Crunched Blog

With our revolutionary online sales pitch automation platform CrunchConnect kicking some serious butt now, we are in full swing sales and customer on-boarding mode ourselves here at SalesCrunch. In fact, as we started ramping several new sales teams onto the platform every day, we have been debating how much training and hand-holding of our customers is enough to guarantee their success on our platform.   Well, our Customer Success Manager Gene Plotkin found an incredibly poignant article on the subject by Malcolm Gladwell.  I think Gene’s email to me and the excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell’s article that he included say it all, so here you go:

“Sean,

I was reading Malcolm Gladwell’s article The Pitchman on the train this morning. It got me thinking of our conversation about (customer) engagement and the importance of a great on boarding (for CrunchConnect).  Especially the fact that in order to convince someone to change the way they do things (their sales process) you must explain how to use the platform multiple times. The passages below is a must read!

 ”Chop-O-Matic was the star of the show. It was, after all, an innovation. It represented a different way of dicing onions and chopping liver: it required consumers to rethink the way they went about their business in the kitchen. Like most great innovations, it was disruptive. And how do you persuade people to disrupt their lives? Not merely by ingratiation or sincerity, and not by being famous or beautiful. You have to explain the invention to customers– not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it’s not at all hard to use.”

“Thirty years ago, the videocassette recorder came on the market, and it was a disruptive product, too: it was supposed to make it possible to tape a television show so that no one would ever again be chained to the prime-time schedule. Yet, as ubiquitous as the VCR became, it was seldom put to that purpose. That’s because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers–not once or twice but three or four times–and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process. All the VCR-makers did was hand over the box with a smile and a pat on the back, tossing in an instruction manual for good measure. Any pitchman could have told you that wasn’t going to do it.”

Best and Better,

Gene”

SalesCrunch now offers free online sales classes every week.  Classes are limited to 40 attendees to keep them intimate. Email subscribers are the first to be invited to SalesCrunch classes, so if you want to be first in line for future classes and be alerted when class recordings are posted subscribe to our email update & invites now.

Topics: sales pitch