People don’t want to buy your product or service. They want to solve problems or find ways to grow their business. If you can’t show them how what you’re selling will help them with what they’re selling, it doesn’t matter how good it is or how cheap it is.
This five-step process can help you create the perfect sales pitch.
- Understand Customer Needs
- Find the Pain Point(s)
- Ease their Pain
- Use Stories and Facts
- Ask for the Business
1. Understand Your Customer’s Needs
Too often, we skip the sales pitch and jump right into demonstrating product features. That’s a big mistake. Crafting the perfect sales pitch takes a structured approach. It starts with taking the time to understand your customer’s business and specific needs.
Depending on the customer, this may mean conducting a Customer Needs Analysis (CNA), doing industry research, or digging deeper before responding to an RFP (Request for Proposal). No matter how you approach it, you need to find the area where the customer needs or wants to create change. That need is the motivation which will act as the driver of their purchase decision. The better you can frame your offer to meet that need, the better your closing rate will be.
2. Find The Pain Point
Only by understanding the prospective customer’s needs can you zero in on the pain points they are facing. You do this by researching and listening to your potential customer.
When you are working through your sales pitch ideas, you are researching their needs. Pain points typically revolve around one of these seven areas:
- Revenue/Sales
- Customers
- Employees
- Products
- Technology
- Capital
- Change
The more quickly you can identify where the pain exists, the deeper you can probe and find out where you can help.
You’re still in the assessment and learning phase here. It’s important that you find out who within the organisation is empowered to solve the pain so that you can get to the true economic buyer. You also want to identify any key stakeholders that need to be part of the final sales pitch process to make decisions.
3. Ease Their Pain
Once you’ve found the pain point(s), it’s time to create solutions for their pain. Be explicit to demonstrate how your product or service can alleviate their pain, help them solve their problem, or improve their position.
You need to create a Value Proposition that shows how the investment will be worth it. Whether it’s a tangible ROI (Return on Investment) or another measurable goal, you won’t close the deal until your prospective customer understands and agrees with your value proposition.
4. Use Stories And Facts
It’s said that facts tell and stories sell.
Be careful not to just do a slide show of charts, graphs, and facts. While facts will help you to reinforce your key selling points, make sure you incorporate stories to make your point. Study after study shows that stories trigger our emotional brain centres. This has been true for centuries. By giving specific sales pitch examples, or telling an engaging story, you can cement that knowledge in a memorable way.
An effective technique is to showcase case studies of others in similar situations who faced the same problems they are facing. Telling how you were able to help them in their situation and showing the results they achieved is powerful. It also does two other things:
- It provides an implied endorsement from the people at the centre of the story.
- It lets your potential customer know that others made the decision to buy from you and helps to minimise their risk.
Your story — and your facts — create a one-two punch that gets remembered.
5. Ask For The Business
In preparing a sales pitch, all too often salespeople get to the end and fail to ask for the order. They wrap up their sales pitch with a whimper. Instead of asking for the order, they say something like: “Do you have any questions?” This kind of question typically gets a response somewhere along the lines of “I don’t have any questions. I need some time to think about it.”
This happens most when people skip the steps along the way to creating their sales pitch.
Take the time to understand your customer’s needs. Identify their pain points and demonstrate how your products or services can ease their pain. Back up your finding with facts and drive the message home with stories of how others have benefited.
If you’ve done all that, you’ve earned the right to ask for their business.
How To Manage A Sales Team Successfully
The sales pitch is really an opportunity to demonstrate how well you understand your potential customer’s business and demonstrate how you can help them grow. It gives you the opportunity to showcase how your product or service is different or better than your competitors. It allows you to create a lasting impression and engaging offer.
However, creating the perfect sales pitch is just one skill your sales team needs to master to close more deals and grow your business. Upskilling your team with corporate sales training can improve performance, provide essential tools for salespeople, and improve negotiation skills.
The most successful salespeople have moved away from transactional selling and instead built deeper relationships and partnerships with customers.
Discovery & Design
You need to understand what your team needs to take it to the next level. Then you need to custom build sales training around the most basic needs. It is no use dragging out a sales training 101 course from anywhere and just running a team through that. These learnings need to be targeted to where there is the most need, and that is different for every business.
Workshops & Coaching
Hands-on, practical and engaging workshops are key. Again, your standard sales training workshop, where delegates are expected to sit there, rote learn what their facilitator says and then tick their name off for attendance provide little if any upside for a team. Not all sales training is the same, that is for sure. Upon completion of any workshops, teams must fill out Action Plans and commit to putting the lessons into practice. One-on-one follow up sessions with every participant two weeks later will hold team members accountable and committed. This is where you will se the change occur.
Proven ROI
You will notice a difference. Proper sales training, with workshops such as Perfecting Your Sales Pitch as a stand alone, will provide almost instant and substantial ROI. Sales, like all professions, requires constant learning to grow.
