How to Open a Sales Pitch Without Talking About Your Product

Where a pitch loses the room

Ask a founder when prospects stop paying attention and you usually get the same answer. A few slides in.

That is early. Early enough that the cause is almost never the product, the price, or the proof. It is the opening.

Most pitches open one of two ways. Some start with the company. Who we are, when we were founded, who backs us, who else buys from us. Others start with the problem, which feels like the sophisticated alternative and is not much better.

Andy Raskin, writing on Medium in 2016, took apart a sales deck from the subscription billing company Zuora and named what it does differently. The essay has been read millions of times, mostly because the fix is structural and anyone can apply it.

Why naming the problem loses

Raskin's point about the problem-first opening is worth sitting with, because it is the opposite of standard advice.

When you assert that a buyer has a problem, you put them on the defensive. They may not think they have it. They may have it and not want to say so in front of their colleagues. Either way, the first thing you have asked them to do is agree to something uncomfortable about their own judgment.

Name a change in the world instead and the dynamic reverses. Nobody is defensive about a shift in their industry. It is not their fault and it is not about them. They will tell you how it is affecting them, what worries them about it, and where they think the opening is. You have moved from presenting to hearing.

The five elements, in order

Raskin identifies five parts, and the order carries the argument.

First, name a big and relevant change in the buyer's world. Something undeniable, that creates both stakes and urgency. Zuora's version of this was to name the shift toward buying access rather than ownership.

Second, show there will be winners and losers. Buyers stay with the status quo because losing feels worse than gaining feels good. You counter that by showing that adapting leads somewhere good and not adapting leads somewhere unacceptable. Zuora did it by documenting how much of the Fortune 500 had disappeared, then showing who had thrived.

Third, describe the destination. Raskin calls it the Promised Land, and it has two properties. It has to be somewhere the buyer wants to be, and it has to be hard to reach without help. If it is easy to reach without you, your company has no reason to exist.

Fourth, and only fourth, introduce the product. Not as a feature list but as the specific means of getting to that destination. Raskin's framing is that your capabilities are the gifts handed to the hero, and a gift only means something once the quest is clear.

Fifth, show evidence you can deliver. The strongest form is a story about someone like them who already made the trip. A demo is the next best thing, and it still has to sit inside the destination you described.

The mistake founders make on the third element

Raskin asked the salesperson he was helping to state his Promised Land, and got back a version of having the most advanced platform for something.

That is the error, and it is close to universal in founder-led companies. The destination is not having your technology. It is what a working week looks like because of it.

There is a practical reason this matters more than it sounds. After you leave the room, your champion has to explain you to colleagues who were not there. They will be asked what you people do. A clear destination gives them something to say. A platform description gives them nothing, and the deal quietly stops moving.

It only works if everyone tells it

The last part of Raskin's argument is the one that reaches past the deck.

A narrative held only by sales gets undone by everything else the company publishes. The version he describes worked because the whole company told it. The chief executive said it in interviews, the marketing ran on it, and by the time a salesperson arrived, buyers had already decided the change was real.

For a founder-led company that is good news, because there is no distance between the person who decides the story and the people telling it. There is usually only one of each.

What to do with it

Before rewriting anything, write one sentence. What has changed in our buyer's world that they already believe.

If you cannot write it, that is the finding. The deck is not the problem.

Raskin's full breakdown, with the Zuora slides, is worth reading before you touch your own.