People pitch me all the time. But hopefully, you'll just go ahead and do it. We are trying to eliminate the need for pitches. I'd rather sit there and applaud. Customers buy products, not Powerpoint presentations.
Interpretation
Focus on creating value rather than preparing endless presentations.
Scott Cook's quote emphasizes the importance of genuine action over superficial presentations. He suggests that customers are more interested in the tangible benefits of a product rather than how it's presented, advocating for a shift towards action and results in business interactions.
In practice
In a startup pitch meeting, I would use this quote to encourage participants to focus on product development.
In my view, product/market fit is the most important thing to get right as a startup entrepreneur. There's a variety of ways to do it, but without solving some pain point that the customer gets so excited about they tell their friends, it's really hard in the modern age to get any liftoff.
The most common cause of low prices is pessimism - some times pervasive, some times specific to a company or industry. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer.
It doesn't matter much where your company sits in its industry ecosystem, nor how vertically or horizontally integrated it is - what matters is its relative 'share of customer value' in the final product or solution, and its cost of producing that value.
Consistent alignment of capabilities and internal processes with the customer value proposition is the core of any strategy execution.
CEOs are paid for doing a terrible job. If the system wasn't so messed up, guys like me wouldn't make this kind of money.
In business, staying focused requires that you turn most opportunities down.
Businesses fail when they over-invest in what is at the expense of what could be.
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