The Three Step Bounce – better sales pitches
The three-step bounce model is your route to better sales pitches and a technique for improving every brochure, email or webpage you write. It works because it’s all about what the customer is interested in.
Here’s the model.
Imagine a four quadrant graph.
- At the top, we have you.
- At the bottom, we have your customer.
- On the left, we have the past.
- On the right, we have the future.
When you’re trying to sell or promote something to a customer, what do you think they’re most interested in?
- Is it the top left quadrant, your past? No, because that’s history. And it’s not even their history; it’s yours.
- Is it the top right quadrant, your future? No, because whatever’s in your future, you haven’t done it yet. And it’s more likely to benefit you than them.
- Is it the bottom left quadrant, their past? No, because (good or bad) that’s history too. They can’t change it now.
- What they’re most interested in is the bottom right quadrant, their future. Whatever you’re proposing, they want to know that it’s going to benefit their future. You’ve got to make yourself part of that future.
The three-step bounce aligns sales and marketing with what the customer is interested in.
So how do we put that into practice? That’s where the three-step bounce comes in.
- Step one is how you start your brochure, your email, your advert or your sales pitch. You talk about the benefit the customer is going to get from doing business with you. You make them imagine a positive future with you as a part of it.
- Once they’ve got that in their mind, you can move to step two which is where you can talk about your past, your experience and your skills because these are what makes you able to deliver the benefits and the future they want.
- Finally, the step three bounces are where you explain the steps you and your customer are going to take together to turn the benefits from theory into reality.
Talk about your history but only as a way to improve the customer’s future.
We ought to add that this is one of the more unusual sales and marketing models we’ve ever spoken about. We don’t actually know what its official name is. Nor do we know its author. If you can tell us those two facts, please get in touch at grow@forbesbaxter.co.uk; we’d be delighted to update this blog and give the model its appropriate attribution.
In the meantime, we’ll continue to call it the three-step bounce model.