What’s more important than perfecting your pitch? Perfecting your question.
Forming strategic partnerships, especially early on, can be the catalyst necessary to take a new business from year 1 to year 2. However, pitching a potential business partner can be tricky, especially if they are an industry incumbent and you’re the new guy on the block. The common advice, recited so often that it’s become business strategy cliche, is to “put yourself in their shoes”. Think about the other side’s needs and formulate a pitch to match.
The problem with this approach is we often assume what the other side’s needs are instead of explicitly asking. When structuring a pitch, the difficulty lies in removing yourself from the hype of your own business. When you’re in the trenches eating, breathing, and living your business, removing yourself completely enough to gain the perspective of an outsider is near impossible. Those that do remove themselves, tend to only go half-way and formulate a pitch through the blurred vision of a self-biased strategy and unproven assumptions of the other party’s needs.
In real life, you never assume to know the exact needs of a stranger, so why make those same assumptions in business. When you want to know how to help somebody, you ask them.
i.e. In an attempt to partner with local organizations and acquire speaking engagements to lift our firm’s brand awareness, I tended to pitch the knowledge base and expertise of our consultants. This was the wrong approach. Most event organizers receive pitches like this everyday. What they really needed was someone with enough flexibility to fill the gaps in their excess time slots. Their problem wasn’t lack of expertise, it was excess capacity. I would of realized this if I had taken the time to ask.
Biz match-making is hard. Sparks only fly when two parties find independent solutions to individual problems by teaming up. If you can determine how to solve the other person’s problem first, then maybe they will agree to help you solve yours. But, you’ll never fully understand their problem until you ask.
Leave the pitch for later. Perfect your question first.
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When seeking partnerships, lose your pitch and perfect your question
What’s more important than perfecting your pitch? Perfecting your question.
Forming strategic partnerships, especially early on, can be the catalyst necessary to take a new business from year 1 to year 2. However, pitching a potential business partner can be tricky, especially if they are an industry incumbent and you’re the new guy on the block. The common advice, recited so often that it’s become business strategy cliche, is to “put yourself in their shoes”. Think about the other side’s needs and formulate a pitch to match.
The problem with this approach is we often assume what the other side’s needs are instead of explicitly asking. When structuring a pitch, the difficulty lies in removing yourself from the hype of your own business. When you’re in the trenches eating, breathing, and living your business, removing yourself completely enough to gain the perspective of an outsider is near impossible. Those that do remove themselves, tend to only go half-way and formulate a pitch through the blurred vision of a self-biased strategy and unproven assumptions of the other party’s needs.
In real life, you never assume to know the exact needs of a stranger, so why make those same assumptions in business. When you want to know how to help somebody, you ask them.
i.e. In an attempt to partner with local organizations and acquire speaking engagements to lift our firm’s brand awareness, I tended to pitch the knowledge base and expertise of our consultants. This was the wrong approach. Most event organizers receive pitches like this everyday. What they really needed was someone with enough flexibility to fill the gaps in their excess time slots. Their problem wasn’t lack of expertise, it was excess capacity. I would of realized this if I had taken the time to ask.
Biz match-making is hard. Sparks only fly when two parties find independent solutions to individual problems by teaming up. If you can determine how to solve the other person’s problem first, then maybe they will agree to help you solve yours. But, you’ll never fully understand their problem until you ask.
Leave the pitch for later. Perfect your question first.