The Sales Pitch: What Is It and How to Do It Yourself

To sell, the seller must inform the customer about his/her products, explain their characteristics, how to use them, discuss the means of payment, dispel their doubts, and apply sales strategies in order to convince the customer to buy. All of these steps and how to get the customer to buy is the sales pitch. 

Many salespeople fail in this attempt because even though they have the basic experience or skills to achieve the goal, they fail to get the customer to buy their products. 

In this article, we are going to talk about this tool, the pitch, which will allow you to overcome all these difficulties related to the process of selling and negotiating with customers and achieving positive results. 

The best sales books are unanimous on one point: with a good sales pitch, you'll be ready to study your customer's behavior, pay attention to their responses, and tailor your pitch. And all this will promote his desire to buy. 

 

What is a sales pitch?

As we have already mentioned it, this is a tool which helps the salesperson to prepare his/her speech during the sales interview with the customer and which consists in analyzing three basic elements: the description of the product (goods or services) it offers, general company information and customer characteristics. 

Based on this information, we can always pay attention to the customer's behavior and define an action plan for them to accept your offer. 
As you can see, this tool relies on customer behavior. The point is, not all customers react the same way. So, to get a feeling about how they might behave with the offer, we need to know what they expect from the negotiation, what their needs or expectations are for the product we are offering. 

Note… Some expectations cannot be controlled by the salesperson, because they depend on factors such as the customer's way of being, his/her education, his/her past experiences, the image of the company (what it means by other customers), product characteristics, etc. 

This is why it is important to make this distinction. There are the expectations that the client expresses, those that he/she does not express with words but with his/her gestures, and those that he himself/herself ignores. 
The sales pitch is therefore a document that charts the path to follow during the interview and the sales funnel. In addition to persuading the customer and guiding their behaviuor towards a buying decision, the sales pitch offers many other advantages:

• It avoids improvisation. Having all the detailed information in front of them, the seller has no further doubts. This guarantees him greater security.
• It lists the actions to be done. The pitch defines everything that needs to be done from the moment the conversation is initiated, until the empathy of the interlocutor is obtained. In other words, it defines what needs to be done to detect the customer's expectations and thus puts the salesperson (and the customer) in the best conditions before arriving at the selling proposition.
• It allows you to repeat its application. By defining the procedure to follow, the argument serves as a "step-by-step guide". Several selles will apply this guide and it will help achieve the group's objectives. This is why it can also be used as a tool for evaluating the performance of sales teams..
• Finally, it serves as a tool for continuous improvement. Once everybody applies the pitch, that the results are evaluated against the level of sales, it can be used as a basis to deploy points of improvement in the sales process.

There are several methods for writing sales pitches, developed by various authors and academics in this field, but here I would like to give you some ideas.

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How to write your own argument?

The following points are just a few ideas about creating the pitch. From this starting point, you will have to evolve it.

1. Develop the Product Description: A good way to start the sales pitch is to develop the exact and precise description of the product (good or service) you want to sell. This is why, as a seller, you must have a catalog or a product sheet that shows all the advantages or qualities of your products.
2. Promote your product and your company: it is very important that you fully understand the philosophy and the strategic elements of the company: mission, vision, strategic objectives, values and, of course, sales policies. You can also provide information about the history or image of the company, customer references and anything else that can serve as a reference and thus generate customer confidence.
3. Know Your Prospects: As a salesperson, you need to know who your target audience is. This will avoid wasting time and energy with customers who will never buy, either because the product you are selling is not intended for them or because it does not meet their needs or expectations. This is why it is important to segment the market well and, if possible, to prepare customer files, with information that reflects everything you need to know about each of them.
4. Predict Customer Behavior: This is where you ultimately define the sales pitch or route to take, that is, you need to detail what questions the customer may ask and how best to go. 'answer to. The information gathered during the first three steps helps answer these questions.

Sales arguments and objections.

Here is an example of what a customer might usually wonder: 

What do I gain if I buy the product? 

Why should I buy from you and not from other suppliers? 

In all cases, it is advisable to define several questions and/or objections and their answers. 

Some authors claim that in an “average sale” there can be up to 20 objections, and for every objection, defining the best possible answers is synonymous with success. 

Finally, you can test the developed document and, based on the results, improve it to craft your final argument, either by including more questions or by modifying the answers. 

What is important to do to be successful is to take ownership of all the key aspects and put them into practice. Because having a good sales pitch does not guarantee success, but not having one is usually a guarantee of failure. 
 

Learn more about: 

5 sales tools that can help boost your business 
Sales course for large companies 
What are the best techniques for concluding deals? 
9 simple and effective strategies to sell more 
Optimise your sales cycle with a powerful CRM