What makes a great pitch? Yeoh Siew Hoon gets a first-hand experience -

There I was, sitting on the balcony of a rooftop bar in Chinatown with Bernadette Dennis, managing director of HSMAI Asia Pacific, and we were looking down on the Chinese New Year festivities on the streets below.

The streets were a sea of red. Everywhere, everyone was trying to sell someone something. Mandarin oranges plants for prosperity, lanterns for prosperity, little tiger toys for prosperity – prosperity is pretty much the common thread for anything to do with Chinese New Year.

One man stood out though. One, he wasn't selling anything red. What he had on his stall were lime green, banana yellow and bright orange hairy-like baseball-bat-looking-like-things. It's the kind of stuff that makes you do a double take.

Two, well, he had a microphone clipped to his ear and he was every bit the showman. He would wave these things in the air, bend them, shake them and then show them to his audience. They looked a bit like psychedelic possums road-kill.

I could see Bernadette's curiosity was aroused. "What are they?" she asked.

"I think they are dusters," I said.

"Fascinating," she said.

Over our beers, we watched and listened this man pitch his products, and he was selling well. Here's the original salesman – the pitchman. We used to call them the "snakeoil salesman", the man who could sell you anything. A vanishing trade, one could say, in the world of the web where things are sold at a click.

He reminded me of Ron Popeil, "The Pitchman", who's featured in Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, "What The Dog Saw". Ron was a man who "dreamed up something new in his kitchen and went out and pitched it himself".

He came from a family of pitchers and he started pitching his father's kitchen gadgets when he was 13 in the mid-50s. "My cousins could sell you an empty box," said Ron.

And what makes a successful pitch? I gleaned two tips from the essay – "in every respect the design of the product must support the transparency and effectiveness of its performance during a demonstration – the better it looks onstage, the easier it is for the pitchman to go into the turn and ask for the money."

And, this quote from another pitcher, "I know how to ask for the money. And that's the secret to the whole damn business."

Well, this man's demonstration was effective and transparent, and he knew how to ask for the money.

Even from a distance, I knew he had got Bernadette hooked and sure enough, she bought two. "One for S$10, two for S$12, if you get it cheaper somewhere else, you come back," he said.

Over the holidays, I too succumbed to a great pitch. Someone had given my name to a home cleaning service – a friend who obviously thought I needed a cleaner home. The company said they would offer me "free home cleaning".

My helper was away and I was helpless, so I said yes. The "free home cleaning" was really a demonstration of a super-duper vacuum cleaner that does everything but make the coffee.

So Aloysius (we are on a first name basis now) came in, put the Rainbow to work on my bed – it can suck 15 inches deep – and lo and behold, dust, dirt and grime like I'd never seen before. I had been sleeping on a bed of germs, not roses, all this while. By the time he did my rugs, I was sold.

The pitch worked because it was "effective" and "transparent". You see real dirt, and it frightens you. The bonus is you can use the Rainbow as an air purifier plus you can also blow your dog dry with it.

And so I am a few thousand dollars poorer but my goodness, you should see what a clean home I have now.

Aloysius is the original door-to-door salesman, the pitchman. Bernadette tells me hotel sales has changed a lot, thanks to the Internet. When you make a sales call, you've got to be more prepared than you've ever been because the customer knows a lot already and so you've got to know more.

I reckon, however, the fundamentals of a great pitch remain the same.

Yeoh Siew Hoon, one of Asia's most respected travel editors and commentators, writes a regular column on news, trends and issues in the hospitality industry for 4Hoteliers.com.

Siew Hoon, who has covered the tourism industry in Asia/Pacific for the past 20 years, runs SHY Ventures Pte Ltd. Her other writings can be found at www.thetransitcafe.com

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