I may regret saying this out loud, but I actually like taking random cold calls from sales agents trying to get me to take an appointment with the firm that hired them. I know how all this works. I know how they got a hold of me and I generally know how they are compensated. The same companies that are trying to hire outsourced people to get my attention, I am in return hiring outsourced people to get their attention. A rather funny exercise when you take a step back and look at it.
I have a practice where at the end of the week, I pick up the phone or respond to a random email or DM and express interest. Lately, I have been really listening for the first thing that is said. I have arrived at one clear conclusion. If you cannot explain the clear value proposition in ten seconds or less, then you have a serious problem.
You can hire a million people to bombard your potential customers with messages, phone calls, gift packages, invitations. But unless you can get to a clear and succinct value statement, you are wasting everyone’s time. I give them ten seconds. If it takes me more than ten seconds to understand what at the core they can do for me, I punt and disconnect quickly.
Out of ten random calls I took this week, only one got this right. It turned out that the one was proposing a solution to a problem that I did not have. But if I had that problem, I would have been willing to continue the conversation. That is the difference. The clarity was there. The value was immediate. The rest did not matter because I understood what they were offering.
The other nine failed. Not because they lacked talent or because their product was bad. They failed because they could not articulate what they did in a way that made sense to me in the time I was willing to give them. They buried the value under jargon, context, backstory, or features. They assumed I would wait for them to get to the point. I did not.
This is not just about sales calls. This is about everything you are trying to build. If you cannot explain what you do in ten seconds, you are in trouble. Not because people are impatient, though they are. But because clarity is the first signal of value. If you cannot name what you do simply, it means you have not figured it out yet. You are still working it out in your own head, and you are asking your customer to do that work for you.
The market will not do that work. The market will move on. It will find someone who can explain their value in the time it takes to walk past them. You do not get more time just because you think you deserve it. You get the time you earn, and you earn it by being clear.
“Clarity is the first signal of value. If you cannot name what you do simply, it means you have not figured it out yet.”
I am not saying you need a perfect pitch. I am saying you need to know what you do and why it matters, and you need to be able to say that out loud in a way that makes sense to someone who does not already care. That is the test. Not whether you can impress someone who is already interested. But whether you can make someone interested in the first place.
The next time you talk about what you are building, time yourself. Say it out loud. See if it makes sense in ten seconds. If it does not, keep working on it. Not the product. The explanation. Because the product does not matter if no one understands what it does.
