Creating a successful sales pitch is about crafting a compelling narrative for your client. Still, it could be easy to treat your sales pitch as a presentation of facts and figures, expecting to make a compelling argument based on data alone. Though it may seem counterintuitive, a successful pitch shouldn’t begin with product features or service capabilities, instead, storytelling should be the foundation of your sales pitch.
First, you need to demonstrate that you truly understand your potential prospects by focusing on their needs rather than yours. By identifying their pain points and tailoring your pitch to address them, whether it’s a cold call, meeting people at a networking event, or presenting in front of prospects, the sales pitch framed around a narrative engages your prospects and gets them invested in what you have to offer. This way, you’ll capture their attention, display your knowledge and inspire them to keep listening.
By starting your sales pitch with their key challenges, you can move to critical industry changes they need to pay attention to. The role of presenting changing trends is twofold, showing the opportunity is too great for the prospect to ignore and creating a sense of urgency by outlining what will happen if they don’t take action. By focusing on change rather than just the problem alone, you go from persuasion to collaboration.
Let’s use Pipedrive as an example. If we’re focusing on the problem, we’d say, “Salespeople are starved for time and struggling to meet sales quotas.”
Now if we were to introduce change here, we’d say something more like, “As more consumers make purchasing decisions based on their research, salespeople have to work harder and engage more leads to make a sale. That means more time is spent on admin tracking all the leads and engagements in their pipeline, which takes time away from selling. However, there’s technology that can streamline this process.”
We’re more likely to shift perspectives with the latter approach and attract leads who believe in what we believe. This will eventually lead them to consider what you’re offering as a superior way to tackle their problem. It could be tempting to start pitching your product here.
Instead, you need to show what life will look like after the customer changes to a new way of working, framing the consequences of not taking action and showing them the benefits of the challenge. This is how you’ll elicit change. They’ll consider new ways of working if they understand what there is to gain, that is delivering the results that they really want. Crucially, this is when you should position yourself as the right person to help the prospect achieve their goal.
So you’ve painted a picture of the problem, the changes in the prospect’s world they need to pay attention to and how they’ll benefit from this change if they take action, now it’s time to present your product as the solution to the next steps they should take to achieve their desired outcomes.
Position your features against the old ways of doing things and then present them as superpowers for your prospect. Create a features checklist or data quadrants comparing your product with competitors. Because you’ve done all the previous groundwork, your product isn’t just a set of features, they’re superpowers for success.
Now for the final piece of your narrative, evidence. How do you back up and present the other heroes of your story, your existing customers and prospective clients? Use testimonials and case studies to showcase how they’ve gained results by using your product and how you’ve helped them navigate this new world. A good sales narrative not only keeps your ideal prospects engaged, it persuades them to follow along the journey. If they believe in what you believe and you can present a better way of doing things, you’re more likely to make a lifelong customer.
So far, we’ve outlined the foundations of your sales pitch, but what happens when you meet objections? If you want to learn more about sales pitches, visit our blog. We go more into detail there, including how you can create engaging content, how does it differ when you’re on a cold call versus a face-to-face presentation to the key stakeholders and how do you deliver a story that resonates with your prospects.
See you there!
