Are you selling what they need to hear?

” It surprises me that most fashion buyers know everything there is to know about which trend and hemline we’ll be wearing in six months but can’t tell me what the density of their sales floor is, what the return is, what the dollars per square foot is, what their top-selling stock-keeping unit is and how many times they’ve reordered it in the season.  However fashionable the brand, we always start and finish with the numbers—the sell-throughs, the margins, the returns, the contributions—and then we talk about the pleasantries.” Marigay McKee, President Saks Fifth Avenue. From an interview in the Wall Street Journal.

How are you pitching your story? In business, your internal pitch needs to show the return on investment, not solely the brilliance of your vision or the cutting edge of your design.  Because vision and design can drive returns, but not if you can’t articulate them in a way to get your vision built in the first place.

At a recent workshop I listened to one female entrepreneur outline her next steps in growing her wellness business, which involved partnering with some other brick and mortar businesses. The first five minutes of the pitch outlined the wonderful community benefit, the sense of empowerment, the size of the mailing lists and the ambience of the event. Nowhere in the pitch was what the measurable benefit to her business would be, or the benefit to her brick and mortar partners.  A business coach kept probing, asking, “What is the benefit, where is the return?” and got more answers about wellness, community, and the overall specialness of the event. It took three tries for the business coach to get the entrepreneur to outline her plan for getting revenue from the event.

Lest any men be laughing and saying “typical female approach,” I’ve noticed many male-led pitches wax on endlessly about the speed of the technology, the sleekness of the interface, the inherent scalability of the product, while never addressing the paying market for the product.

At some point we all do it, fall so in love with our grand plan that we think everyone will buy in. And passion is a good thing.  Passion and drive keep you going at 3 am, when the 16th version is just not working the way you planned, and when you know in two hours the kids need to get up to get ready for school and you’re operating on no sleep. But we have to be mindful of our audience. Your significant other, your mom and your dog will love your idea, and think its brilliant, but unless they can finance it, eventually you have to sell it.

How are you pitching your vision? And are you selling it in a way that those who are buying can hear it?

Want to Speed Read an Organization you may be pitching? Subscribe today.