Many sales pitches are won (or lost!) instantly.
This sales presentation tells a brief story about your product, service, or idea in order to capture your prospect’s attention and convince this target that your offering is worth the investment. Put differently, a pitch is the opening stage that builds anticipation and warms up your prospective clients to the headliner—your offer.
How can you whet your target’s appetite in less than 5 minutes? Keep it short and simple, but never generic.
There’s a hard truth about generic sales offers—they fall flat. Most prospects can see right through these surface-level attempts to spark buyer interest and tend to respond to personalized product recommendations even if they come at a higher price.
This article provides handy tips to help you craft concise, persuasive, and captivating sales pitches that incessantly draw—and keep—the attention of your coveted prospects.
Ramp Up Your Sales Pitch
Ideally, your sales presentation is whittled down to 2-3 sentences and stokes curiosity by concisely summarizing:
- The introduction—who are you and what is your company doing?
- The value—why should your prospects listen to you and tune out your competitors?
- The benefits—how do you plan to solve their individual roadblocks?
Buyers presumably form indelible split-second impressions: some may perceive you as a trusted advisor right away; others keep their guard up and avoid planning for a second encounter.
All that considered, how can you make a great impression at first sight? A pitch that is memorable from the get-go succinctly describes your selling message; but it is also tailored to different audiences and distinct goals, priorities, or motives.
Hone in on the following strategies to make your pitch customer-centric, deliver enticing sales presentations, and give your prospects a reason to trust you with their business.
Identify Your Best-Fit Targets
Get a more complete picture of your potential customers by identifying:
- Who is most likely to buy your product, and why?
- What are their main priorities?
- What are the buying patterns of your prospective clients?
- What is keeping them up at night?
This client discovery phase is a continuous process that is guided by data.
While a substantial amount of data about each potential customer is readily available, filter through the noise to go beyond the buyers’ names and zoom in on the details, such as their recent business partnerships or personal achievements. Every bit of information will enable you to personalize your pitch and build authentic relationships with top-level buyers.
Craft an Enticing Value Proposition
The buyer-seller connection is tenuous without reciprocal value exchange.
The secret sauce? Pique the curiosity of your high-value prospects by speaking directly to their wants.
To provide immediate value, avoid crafting your pitch around target accounts with divergent perspectives. Focus on individual needs and deliver a tangible value proposition custom-fit to each prospect. Your narrative should clearly articulate the benefits of your product and explicitly communicate how you intend to solve your customer’s problems by demonstrating the possible results:
e.g. [product], built by [company] for [target audience] to [benefits].
Identify what drives your prospect’s decision-making, pay particular attention to subtle buyer interests and overlooked business growth ideas, and address unmet needs. The end goal is to resonate with your audience right off the bat and differentiate yourself from the crowd of competitors.
Address Objections with Confidence
Attitude sells… or it wreaks havoc on your pitch.
Think about what you say and how you say it. Words matter, but your tonality and body language generate a mix of emotions; a feeble voice may be deemed untrustworthy while a confident body posture persuades and commands attention.
Similarly, your attitude has a direct impact on the hesitant buyer.
Some prospects are reluctant to close the deal for varying motives, such as lack of trust or budget constraints, and raise several objections. Just like a refusal might not be definitive, an objection isn’t necessarily a lost deal. Instead, it’s an invaluable opportunity to examine your offer from your buyer’s perspective and clarify misread situations.
Anticipate questions, ask for feedback, let your prospects voice all their concerns, and validate their arguments.
Acknowledging your prospects’ pain points helps you foster trusting relationships. Address individual buyer objections immediately and give a convincing pitch that is backed by social proof to progressively break the deadlock and move the sale forward.
Ready. Set. Pitch.
Good pitches hinge on well-crafted selling stories, but the delivery is equally important.
Attitude speaks for itself, so be sure to sell with confidence to remove any trust barrier that may possibly spring up between you and your prospect.
Remember: a pitch is not an up-front sale; it’s a hint at how your client’s possible future may look like after they invest in your product. The goal, however, is not to stall a sale. Establish the next action steps to keep the conversation going and follow through on your selling proposal.
