How to pitch your product

Product managers have to be on the road with the sales team and try to understand the market better.

Any amount of market research is not sufficient to help understand what should the product shape up like.

In case you have observed, We need two kinds of pitches to make - they need to be made on a specific scenario - some times to the same contact at the different times.

Scenario 1:  You want the prospect to start listening to you. The prospect has not yet connected with you.

This scenario is the most common when we do cold calling or when we meet people in conferences / fairs.

The prospect has no idea who you are or what problem you are trying to solve.

In this case, you need to have the following information

• What is his/her dominant problem?
• What figures do we have to state it more quantitatively?

To put it in better perspective, The dominant problem of a typical retailer that we meet is as follows:

• I am not sure what kind of stock is left with me at the end of the month and not sure what is the sales trend. If I know this, I could procure in a better way and handle my inventory in a better way
• If the retailer has known what inventory he has in a monthly fashion, he could push the higher valued inventory within 3-4 months of procurement. Since he is not able to do this, he is losing on approximately 5% of his original planed margin.

This tells a story and lets him connect to the product immediately.

Scenario 2: You have 2 minutes to explain , based on which you can get into a detailed conversation.

Your 2 minutes starts when the prospect has connected with you and wants to know more. However, he is not sure what kind of product you are trying to sell and before he can explain what his real problem is , he wants to hear you out.

It is better to go for a simple and effective pitch , probably structured as below. Helps a lot.

For [Target Customer]
who has [Customer Need]
[Product name] is a [market category]
That [one key benefit]
unlike [Competition], the product [unique differentiator]

While there could be more effective ways in which you could pitch your product, I would suggest that product managers leave them to the sales team. They are far more effective and have more rabbit in their sleeve than we can even think of.

This should be effective enough and is a definite thing for a product manager.