Your best sales pitch is to not “pitch”, so what is it then?
How can you make the “Best Sales Pitch”?
Often, we see individuals who are specialists take on client-facing roles as they grow within their organization. While their expertise allows them the ability to advise in certain areas, whether or not the client is willing to listen to your advice is what we have to consider first. In today’s world of sales, the customer is smarter and more informed. The Internet and communications are abundant. They can find information on their own. They need to find someone they can work with and be comfortable working with. This is a principle that has never changed since the beginning of sales.
When I began in sales, I was working in a startup. Our initial sales training was on-the-job. There was one time I had the opportunity to enroll in some sales courses in Singapore. Even when these sales courses were offered by different operators, the key message was uniform: “Clients buy from who they trust”. So the question is, how do you build that trust?
Sales Pitch Mistake #1
Talk, talk, talk…. Many misconceptions about sales professionals is that you have to be “good talkers”. Not true. Radio DJ’s maybe. Think about it – how do you feel when someone just keeps talking at you without listening to what you’re looking for? The reason why too much talking lowers the perception of your value as an advisor is because you show too much self-interest. When self-interest is perceived to be imbalanced and weighted heavier than client-interest, we stop caring about being advised. We begin to feel the need to protect ourselves and naturally do this by blocking whatever the other person is trying to put forth towards us. Talk less, listen more. Let the customer share their views, and think through the way forward together.
Sales Pitch Mistake #2
Sales professionals usually run on targets and timelines. Making numbers by the quarter or trying to get into the sales club of the elite – common in the lives of sales executives. Now, when people feel pressured or rushed, they begin to get anxious and sometimes pushy. They try to exert pressure or even force an outcome to arrive earlier. When this happens during sales interactions with clients, the sales pitch becomes “pushy”. There’s an old and outdated saying from sales training courses – “Always Be Closing”. This was called the “ABC” acronym.
Think about it from the client’s end – if you feel pressured to make a decision, what would you feel? What would you do? It’s important to get closure and move forward in sales, but it has to be a decision which all parties are moving towards and happy with. The progression must be aligned, and we know whether we are aligned if we stay connected with our clients during the interactions. Maybe the old “ABC” acronym should change to “Always Be Connecting”
Sales Pitch Mistake #3
20 years after attending that sales training in Singapore that I mentioned above, I now had the opportunity to deliver sales training as a facilitator. This week, I was working with an experienced group of experienced investment banking experts who were now taking on client-facing roles. That experience inspired me to write this blog – because I thought, “Why are these intelligent experts not getting the buy-in they deserve?” As I listened to their situations and ways of dealing with clients, it was consistent that they were being too rational with their clients. Too “black & white”, per say. They would give figurative estimates, show graphs and charts to prove they were a superior option. Yet, they did not consider the element of their audience’s emotions.
In this business scenario, if they were to enter into any business relationship with their clients, it would be a long-term partnership. This would require almost daily interaction and a lot of joint-decisions. Well – when we’re looking at who we will be partnering with, the social fit is always evaluated, yet rarely spoken. It’s almost like the client is thinking “Can we live with these folks?” In the above section, we talked about self-interest lowering the trust in us. If we are missing social connection with clients, it lowers the feeling of alignment others have in us. They won’t feel there’s enough in common and may fear that different values would bring about more conflict than cooperation.
So what did we do with the participants of the sales training in Singapore which I mentioned above? They learned to build rapport before pitching anything. They learned to take time to understand where their clients were coming from, and how they were feeling all throughout. Sales pitches don’t land unless we connect.
