Invent It, Sell It, Bank It!: Make Your Million-Dollar Idea Into a Reality (25 page)

The trick is to be quick, likeable, and assertive but not aggressive.

If a buyer’s immediate response is no, you can reply with, “I promise you this is different from anything you’ve seen before. Please, just five minutes?” Stay polite and respectful at all times. And then stop. Don’t keep pushing, because then you’ll become annoying, and no one wants to do business with someone who is annoying.

If the person tells you send pictures or information via email, say that the product will really come to life when he or she can see the real thing. You’re always more convincing in person. You’ll be too easy to dismiss if you’re just one more blip in an inbox, so do whatever you can to get a face-to-face meeting.

The Email Pitch

I tell my entrepreneurs all the time that when calling a buyer, they should speak in short, quick, and precise sentences, because people are busy and won’t listen past a few sentences. This advice holds true for email, as well as phone pitches. In fact, often it may be more common for you to reach buyers by email than by phone, since that’s how people communicate in business. But the process isn’t that different. Your emails should be short and concise.

People don’t read past the first few sentences, so grab their attention fast. You need to edit, edit, and edit your emails again before sending them out. I do it (and I encourage my
Shark Tank
entrepreneurs to do it, too). I’ll write out all my thoughts, and then ruthlessly shorten them. No one wants to read through a whole bunch of stuff. Also, people love bullet points. If you want people to read your email, don’t write big run-on paragraphs. There is nothing worse, and people will click away. I do.

Do something in your email to catch people’s attention and stand out. If you’re comfortable with revealing your product, embed an image of it so buyers can immediately see why you’re so excited, or send an attachment or a link to a product page, especially to a YouTube video or a video on your website that demonstrates and shows the product so that they can instantly see why it’s wonderful. You might win them over in those few seconds.

That’s what happened when a bright young college student named Angela, from Boston, was passed through to my website after taking my Hero or Zero app test. She sent me a quick, concise submittal with her idea for a makeup brush that opened in the middle and held four more brushes inside. She included drawings of the product. The email captured our attention instantly. I called her and we did the product together. I manufactured
it for her, we launched it on QVC, and it was a success. And Angela is a happy lady today.

At the rate people skim emails, the more you can reveal up front, the more likely you are to grab their attention. You probably know this from experience. When you’re busy and in a hurry, it can seem like too much work to bother clicking to open an attachment or a link. Make it as easy as possible for buyers to see everything they need to see in one quick glance. People are glutted with information, so make your email short, memorable, and visually enticing.

That said, try to capture a buyer on the phone so that you can use your power of persuasion. Emails are great for pictures, but not so good for expressing tone or emotion. I still believe in the power of a phone call and the live human voice. It is supremely easy to delete or ignore an email without even opening it, just because you don’t recognize the name of the sender or you don’t like the subject line. Most people, however, have to listen to the whole first sentence of a phone call before they can determine whether they want to continue the conversation or not. If your first sentence is powerful and intriguing enough—and makes it clear that listening might offer your buyer an edge at work—you might get to finish your introduction and schedule a face-to-face meeting.

RISK PAYS OFF

Now, I was calling buyers all over the country and asking for appointments when I didn’t have a single plane ticket purchased. But no one needed to know that. If a buyer sounded willing to meet with me but was unavailable the week I offered to come in, I’d tell the buyer that I had another trip scheduled two weeks after that. No matter what he or she said, I had an answer. I made
it so easy that the person couldn’t come up with an excuse not to meet me. If the buyer didn’t want to hear my pitch, he or she was going to have to flat-out say so. But very few people did.

There are probably a few reasons for this. First, my product was easy to visualize, and what I was describing really was unlike anything these buyers had ever seen. Second, when you are polished, determined, and persistent, most buyers start to get curious. What if you’re the real deal? What if you really do have the next big thing? They don’t want to miss out, and if your mini pitch is just right, they may have reason to believe that you might just be worth a few more minutes of their time. And if you’ve got a brilliant product and a brilliant pitch, a few minutes of face-to-face time is all you’ll need to seal the deal.

As a result of those incessant phone calls and my tightly wound pitch, I ended up traveling to nineteen cities in twenty-one days. I was in Ohio one day, Texas the next, Arkansas after that. It was exhausting. And although I traveled as cheaply as possible, taking low-budget airlines and many connecting flights, I knew I was risking a lot of money on flights to go to meetings that might not come to anything. But the risk paid off, because ultimately most of the buyers I was fortunate enough to get a meeting with gave me a chance.

PITCH TO-DO LIST:

Perfect your prototype.

Compile the contact information for every buyer at every intended retailer.

Write a cold-call script that you can say quickly.

Write an email that will capture people’s attention right away.

Know every detail about your product.

Be able to outline your product’s features and benefits.

Be able to explain why it is an exciting, brand-new, original product that people will love.

Reassure them that you will be easy to work with.

Make it as easy as possible for them to meet with you.