I was listening to the radio today, and I heard an example of a sales pitch, and it was clear there was something missing from it. Here is an attempt at paraphrasing the main pitch that I heard:

Remember how years ago when you wondered when you would be able to talk into your remote and change the channel on your TV. Well can you believe that time is actually here…

It was a radio spot that was promoting a cable provider’s new feature on their remote controls that allows you to perform actions by talking into your remote control.

As I heard this example of a sales pitch, I thought of a few different things. The first thing that I thought was that I never grew up wondering when the day would come when I would be able to talk into the remote control for my TV.

The other thing that I thought is that the real weak part of the ad is that it is selling the product and feature and totally missed communicating the value that the feature offers.

 

Selling the Product

Focusing only on selling the feature is something that all of us can fall into, especially if you have a really cool product. For example, if you sell software that does all of these really cool things, it can be easy to get your sales pitch wrapped around the features and functionality and completely forget to talk about the value that those features offer.

In the sales pitch example of the radio ad and the remote that you can talk into, the details of talking into the remote is a feature of the product, and what the remote can do when you talk into it is the functionality of that feature. This tells us what the product does, but it does not tell us what the product helps us do or how it can improve things for us.

 

Selling the Value

Before I talk about how they could have sold the value in this radio ad, I do want to point out that I don’t know all the details about this particular product, and I also don’t really know if there is that much value that it offers. This may be the case of a company developing technology that is cool but offers little value, and I also am not a fan of speaking commands when I can push a button, but I will still try to demonstrate how there could have been more of an emphasis on value.

I personally think it is probably easier to push buttons 3, 2, and 5 if I want to go to channel 325, so I don’t think changing channels is the real value to focus on here. But one way this may offer value is how it makes it easier to enter text into your cable box when searching and using advanced features. This is difficult with the standard numeric keys, and the sales pitch can focus on how this makes it much easier and quicker to use the cable box and all of its advanced features and apps.

Again, I don’t know if that is the perfect example of a sales pitch for this product, but the key thing to look at here is that selling the ability to talk into a remote is not compelling nor attention-grabbing, and they may be missing the mark with their current radio ad.