Announcer: Get ready for your daily dose of marketing strategies and tactics from entrepreneurs with the guile and experience to help you find success in any marketing capacity. You're listening to Marketing School with your instructors Neil Patel and Eric Siu.

Eric Siu: Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

Neil Patel: And I'm Neil Patel.

Eric Siu: Today we are going to talk about seven ways to keep potential clients engaged during business pitches. Lesson number one, you know what works for us, we actually did this a couple of weeks ago. We actually made sure that we went above and beyond, we posted things against, basically we were over prepared coming into the meeting, we posted different creatives, different targetings against the wall because this person was a very visual person, and we made sure we prepared ahead of time a really good catered lunch. We just made the experience really good, people actually came in and dressed up too from my team, and it just made the experience great, and they actually commented about it afterwards in terms of how comfortable they were. This was a client that was, I mean, this was a big spending client too, so it worked well for us.

Neil Patel: Number two, storytelling. When you tell stories, people get more engaged. Storytelling goes back thousands and thousands of years, but it's effective because people remember stories. If you can tell stories that other people can relate with, you're much more likely to keep them hooked.

Eric Siu: Number three, this kind of builds on what Neil was talking about during a business pitch, instead of talking about yourself all the time, talk about the client, talk about what insights you can provide to the client and ask the right questions at the end of the day, because ultimately it's about the client, it's not about how great you are. I don't care about what clients you work with. Nobody cares about that, at least not me.

Neil Patel: At number four, be honest, and what I mean by this is, it's funny, I was doing a business pitch and people asking like, "Oh, who have you worked with," and then I showed them some logos and examples, and I'm like, "But you know what? All of these logos, they don't mean anything." I'm like, "The reason being is and overtime when you're in business, you're going to get a lot of logos, businesses, and case studies. All that really matters is what can I do for you," and they just started laughing.

Eric Siu: Number five, so when I talk about providing value in these pitches, it's not just about a talk fest from you. It's about how can you give a little bit of a carrot, dangle a carrot in front of them and actually provide some let's say, "Hey, can you give us access to your analytics profile," for example, or "read-only access to your Facebook ads, your Google AdWords."
We actually take a look at this stuff and then we tell them, "Hey, here's what's going on, here are a couple of opportunities that we see, here's some bullet points. What are your thoughts around this." And then they start to talk back, and then it becomes an engaging conversation, instead of just you talking the whole time.
What I find, just building on, so what we use, we use a tool called UberConference and it shows you what percent of the time you're talking. You should not be talking maybe more than 30% of the time. You should be asking questions, at least in the beginning, you're asking questions, you're discovering things, and you're letting them answer, because guess what, people like talking about themselves.

Neil Patel: Number six, pay attention to the other person or party. What I mean by that is if you seem getting bored, then change it up. If you see things are going to be taking too long, then make it shorter because people have short attention spans. But pay attention to the other person. The more you pay attention to them, the more likely they are to be engaged because if you see that whatever you're telling them is putting them to sleep, then stop right there and go change it up.

Eric Siu: Number seven, you want to have something visual. We talked about putting things against the wall, but also a lot of our pitches are done through Zoom for example, which is what we use for presentations, great tool. With Zoom we show them, okay, here's some ... It's basically a screen cast on, hey, how are things going on your site, here's what we're seeing so far, here's what we're seeing that's working in our space. We basically make it very visual to them because a lot of people are visual. I know I'm visual, and instead of just talking on the phone about it, they can actually see what's going. Ideally it's easier for you to even get in person and to build that relationship so you're not just another number, because I can tell you that when you're able to show up in person, that does increase conversion rates. But worse case scenario, you do a Zoom presentation, you're going to be able to close some nice five, six, seven figure deals.
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