Just when you thought it was safe to come out, I decide to write another blog post. So far we have:

1. Thought of an idea

2. Validated the idea

All with just a pen, paper and a bowl of cereal. We now need to take the next step, and this is fine tuning the idea, really boiling it down to its basic pitch. Some people call this the “Elevator Pitch.” I however feel this is wrong, mainly because I tend not to travel in elevators, but also I tend not to sell in an elevator :-). Seriously, I think you need to view it a little differently.

Imagine you were given a budget of £1 million to go and sell your product/service. The limitation was that you had to spend all this money on sponsoring football shorts, or on billboards. How would you tell the world what you do? This is what you need to create now, and that is why I call it a marketing pitch. You need to be able to sell your idea, explain your idea and get people all hot and excited, simply by using one to two lines.

Now many of you will say “Impossible, can’t be done,” my idea is so technical, its needs explaining. The sad truth my friend is, if it is that complicated, you will only get a handful of sales, which require 3 hour 1-2-1 meetings. Even those will be limited, since a cold call, or an email, which cannot explain what you do in a few sentences, will usually lose the person at the other end.

So if your idea is really going to get you that Ferrari, you need to create the “Marketing Pitch”….let us begin.
1. Write down everything your service does. Let’s imagine you are selling a collaboration project (a recent project which came across my radar)
a) Helps you store
b) Helps you work quicker
c) Share documents
d) Share and keep track of communication
Etc etc
You get the idea, everything it does, how it helps, everything.

2. Now organise all of this into a paragraph of text. Write long “story” like flowing sentences, just ensure that you have covered everything that you do.
Note: Another way of doing this is to record what you say to other people when you meet them

3. Get down the pub, have a drink, come back to this paper in 24 hrs. Do NOT skip this step, not because going to the pub is essential, BUT because the delay is.

4. You will notice, that some of the lines no longer make sense, or are not needed. If you can’t see this, show it to someone else. Ask them to cross out the lines which mean nothing.

5. By now you should be left with a distilled version of what you started with. Now get a dictionary and a thesaurus. Start to replace words, or collections of words. Remove those extra words e.g replace “However, we now offer” and change to “We offer”. Replace “More recently” with “Recently”. You know we all like to pad our English, change it. (I am sure I can write this blog post in 3 lines if I tried :-)). If you are no good at this, find someone good at English to do it.

6. Now your description should be much tighter. What we need to do now is to further distill one or two key ideas. To do this, you simply set yourself a boundary. Ask yourself “What if I could only bring to market two things, or even one, which one would I pick?”
So thinking about collaboration, would it be storage, or would it be “working together on documents in realtime.” Do you need to be different? Or is your service just better than others, if so why? This part is all about your entire business idea. Are you unique, is it groundbreaking, or just another me too, but with a difference. Scratch out the lines which do not fit anymore.

7. At long last you should be down to 1-2 sentences. This is your marketing pitch…almost. Put back on the shelf, down the pub again you go. This time for 48 hrs (No you do not need to spend all that time in the pub)

8. Come back, highlight in your sentence three key words, power words, something which tell you what you do. Do you have more than three, if so, pick the top three, the others need to go. Reword the sentence. You are home. It’s done.

9. “ABC.com allows you to…….”

Of course you can change the wording to suit your audience.
Now write this down, and memorise it. You are ready to go and validate this marketing pitch. Down the pub you go, find a couple of new people, or head off to the nearest tech meetup, pitch the line. If 90% of them get it, you can sit back and congratulate yourself, if not, get back to the text, and reiterate the entire process.

All this and still no spend, no website, no development, nothing.
Please note the marketing pitch has nothing to do with go-to market plans. This is still about validating your idea. Although, whilst writing it down, you will have had to think a little more about your customers, who they are, how they will buy.

You can now write down what you do on the back of a business card, hand it to people….simply the best marketing tool there is. Next step Building It….

P.S With all the references about going down the pub, I don’t want people to assume that you need to be intoxicated to build a great business (I am sure some may agree to this)