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Peeve of the Week: Off Key Sales Pitches

March 6, 2009 Just recently, I received two separate “pitch” emails within days of each other.  In one, the sender wanted me to join a group of industry analysts based in Europe and in the other, a man wanted me to use his marketing company to help improve my Google ranking.  It was clear that they had both done some research.  They knew enough about my background and me to incorporate a few of the details into their spiels.  No doubt that was part of their strategy to get my attention, and it worked.  I read their messages, which is a respectable feat these days by itself considering the onslaught of email, junk and otherwise, that drops into our inboxes everyday.  But just a few sentences into it, they blew it.  Why?  Because they lost their credibility.  How?

Well, in the first example the woman wrote a perfectly lovely email, selling me on all of the reasons why I should consider signing up with her organization.  She said that she’d noticed my years in business, blah, blah, blah… but then, and I kid you not, she penned, “In your role as the former president of Chanel…” What!?  Now, ‘tis true that I worked for Chanel, but as an entry-level sales manager covering the northeast territory – a far cry from running a global multi-billion dollar company.  There was no need to go any further.  That one comment made her look like a complete idiot.  Any iota of credibility that she might have had was lost in a nanosecond. For what it’s worth, the CEO’s of Chanel are famous.  That shouldn’t have been too hard to miss.

Then I had a guy write to me suggesting that we (meaning my company) needed help because we “ranked so low” on Google.   But of course, naturally, he assumed that we’d be as appalled as he to learn that we “placed” at the top of page 26.  Apparently, he had searched “business branding” and figured we’d act immediately on our dismal performance results.  Meanwhile, my partner and I couldn’t believe we ranked that high.  We were thrilled. OK, truthfully?   We were shocked.  Under “business branding?”  To be one page away from the top 25? That’s a huge category with companies in it who do only that.  We don’t.  There had to be hundreds of thousands of results.  So, we were actually feeling kind of good about it. Not at all unhappy, perhaps even a little impressed.  Just a smidge. 

But then this man went on to say that we may as well not rank at all if we don’t come in first, second or third.  He claimed to be the best in "Search Engine Optimization," with all the tricks one needs up his sleeve to move anyone to the proverbial “front of the line.”  Or as he put it, “I have a very simple way to prove that what I do works…Nothing beats seeing the results with your own eyes.” So we thought, “Fair enough.  Why not?  Good point.  Let’s Google him.”  There’s always room for improvement and our thinking was that if we were doing as well as we were (in our own minds) without doing anything, we could make real progress if we did something.  After all, our tagline is “Setting Potential to Flight.”   Why settle for less than your full potential, right?

So we pulled his name, his keywords and his company from his correspondence and we googled, googled, googled.  But, this guy was nowhere to be found.  He didn’t register on page 1, 2, 3 or 5 – 10 for that matter.  Hmmmm.  The sale was spontaneously dead. 

Call me crazy, but I think you should 1) try to know what you are talking about and 2) be able to show that you can do for yourself what you are telling prospective customers you can do for them.  

Posted by Donna Flagg on March 6, 2009 | Comments (0)