A Perfect Sales Pitch for Any Product
How to Pitch a Product So Good No One Could Ignore It
Regular folks think pitching is for sales reps, but that couldn’t be more wrong. Everybody at one point in their life must pitch. A company executive or founder pitches every day. A customer care officer would have to pitch every other day.
Marketers, just like sales reps make pitches every single time they create those ads, emails, or whatnot that bring in outbound prospects into their business.
So if you’re a startup founder, a company executive, a sales rep, a marketer, a customer support officer or you want to make a positive impact on the growth of your workplace by convincing more investors and customers to back your new ideas and products. You must build up your pitching school like an expert, I will share with you the same strategy used by industry experts for product pitching.
Step by Step on How to Make a Sales Pitch that is Irresistible
In the following few paragraphs, I will walk you through the nine steps to making a sales pitch that is simply irresistible and leads to practical results.
Step 1: DON’T Pitch – Make Conversations
I thought about this a lot in our viral e-commerce strategies (maybe someday, I will share it in this blog). Everybody hates a pitch; even sales guys hate getting pitched, including me.
I only hunt (keyword “hunt,” actively wanting it) for sales pitches, emails and ads because I love swiping from an expert, and I love studying what others are doing and strategies that work; otherwise… I wouldn’t say I like pitches.
And when I’m in my zone, swiping these incredible works of art to learn from, guess the ones I throw in the trash? Exactly… the ones that sound pitchy.
But you see those where there’s a conversation, storytelling, and before I know it, I’m hooked? Those are goldmines, and I preserve them.
You see, the brain is heavily wired to protect us, and human instinct has been about defending himself against any harm or loss. The moment a pitch comes up, the brain goes into a relaxed position, puts up all sorts of defenses, and from the onset, starts looking for faults and errors to protect itself from any exposure to financial risk.
This is an involuntary and a subconscious action that even the prospect you’re pitching can’t stop; it’s an instinct; when you do a direct pitch, you end up with two options, and it’s not 50-50. Either your prospects will love what you have to offer, which will lead to a successful sale, or they will hate it, and all you’ll get is a polite decline (and that’s if you’re lucky!).
The odds and defenses have been against you, so the tendency of getting a NO is many times higher than getting a Yes. Many sales reps are struggling with abysmal approval ratings and sales records; they never crack that first defense of their prospect.
Successful selling is about building a relationship with prospective clients and demonstrating how your product or service offers an immediate solution to their problems. A successful sales pitch isn’t a monologue. It’s a dialogue.
And I’m sure that the idea of a dialogue between you and your customers is much more appealing than a monologue, right? Because your prospect will only spend money with you when they believe your product is right for them and for you to achieve, there needs to be an understanding between you and your prospect.
Step 2: Buyer’s needs come first
Now, you understand that pitching is best as a form of a conversation; the next step in crafting the perfect product pitch is realizing the buyer’s needs must come first.
Every customer is different and has unique problems. So when pitching your product, you must always ask how your product can solve their problems.
Step 3: Create a connection with your story
Storytelling is proven to relax the brain and increase acceptance which converts into sales. Our brains love stories; this is why Hollywood movies turn out to be multi-million and billion-dollar tickets. It’s all about the story, and I talked about this a lot in our viral eCommerce strategies, which I will be sharing on this blog in the future.
Stories allow you to capture the attention of the audience (or customer), motivate people to take action, and build trust and rapport using relatable experiences in your story to establish connections between you (your product/brand) and the customer.
Good storytelling beats good selling any day. By pairing your brand and product story with facts and figures that back up your claims, you can quickly engage modern buyers to want to know more. Then, use this opportunity to tell your brand’s story, which is much more likely to close the deal and generate revenue.
Step 4: Always find a hook to hold onto
A perfect hook for any product pitch that will pull your customers like a horseshoe magnet will always have an ACTION, TIMELINE, and RESULTS.
– Action: What can be done with the product
– Timeline: The shortest amount of time or time frame within such action/task can be done with the product
– Result: The output/reward you’ll get from using the product to perform such action (this could be more time, freedom, ease of automation, more leads, more customers, more exposure for your business, etc.)
Using this, you should be able to craft magnetic hooks that will pull your audience’s attention and get them to listen to your entire product pitch (well, conversation + storytelling).
For example: if you were selling a social media management software
“Easily Discover Trending Topics, Curate and Publish to Your Social Media Pages in Few Clicks and Automatically Grow Your Followers Daily Free“
Let’s break down this simple headline hook.
– Action: Easily Discover Trending Topics, Curate and Publish to Your Social Media Pages (this is what the software can do for you)
– Timeline: Discover, Curate, Publish in a Few Clicks (this is the time which it will make you carry out the act of discovering, curating, and publish… just a few clicks)
– Result: Automatically Grow Your Followers Daily Free (this is the crucial reward you’ll gain from performing these actions with the software).
A hook is essential as it attracts your prospects and gets them to pay attention to the rest of your pitch.
Step 5: Share the problem, solve it, share your solution, and back it up with facts
Once you’ve hooked your prospects, the next point is to connect with them on the problems they have, as discussed in step 2. Share the issues with them in detail to let them know you’re very aware of their grievances.
And tell a story to connect with them on your/friend’s/colleague’s/X personal experience/journey with the same problem; this is where the story we talked about in step 3 becomes very important; it builds rapport.
Then tell them how you/your team/X overcame this problem and share the solution with them, how it works, and how it will benefit them (your products).
Remember, the buyer’s needs come first, so it’s about how they will benefit from this solution. Then back up your answers with statistics and facts. Imagine telling someone your new diet pill will help them lose weight, or your new argan serum will help them grow fuller hair. And you don’t show facts to back it up?
They’ll have to take this on your word. Remember, these prospects don’t know you personally nor have years of relationship with you, so why should there take you on your word?
You must back up statements about your solutions with facts, research, quotes from known authorities, before and after results of existing users, reviews from independent sources, testimonials, and so on. These facts should be readily verifiable to increase their trustworthiness.
Step 6: Always be closing
At this point, your prospect is already engaged with your offer, and it’s the perfect time to ask for the sale. Always ask for the sale. In fact, from the beginning of your pitch, you should start nudging them towards the close.
Example: right after my hook and some lines later, you’ll get a line like this…
During this XXXX (webinar, video, letter, email), I will show you why the XXXX is going wrong with you and what to do to achieve XXXX that you’ve always wanted, and by the end of this XXXX (webinar, video, letter, email), if you take action on the XXXX (product, service, etc.) that I’m offering/will offer you, you would gain XXXXX.
Do you see what happened there? I’ve just literally closed them from the beginning of the pitch. This will start prepping their mind and nudging them towards spending money with me and buying my product.
Don’t wait till the end to close; permanently be approaching from the start. Every nudge you give them pushes them towards saying YES when you eventually ask for the sale.
Step 7: Lay out their options and trash them, making your solution the most viable, break their defenses and push them over the fence
One of the most significant factors that stop salespeople from closing the sale is their prospects sitting on the fence, which happens quite often. In an average pitch. 5% are instant. YES, 12% are instant NO, and 83% of the audience sits on the fence; you can see how this is where the money is.
What separates a good marketer from a GREAT MARKETER is their ability to convert prospects from sitting on the fence to saying YES. And the good news about that is that it’s quite easy. Most prospects sit on the fence for the most basic reasons, it could just be a simple question they need to be answered.
Example: will this work for me if my XXX is XXX?
This is why FAQs are significant; They do a number on fence-sitters; it answers most of these one-line questions that keep your prospects sitting on the fence. The first thing you need to do to wear down their defenses is to lay out their options; For every product or service you sell, there must be a competition or something that looks like it (in first-to-market products).
And you have to believe your prospects already know about them and are already thinking in their minds if your product will give them better value than XXX product.
The only way to win is to get in front of this. Talk about these competing products and services, and show how your product is better than them, maybe in features, ease of use, performance, pricing, etc.
Be the one to paint and control the narrative, and direct the outcome to your benefit; you must always be the winner. Then talk about what life or their business will be without your product, paint a blatant pitch for them, hit all their pain points, and alleviate them by reminding them the solution is your product.
Think of their questions, reserves, holdbacks, and hurdles ahead of them, and prepare the answers to each; this will take a massive break down their defenses.
Step 8: Short, sweet, and clean
Don’t spend too long pitching if it’s not a webinar/life seminar where you’re using the educational approach to sell that requires you to teach your audience a significant amount of information; otherwise, you’ll wear them out.
Keep your sales pitch short and sweet… bam, bam bam, close! Always make sure there are no grammatical errors in your pitch.
Step 9: Follow Up
This will set you apart from the rest of the marketers and salespeople; data from Yesware revealed that 70% of salespeople give up after the first try, and this is excellent news.
Because this means you can perform better than average salespeople. The same stat also showed that it takes five follow-ups to close a sale. Can you see the loophole there?
Mailshake statistics showed that salespeople who followed up the second time got 21% more responses from their prospects.
And today, there are so many ways to follow up with prospects.
- Emails
- Phone Calls
- Online ads retargeting (easiest and fastest)
- Messenger marketing
And so much more. Following these steps will give you desired results.
RELATED: 9 Best Sales Videos Ever: Watch The Best Salesman Pitches
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I'm a serial enterpreneur with over 14 years of experience in digital marketing and SaaS.
Currently leading the ADILO team and building a strong brand @BigCommand