so they can focus on what they do best - selling. How do you currently generate new leads for your business?
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Not only is this much shorter, but it circles - or revolves - the conversation back around to you.
And you can use your response to form the beginning of your next question.
For example, if they answered your initial question with something like:
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We generate leads by using a mix of content marketing and online ads. We’re quite happy with our methods, to be honest.
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You could respond with:
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Great to hear things are working for you. Many of our clients also relied entirely on inbound leads, before reaching the point of needing a more consistent flow of leads. How many leads do you need per month to build enough pipeline?
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Here's another Revolving Door Pitch example:
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We use advanced personalisation to generate 84% more responses than the average response rate for cold email. When it comes to outbound lead generation, what's the biggest challenge your team has faced?
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When to Use Both Pitches
Both of these types of pitches have their place during conversations with prospects, and one is not necessarily more important than the other.
Also, you don’t need to ambush your prospects in revolving doors or elevators, either.
These techniques can be put into practice during:
- Discovery calls
- Video meetings
- Face-to-face meetings
- Sales presentations
- At trade shows
Basically, wherever and whenever you’re speaking with a prospect.
Generate Curiosity
The idea with The Revolving Door Pitch is to engage your prospect and to keep it conversational. But the time will also come when they want to hear the full version.
After all, they need to understand if and how you can help them.
By using good questions - and by keeping your prospect talking about their business - they will naturally want to hear more from you eventually.
You've built suspense. You’ve generated their interest, and curiosity. They’ve shared their goals and challenges with you. Now they’re ready to listen.
They’ve opted in.
And that’s exactly what you want.
By Joe Ogden, founder at Discoveroo || Helping B2B SaaS companies build pipeline faster using cold email.
You can find him on LinkedIn.