The Best Sales Pitch Isn’t a Pitch at All

Why is the Best Sales Pitch Isn’t a Pitch at All? :- The best strategy for seizing the sales is to know: sales pitch should not really be a pitch at all. The secret is to be yourself for every new deal. The traditional, frequently used sales pitches are very boring and often annoying as well.

Instead of using the same traditional way, you should follow a strategy using which you should be able to customize your sales pitch depending on the potential prospect. Before flooding them with all the features your product have or in simple words before bragging about your product, you should always find direct or indirect ways to know about their requirement and based on that tell a story or frame a story where you helped someone with a similar problem and also tell them; how well they are doing now. Rarely anyone remembers your analytics graph or pictures used in the presentation, but most of them will remember your story and this is how the human mind has evolved to be.

Attacking pitches have a great chance of failing because rarely anyone is interested in one-sided conversation. It is better to imagine yourself in place of customers and think: What problems can you solve for them? How can you make their lives easier? Be an active listener, invest time in listening, then respond accordingly. Listening is an art and not everyone is an artist. The main point is to personalize your communications to a limit which looks good and it should not be disturbing.

Jacqueline Smith says:A successful sales pitch isn’t a monologue. It’s a dialogue.

Don’t you agree that an interactive conversation with your prospect is far better than a dry speech?

In this article, we will walk you through anything and everything you need to know to improve sales pitch, and also; how to master it in a productive way.

Before connecting to your prospects on the salesman to customer level, you need to connect to them on a human to human level. You always need to be really very careful with the ways you are doing it.

Being too much formal like a salesperson will be annoying for your prospects. On the other hand, being too much casual will change their mindset in a way that they won’t take you and your words very seriously.

There is a fine hairline gap between being too much formal and being too much casual. There is a need to maintain a balance. Below are the examples of a few sales pitch that will help you out in framing your own amazing sales pitch.

a. Sales pitch over a phone call:- Selling products or services over the phone is an easy task, as you won’t be facing the customer directly; if you have similar thoughts then you are duping yourself. Selling products or services over the phone is not that easy as it sounds.

It actually requires a great set of skills to seize someone’s time to talk. Your prospects may not even listen to you further if you start with the same boring pitch. So you need to prepare a great opening statement.

It is always better to ask them; “how are they?” in place of asking this traditional question; “Do you have a couple of minutes to talk or is it the right time to talk to you”? There are great chances that they will simply hang up the call by hearing that very familiar annoying sales pitch. By simply asking “how are they?” is an easy way to establish a connection with them on a human to human level.

With coming days people are growing to be very concerned about their privacy and security. So, there are great chances that they will ask you from where did you get their contact details. You need to be ready with the answer, you can tell them that you get their information from the ads posted by them on their website or any other third-party website.

Do not initiate the chat by bragging about your product or services. Apparently, tell them how your product or services will help them and how other similar companies have benefited from your product or services.

In the end, if needed, ask them for a suitable time frame for a follow-up call so that they will get enough time to think and at the same time you will also get enough time to prepare a more personalized sales pitch for them.

b. Sales pitch over an Email:– Sale pitch over an email is not much different from what happens on a phone call. It is a bit easier when compared to phone calls as framing a reply is not a bi-directional real-time conversation.

Almost everyone who is even a little active over internet receives a minimum of 50-100 emails every day. And many emails are straight away dumped into the spam box. To avoid getting into spam box or being left unreplied to get a reply from the potential prospect, you need to be very catchy and unique with your content. Keep your email short and engaging.

How will you feel if you come to know that you were not able to convince your prospect just because the email you sent had grammar mistakes? Bad? Very bad? So, better make a habit of performing spell and grammar check always after framing your sales pitch and also before sending it to the prospect.

c. Sales pitch over a Voicemail:- Many of the times you end up dropping a voicemail when you contact your potential prospects in their busy hours, usually when they are probably at work or they might be intentionally ignoring your call since the number is an unknown one. Whatever the reason may be, you always need to keep an impressive voicemail, as you can’t drop the chance of getting a call back from your potential prospects.

It is always a good practice to send a follow-up email, for some prospects it will act as a reminder and for a shy group of prospects who are not comfortable with on-call conversation or one to one conversation it will be a great helping hand.

d. Sales pitch over a Presentation:- Presentations are one of the most traditionally inherited forms of selling. Most of the time presentations are presented in the form of a slideshow. It is one of the most complicated sales pitch. Presentations are just not about preparing slides, along with good slides, you need very good presentation skills. Your main intention should be to seize the audience’s attention. It is always better to give preference to pictures over text.

e. Elevated Sales pitch :- You need to be always prepared with your sales speech. You should also sound very confident and fluent while educating them about your product or about the services you provide. That doesn’t mean to sound like a typical salesman.

Do not try to act extra smart by walking your prospects through your complicated vocab, they might not get what you are saying. Avoid communication gap which happens due to the use of jargon(special words used by a certain group of people among themselves, that are difficult for others to understand).

f. Sales pitch for follow-ups:– You need to involve follow-up mechanism with your prospective customers. It doesn’t matter where you met them or when you got a chance to communicate with them; over a phone call or through an email or during any presentation. What matters is you follow-up with them by an email or a call on a well planned periodic basis. Your endurance might payback in form of a lead. Always try giving them a recap of things discussed before, with every follow-up.

TYPES OF SALES PITCH:

In the growing market with even more growing competitions, the consumers these days have a wide range of options to choose from. They prefer the internet right through their smartphones to know about the products rather than getting the same information through a salesman. And why not, as they are very busy with their work, they do not have much time to listen to someone, until and unless they are paid for listening. Below are the few types of sales pitch that will help you in understanding the prospects mindset:

a. A One-Word Pitch :- Though it is a debatable topic, the one-word pitch is the best and at the same time, it is very difficult to master the one-word pitch. It is more like a signature line which should be uniformly used by all the people of your organization in the same form without altering it. You do not believe it? This type of sales pitch is even used by big companies like Google (their one-word pitch is “search”), Nokia (their one-word pitch is “connecting people”)and prominent people like Barack Obama (his one-word pitch was “hope”).

Sounds easy? But, the main concern is how will you come up with that one word which has the potential to describe your brand?

All you need to do is invest time in thinking about your company from every perspective and at the same time thinking about your potential prospects.

Once you get your word, the next task will be to plant it in every possible dimension of the market. Once people start linking the word with your brand and also the other way round, your half work is done.

b. Social Media Pitch :- Social media platforms are famous for their ever-changing algorithms. Creating a pitch for social media is not a one time task. You need to change your pitch according to the changing algorithm. Instagram is on the top of the list for frequently changing the algorithm. Many brand owners have reported that their business was affected due to weird algorithms of Instagram.

Our intention was not to scare you, we actually want you to create a type of social media pitch which can confront most of the algorithm changes.

It is always better to be on the safe side, prepare a short pitch with relevant details and do not use offensive or irrelevant hashtags. Make it in a way that your target audience craves to know more about it and end up landing on your main website.

Storytelling is amazing as well as a fine form of art. Either you are good at it or you are not. There is nothing in between. Storytelling actually makes you more human who can positively touch people through his/her words that a typical salesperson with a typical sales pitch can not. It gives you an opportunity to empathize with your prospects through your characters. They might forget everything else you told them but there are great chances that they will stick to the story you made them imagine. The characters you framed, and the most important how your product or service played a great positive role of the savior in the story.

Normal presentation only activates two zones of the brain. Storytelling, on the other hand, activates seven zones of the brain. Stories always create an enduring bond.

A good practice will be to encourage your brand advocates to share their success stories online. So the prospects will get to know about it and will come to you seeking the same success for them.

DO YOU WANT TO BE AN AMAZING STORYTELLER TO POLISH YOUR SALES PITCH?

Have you ever wondered why so many people go for movies or why they spend hours reading novels? A simple answer to the above question is; they find stories more relatable than what is happening around them in real life. If you start noticing the conversations going around you, you will get to know that most of the people communicate well when they share stories with each other.

BUT, your prospects will easily lose interest in your story, if you are not a good storyteller. If you aren’t a good storyteller, you need to follow the below points:

• Try holding their interest, you can do it by starting your story with a hook, it could be a question or a suspense element you will be telling them at the end of the story.
• Always keep your story aligned with a central point of interest. Do not let it go on a pointless track.
• It is always better to choose the correct time slot to narrate your story. Not in a time when your prospect is busy or upset with something else.
• You may share your personal experiences as well with the prospects. But you need to be really very careful with what you are sharing.
• You should know the mains points of your story very well, and also you need to make sure that you are rolling them out in a pre-decided well-structured manner.
• You should always remember important details like names, dates, and locations. Always remember that prospects get induced into your stories by the touching ingredients of your story, not by your ability to talk about facts and figures only.
• You may try adding quotes and dialogue to support your points.
• Draft your story which revolves around prospects, not only your product or services. Talk about their real problems and tell them how they can get benefited from your product or services or if the situation demands tell them how your services will help them to recover the prior losses.
• Instead of bragging about your abilities, tell them about the problems you solve that your prospects can relate to. This strategy will help you in getting deep knowledge about your prospects exact requirements. Once you know their exact requirement you can put up the best-suited story as per the prospect’s requirements.
• Like every other skills storytelling too needs a great amount of practice to reach that point of perfection.

If you are left with no results or negligible results even after making a call after the call to many potential prospects, and after publishing advertisements after advertisement for potential prospects, it is the time when you should stop firing bullets blindly and invest time and find out why isn’t your sales pitch passing the potential prospects through the sales funnel?

If you are left with no hopes and you have already started thinking that you have tried everything you could, then it is the time to think once again. Most probably you are not communicating well with your potential prospects. Or in worst cases, you are not trying to communicate with them at all. There is no benefit in preparing a good sales pitch if you are not willing to communicate.

No doubt, you usually listen to your prospects, but are you hearing them seriously? To shape the further conversation accordingly? Just putting your points to the customer is not enough, apparently, you should allow the customer to do most of the talking. By which you will get an idea about how their business works and their requirement and then you can ask related cross questions to make things crystal clear and then finally you will be in a position to put up a deal that they will happily accept. A quick check to know how you are doing it: if it feels like a business presentation you are not doing it correctly, and if it feels very human then you are on the right track.

LET THE CORRECT WORD COUNT DO THE MAGIC:

How will you feel when you will get to know that your sales pitch was ignored just because it was a bit longer? Bad? Extremely Bad? The word count of your pitch is a very important parameter which needs to be taken care of. If your pitch is too lengthy, it is a very possible case that your target prospects will ignore it without giving any reading attempt at all. Try keeping it short and simple, do not use very uncommon words which create a need of dictionary references. You are always supposed to keep it interesting from the starting note to the ending note. Placing some points of inclination depending on your prospect for whom you are preparing it is always a good and effective practice.

According to this article, 85% of salesperson ended the communications with prospects without asking for the sale.

Yes, it is not 58%, it is actually 85%. Below are the reasons they gave behind this act of not asking for sale:-

• “I don’t sell by pushing the customer.”
• “In this market, you cannot be over aggressive.”
• “The people here are different.”
• And then, after talking with them for a while I got the truth,”I do not like being rejected.”

When you have already turned a random businessman to your prospective customer after putting up a lot of efforts. You can’t just let them go without offering them anything. Let them know: Are they supposed to come to your office? You will be sending a person to their office or home? Are they supposed to go to your website and fill up any form? Or they need to call you? There are immense possibilities of further actions, depending on the type of product or service you are providing and your customers. Whatever activity is required; keep it clear and documented in a form which can be easily passed on to a convinced prospect.

IN THE END:

Every other sales representative in the market is already holding a set of bread and butter which they are going to apply to the prospects. But, you need to prepare the best combination out of all. Keep learning, keep polishing your pitch and keep it flexible enough to be personalized with changing prospects.

Most of the prospects own a business mindset that requires logical approval from every perspective. In general, everything they do has to be meaningful and well planned on a financial as well as on the social level, they do not go after random things. This nature of potential prospects provides you a great opportunity to educate them how getting you on board will help them to solve their real problems. Don’t talk random things to them always give them reasons that are very logical and believable.

Try using the tricks and tips mentioned in this article when the next time you are going to communicate with any of the prospects, and then you will see the improvement in the results.