I moved to New Hampshire exactly 24 years ago today! I was 12 years old.
My family moved here right after school ended, so that summer, I had no friends, no license, no way or infrastructure of meeting people.
For years I've been teaching people about the 3 stages of conversation.
Stage 1 is small talk. Things like the weather, current events, and location.
Stage 2 is common interests or sharing an experience.
Stage 3 is feelings, fears, and emotions.
If two people can connect at stage 2, anything can happen.
Stage 2 is how relationships get formed. A shared experience or common interests.
Stage 3 is how relationships turn into life long friendships.
Think about your friends and how you met.
Some of them were colleagues at the same office, share an interests with you, mutual friends, or maybe lived in the same dorm/school right?
Last week, I talked about the whole system of outbound prospecting being broken.
Cold calls, cold email, and direct messages are overused. There is no incentive for a buyer to respond anymore, so sellers have to do follow up.
That's not how relationships should start.
There has never really been a safe place for sales people to pitch someone out of the blue, and have it be welcomed. That ends today.
The first fall when school started, I made most of my friends by going to over their houses, and we would have fires. It's bring everyone together. In some cases, the whole neighborhood or town would come.
The fire was a centerpiece that brought us all together. It was a common shared experience. I want to do the same thing for sales.
Today, I'm proud to announce Request for Meeting is now called Pitchfire.
We're rebranding the company to Pitchfire! We're changing our name, and evolving the product.
This is a place where buyers and sellers can come together, without the coldness of outreach.
We'll be migrating existing Request for Meeting users over to Pitchfire in the next few weeks. If you want be part this new safe place for buyers and sellers to come together, you can get on our waitlist.
Your attention and time are worth it.
Ryan O'Hara is the founder of Pitchfire. Prior to starting Pitchfire, he has been an early employee at several startups helping them with marketing and prospecting tactics including Dyn (Acquired by Oracle 2016) and LeadIQ (first GTM employee-Series B).
He's had prospecting and marketing campaigns featured in Fortune, Mashable, and TheNextWeb. Ryan specializes in go-to-market strategy, branding, business development, prospecting, and sales training. He also mentors two accelerators, The Iron Yard and The Alpha Loft.
