When you’re talking to a prospect, you only have a small window to grab their attention. It might be a couple of minutes on a phone call, the first few lines of an email, or the opening of a presentation. The key to success in those moments is to communicate clearly and efficiently, which is not always easy to do. Knowing what to say and ask can be a real challenge.
But we are going to help with that in this video and blog post, which is the first part of a 3-part training series on how to create a winning sales pitch.
The Sales Pitch Most Salespeople Use
Most salespeople use what I call a product-focused sales pitch, which usually sounds something like this:
This is who I am.
This is the company I’m with.
This is the product I sell.
Do you need what I sell?
Can we schedule a meeting to discuss my product?
While that seems like a logical approach, it is not optimum for a few reasons:
- Prospects get sold to a lot
- Their guardedness will be at a medium level
- This flags you as being a salesperson trying to sell something
- Tiggering more guardedness
- All about me
- Prospects are not in buying mode
- Leading to objections, rejection, and instant deletes
The Core Principles of a Winning Pitch
Instead of using a product-focused sales pitch, we recommend you flip that around by using a prospect-focused sales pitch.
- More about the prospect
- Sounds less like a salesperson
- Fewer objections and rejections
- Establish more conversations
- Create more rapport
- Generate more leads and closed sales
In this series of training sessions, we will take you through a six-step process you can use to create a prospect-focused sales pitch for your product or service. But in this session, we only focus on going through the first three steps of that six-step process.
Step 1 – Product
The first step is to start with the product. This is because you need clarity on what you’re selling before you can connect it to your prospect’s world.
- Identify the product or service you’re pitching.
- List the main features.
- List how your product is different or better than the competition.
Step 2 – Select the Target
Next, identify the target audience for your pitch. Who are you selling to?
- If you’re just starting out, keep it broad: “small businesses” or “individual consumers.”
- For advanced sellers, narrow it down: industry, department, or decision-maker role.
Step 3 – Identify the Value
This is where most product-focused pitches stop. But a winning pitch goes further by connecting the product to how it helps the prospect.
To make this easier, we created a checklist of the main ways a product or service might help its customers:
- Make something work better
- Make something easier
- Decrease the time required
- Increase revenue or income
- Decrease costs or expenses
- Improve the customer’s product
- Decrease risk
- Improve visibility
You might be able to look at that checklist and get ideas for how your product or service helps. If not, bring back the features and differentiation you came up with on the previous step and look at those individually against the checklist and stop to think about if that individual detail helps your customers in any of those ways.
Putting It Into Action
Even if you stopped at this step, you’d already be far ahead of most salespeople, because you now have an optimized value proposition that you can weave into every prospecting touchpoint:
- Cold call openers
- Cold email messages
- Voicemail scripts
- Objection responses
- Networking intros
- Presentation openings
This shift transforms your conversations. Instead of sounding like a salesperson pushing a product, you’ll sound like a problem-solver focused more on the prospect than on the product you sell.
