Stop Pitch-Slapping me!
Pitch-slapping. You know what it is.
It's when a salesperson pitches the most important benefits, features and functions of their products and services (often without invitation) and clearly does not care less about you, the buyer.
Vague intro, misleading intentions... buy my stuff?
OUCH!! PITCH-SLAP!!
Pitch-slapping used to be relegated to scripted cold calls, generic print ads in magazines and rubbish emails but now pitch-slapping is making its way onto social media like some insidious form of cancer
People just endlessly posting the same email template again and again hoping someone will connect. You know the type - they invite you to connect, you accept and then BAM! A generic message saying, “Hey, buy my stuff?” Err. No.
When I get those pitch-slapping direct mails into my LinkedIn inbox, I am so incredulous I just have to ask them questions
Have you even read my profile before sending me this message?
How often do people read to the end of your emails?
How may interested follow-ups are you actually getting with this activity?
How successful are you in selling whatever the hell it is you are selling?
From now on, I'm just going to send them a "You're accused of pitch-slapping. Please review this blog" response
Seriously - you have to market with people, not at them - care about their conversations and develop those conversations further.
How is it that in 2020 People are STILL being trained to pitch-slap prospects into securing an appointment and not bother to ask questions, understand the customer’s needs and build value at all? Trained to sell and not to waste a moment attempting to build rapport or actually connect as human beings?
But now they're not knocking on my door (which I can ignore), posting junk mail (that I can throw away) or sending unsolicited mail to my email inbox (so I can black-list them for all eternity). No, now they're now bull-dozing my social media messenger apps with their crap instead. Honestly, I'm getting an RSI from pressing the delete button so many times!
For a lot of businesses, social media doesn't work. That's because, as I mentioned in a previous blog/rant on "why scheduling posts is anti-social," they're not using it the way that it was intended.
SOCIAL is not a tool, it's not a platform.
SOCIAL is an activity related to or designed for human beings to connect with one another.
Real SOCIAL media needs to do three things:
Be a 2-way conversation
Intended to build relationships and encourage interaction
Add value
It’s that Basic!
Ron Tite says pitch-slapping is almost as bad as groping and I agree. Think about it: You're being contacted in an unwelcome way that you haven't invited; You're usually frustrated, angry and/or disgusted with the person/company who's doing it and fundamentally it's completely unacceptable behaviour!
Sadly most of the salespeople I talk to who are doing it actually hate having to - They don't want to pitch in this way for their business but it's what they're being trained and told to do in order to hit target. NO, NO, NO!!
It's time to stop the sales assault!
I can't pretend that I have all the answers...but I have a basic framework, a set of rules that I follow when I want to connect with someone; a simple form of netiquette if you will. Maybe if more people used it we'd have less pitch-slapping going on?
It goes like this:
You're already on LinkedIn. Check out the person's profile so you know:
What their company does
What they do specifically
If you've helped a similar person/company in the past
One "fun fact" about them
One person that you have in common in your network.
Then craft an interesting and/or entertaining message. Here is the EMARI formula for an in-mail that is more likely to build and develop relationships with your contacts:
Include something personal – you saw something on his/her profile/in the news/at an event
Say something nice
Includes a sentence about why we should connect.
Mention the name of a mutual connection
Doesn’t make an overboard request that requires too much time.
It's that simple.
Winning on social is very rarely about numbers of followers or likes. It is about engagement. It’s about being attention-worthy in the first place and then creating ways to get the right people to attract the right people's attention and then hold it over a sustained period of time. Sometimes the reality is that you might only need a few hundred or thousand people to follow you and you’ve made it.
Think of the Beatles - they spent years playing twice a day to handfuls of people in Germany before their first album; Sporting prodigy Rory McIlroy who used to practise for hours in his front garden hitting balls into an old washing machine; or entrepreneurs like Twitter founder Evan Williams (who had several businesses that didn’t work prior to Twitter making it), they all spent thousands of hours honing their craft before they became successful.
You can’t hack being good on a guitar or with a golf club any more than you can with social media. So stop pitch-slapping me. It's not a pleasant experience for either of us!