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10 Highly Actionable Sales Pitch Tips and Ideas

The quality of your sales pitch presentation can make or break a deal, so it is important that you spend plenty of time working on it. From your opening line to your closing statement — all aspects of your sales pitch are important. In this post, we’ll be sharing several essential tips to help you craft a successful sales pitch presentation.

#1 –Take your research to the next level

Every successful salesperson knows that preparation is key when it comes to crafting a great sales pitch. Researching the prospect will help you determine the ideal direction of a sales pitch presentation to make it resonate with the prospect. Key areas you need to research include:

The prospect

Learn more about the prospect, their goals, and their personal preferences.

If you are pitching to a business:

  • What challenges are they facing and how can you help?
  • What does success look like for the prospect?
  • Who makes the purchasing decisions at the business?
  • What relationships does the prospect have with other businesses?
  • What are concerns might they have relating to your offer?
  • What products or services do they currently use?

The industry

If your prospect is a business, how well is their industry fairing at the moment? Is it booming or struggling with a specific problem that your product can help solve? Which challenges will the industry be dealing with in the coming years?

The competitors

Are there other products or services already in the marketplace which are similar to yours? How is yours different? Does it offer more value or deliver better results? Be ready to answer these questions, particularly if you are pitching to a well-informed prospect.

Use social media, articles, industry publications, conversations, feedback from past pitches, and other sources of information to answer these questions.

#2 – Share a value statement

It’s important to share some essential information about yourself and your business with the prospect. In addition to providing your name and a brief overview of what your business does, talk about your enterprise’s values and mission statement. This will help to build some rapport with the prospect and give them additional insight into your business.

#3 – Focus on your prospect

Don’t spend 10 minutes boasting about your business and the capabilities of your product or service. Instead, maintain focus on the prospect and their needs. Explain why your product or service is the ideal solution for the prospect, given their unique circumstances and personal preferences.

#4 – Talk problems and solutions

Instead of weighing a prospect down with a list of features and technological jargon, focus on problems and solutions. Identify the problems affecting a prospect either through research or discussion, then describe how your product or service will solve those issues.

One of the best ways to present problems and solutions is using the before-after-bridge. Begin with a thorough description of the current problem affecting a business including details of any negative impacts — the “Before”. Then, ask the prospect to imagine how good life would be if those problems were solved — the “After”. Finally, link the two scenarios with the “Bridge” which is how they will get there (with the help of your product or service).

#5 – Share compelling proof points

A proof point is irrefutable evidence of the importance, quality, and uniqueness of your offer. It’s important to have proof points ready to back up any claims you make during the presentation. If you claim that your software improves sales team productivity, have data available to prove it.

#6 – Customer stories

Integrating customer stories into a sales pitch presentation can be extremely effective. Start by sharing details of a customer who was dealing with a specific problem and explain how your product or service resolved it.

This approach provides additional proof points and demonstrates the problem-solving capacity of your offering. The prospect may also relate to the same problems and concerns that the customer in your story faced. Remember that statistics are easy to forget, while a story can be compelling and memorable.

#7 – Make your pitch conversational

Researchers have discovered that the success rates of sales presentations increases if they are more conversational in nature (something that is key for the Audience Advantage sales presentation platform). How much should you talk? One analysis of B2B sales phone calls found that the most successful salespeople talked less than 46% of the time.

That’s a lot of listening!  The best way to do less talking is to use open-ended questions about the prospect and their business. You can use their responses to create a more conversational pitch which is relaxed yet informative. This approach allows you to talk about problems and solutions specific to the prospect.

#8 – Incorporate simple graphics into your presentation

Graphics are a great way to clearly convey a message to your audience. Don’t talk about the benefits of your product or service when it is easier to do so with a graph or pie chart. However, it’s important to keep these images extremely simple to understand. Ideally, the prospect should be able to glance at the image and understand its meaning within a couple of seconds.

#9 – Destroy your competition

If a prospect is already using a similar product or service, your main challenge will be getting them to feel the need to change. This can be quite challenging because they are already familiar with the product or service they currently use. The best approach is to destroy the competition using proof points that clearly demonstrate the superiority of what you are offering. Be ready to take down the competition.

#10 – Use a strong call to action

Finally, finish the presentation with a strong call to action. Ideally, it should:

  • Be short and to the point
  • Incentivise action
  • Create a sense of urgency (time-limited bonuses work well or fear of loss)
  • Be specific about what you are offering
  • Be unique