Three Ways to Make Your Sales Pitch More Compelling

In sales pitches, it’s natural that doubt creeps in. Follow these 3 simple steps to make your pitch more compelling.

Key takeouts:

• Recognize and verify where your customer is in their journey – be attuned to their concerns and know how to address them.
• Don’t leave it to your customer to understand how and why your company and solution is different in a market where they have choices.

Here’s a scene that will be all too familiar to you: You have just finished speaking with one of your most opportunistic customers, happy that it went well and already working on the next conversation in your head. But then you think back to your discussion and the answers you gave to some of the customer’s question. Will they remember the main points? And will the pitch stand out among the other competitors they are speaking with?

It’s natural to second guess yourself, especially in high-potential situations, but you don’t have to. We have three simple, tried-and-tested steps for you to follow that will make your sales pitch more compelling and leave you feeling assured after every meeting.

Show how you improve your customer’s situation.

Zoom out a bit from the immediate ask, and investigate underlying issues that might be causing the customer’s immediate problem. They have come to you to solve problem X, but imagine if you could improve situations A, B, and C so that X resolves itself? As a recent Harvard Business Review article stresses, homing in on “the progress that the customer is trying to make in a given circumstance—what the customer hopes to accomplish” shows that it’s most often bigger than the current problem; a more holistic view of their ‘job to be done’ is necessary.

You can do this by addressing two important questions:

• What benefits does the customer get from using your product or service?
• What pain points will the customer continue to experience if they do not use your product or service?

For example, your customer’s problem might be “I receive too many emails”, and your solution might be an email filtering system. On top of showing that you can filter your customer’s email, you could also show how the tool saves time, improves relationships through better email responses and reduces frustration in searching for archived emails. You’re now providing a complete email system solution instead of an email filter. Moreover, if you demonstrate that your email system alleviates the pain of bounced emails due to an incorrect email address and the potential lost business from missed emails, you have shown what your customer will have to go through if he or she doesn’t use your product. They’ll choose email Nirvana any day!

As well as showing that you can solve your customer’s problem, make sure your sales pitch also clearly communicates why your customer will be better off after they purchase your product or service, and paint the picture of what drawbacks they will encounter if they don’t.

Make your sales pitch unique by gathering competitive intelligence

Just like you, your customer is doing their homework, comparing multiple potential vendors at once. You need to make sure that your pitch isn’t a carbon copy of theirs. By going into a meeting armed with what you have that your competitors don’t, you’ve already turned to tables in your favour.

Make it easy for your customer to see what he or she will get with your product that she won’t get from anyone else. The best way to understand this is to be able to intelligently compare your product or service to that of your competition. Very often, this vital part of the pitch is neglected—it’s far easier to know your product than that of any competitors—but if you make some basic comparisons in advance, your product or service will stand out in your customer’s mind when it comes time for the buying decision. Otherwise, you leave it to your customer to figure out, and maybe they won’t or they might get it wrong.

Turn objections into benefits and help them be their best

You’ve got a great product or service, you sell it every day and sing its praises, but customers will always have questions or concerns. A healthy scepticism is natural. They need to have the right amount of certainty to vouch for your product to their peers or superiors. They need to be able to show how you come out above the competition, and often, these objections will come from claims competitors may have made. Consider the fact that for better or worse, most sales decisions are made based on comparisons and correlations. Arming yourself and your pitch with these three tips will alleviate the concerns and make your pitch compelling:

1. Acknowledge

Embrace your customer’s objection: Whether it is entirely true or not, the customer believes that there is some limitation or drawback of your product or service.

2. Qualify

Repeat and qualify the objection: Communicate to the customer that you’ve heard and understand his or her objection and also the background, perceived drawback and breakdowns they are living with and figure out what possible ways it can be mitigated.

3. Re-focus

We all remember those dreaded interview questions: “Tell me your biggest weaknesses”. You learned to acknowledge and reframe them. This is no different. Re-focus the discussion to a strength or benefit. If you can associate a benefit with a perceived weakness of your product, it strengthens the customer’s perception of your offering. When they go through the buying decision, later on, the objections will turn into compelling points in their mind.

For example, maybe your competitor told your customer that your product has a complicated setup process. When you claim that your email system helps save your customer time, they may bring this up as a concern. A sample response would be: “It does take some time to set up if you choose to do it manually, but we offer many automated tools that can easily do this for you.”

This one simple sentence does 3 things:

• Acknowledges the issue:  “It does take time to set up…” : Your customer has raised a valid concern.
• Limits the issue: “…if you choose to do it manually…” : The problem only exists in limited circumstances that the customer likely won’t do.
• Refocuses the discussion: “…we offer many automated tools…” : Your competitors might not have automated tools. Now when the customer thinks about time to set up the system, their mind is refocused to automated tools—something your competitor cannot offer.

You can be proactive by discovering objections can be discovered through win/loss analysis, customer interviews, and even by reading online reviews of your product or service.

Of course, you won’t be able to anticipate every objection that comes up, but if you’re aware of the most common ones it will help you eliminate some obstructions to the sales process, and it puts you in the best position to handle the rest.

To learn more about how to improve your deal win-rate with competitive intelligence, check out our resources or get in touch with us, we’d be happy to help.