Improving your sales pitch

Pitchbound wants to empower sales reps to become sales athletes and empowerment starts with understanding the pains, the goals, and the process of sales reps, so we interviewed more than 50 sales reps with the goal of understanding how they work, what their biggest challenges was and how they picture success.

Pitchbound was built to empower sales reps to become sales athletes. We have interviewed more than 50 sales athletes to understand their pains, mindset, work process and success experiences and answer the question: How to be better at sales?

These sales athletes have different seniority and performance profiles, and they are split out on both product-based selling and service-based selling. We share our findings below!

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Go ALL-IN onpersonalisation, collaboration, and information
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Across all interviews and responses, one theme always comes up: Success in sales is all about personalisation. Sales reps can’t seem to stress enough how important it is to not be generic and anticipate the needs of a prospect. Collaboration and information are the two runner ups and together with personalisation, these three themes create the triangle of success:

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1) Personalisation.

‍Personalisation is about not being generic and scripted but rather building a natural, relevant conversation with a prospect. To start personalising your calls, emails, InMessages and demos more, always ask yourself why you are reaching out and why it’s relevant for the prospect. You need to do them a service. A great way to do this is to prepare relevant market trends, use-cases or refer to relevant news early on in the conversation.

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2) Collaboration.

‍Everyone working in sales can agree upon one thing: Motivation is key to high performance. Teamwork is mentioned as the number one reason for maintaining a high level of motivation in sales teams and top-performers report that sharing and receiving tips and tricks within teams greatly increase their performance and sense of wholeness. Share winning phrases, new market trends or a good strategy for overcoming a tough objections with your colleagues and whenever you feel challenged, seek advice from the same colleagues!

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3) Information.

Top performers report that having the right information at the right time greatly increase the probability of closing a deal as it increases personalisation, authority and helps create better and more natural conversations. We spend so much time trying to get through to prospects and once we get through to a decision-maker, we are instantly challenged on product, sales, and industry knowledge! That is why having the right information available and ready to use makes it easier to sieze the moment and create an opportunity. A good strategy for this is to assume some pain points based on your ICP and choose the value propositions to match the pain points and use cases to cement your value propositions.

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Winning tips for each phase of your pitch

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We asked the sales reps to mention their top winning tips for better conversations – both overall and for each phase of the pitch (Introduction, Discovery / Qualification, Matching and Closing) – and the results are in.

Overall, personalisation, proper identification of pain points, bridging said pain points with the relevant value propositions and being relaxed in conversations are the most important factors to incorporate. Deep diving intothe specific phases, the following winning tips emerged:

1. Introduction

Matching the prospects’ personality and catching their attention to ensure they are listening to your pitch. This can be done through adapting your tone of voice and using leading questions.

2. Discovery / Qualification

Asking the right questions is the most important thing to identify the relevant painpoints and especially the use of ‘Power Questions’ can help create a natural conversation that flows in a desired direction.

3.Matching

Sales reps agree that matching pain points with relevant value propositions and use-cases, and of course handling upcoming objections, is the most difficult phase of the pitch. Accommodating incoming objections politely and changing the perspective through the use of power questions is a very powerful strategy to overcome this. Being adaptive and investigative is crucial to find the right time and reason to close.

4. Closing

ABC – Always Be Closing. The first rule of closing is to always try to close. When you try, try to create a high sense of urgency and be decisive. This creates trust and credibility if you’ve succeeded in the phases before closing.

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The answers above came from interviewing more than 50 sales athletes – feel free to drop a comment below!