The 8-Step Process for Writing a Winning Sales Pitch in Less Than 15 Minutes

Businesses these days are spending a lot on marketing and advertising to generate leads. It is painful to see when those leads are not converted into sales despite the best efforts from your sales team.

Here are some of the problems salespeople face. According to a survey, 48% of salespeople complain that they feel threatened by the low price competitors, and it's a big issue while closing a sale.

The average closing rate is less than 50%, even for the best salespeople.

Furthermore, the closing rate has been incessantly undergoing a sharp drop for the previous six years due to increasing competition.

So, is there a formula that the most successful salespeople across the world use to increase conversion?

It is also true that 20% of the best people close 80% of overall sales deals. Would you like to know the secret of their success? According to experts, your sales pitch plays a crucial part while closing the sale. So how should you write your sales pitch?

In this article, you'll find three essential tips and an eight-step process to write a winning sales pitch that will change the game for you forever.

A. Make It More Conversation-Oriented

Traditional sales pitches don't work anymore. You can see smart salespeople in formal suits making sales presentations. Still, the percentage of salespeople hitting their sales targets has dropped from 63% to 53% since 2015. So, it is more about meaningful conversations in the reversed situation than making pitches more like a one-way street.

It's no wonder that only 13% of executive buyers believe that salespeople genuinely understand their business issues while demonstrating a way to solve them. Most salespeople are so obsessed with their products and brands that they completely forget who they are talking to and their struggles. So, initiate conversations and discuss the problems your prospects are facing.

Reverse-engineering the sales pitch may dramatically change the game for you.

One major drawback with a traditional sales pitch is that it leaves you with just two options - a "yes" or "no." It is not aimed at building relationships. And it would help if you had a dialogue to build strong relationships rather than a monologue.

B. Reverse Engineer the Game, Put Buyers First

Now that you have moved away from pitching, you need to start a need-based conversation with the buyer. When conversations happen, you build trust and establish effective communication. Since every buyer is different in terms of personality, situation, buying capacity, and needs, you need to assess their needs first. During the sales meeting, you can discuss in detail how your product or service will meet their needs and address their pain points. It will also help you to display a need for them to buy the product.

It will also help you know whether your customer is a right-brain thinker or a left-brain thinker. The left-brain thinker thinks and decides based on logic and facts, whereas the right-brain thinker is more creative and emotional.

C. Don't Keep It Dry and Formal; Use Storytelling to Connect

Storytelling is extremely helpful in sales because it allows you to connect with your customer. It helps them relate to your brand on a personal level and gives them a reason to buy your products or services. Storytelling is scientifically proven to impact the human mind, especially the subconscious mind, and it aids in training, education, marketing, and sales.

It also helps in boosting sales as all humans perform 99% of their activities using the subconscious mind and only 1% with the conscious brain. So try to engage your buyers with storytelling as it will help you close the deal and generate revenue quickly.

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Your sales pitch is indispensable to maintaining your company's cash flow and revenues. It is imperative, therefore, to pay attention to your sales pitch and make it right.

The Eight-Step Process to Writing an Effective Sales Pitch

Here is the eight-step process to writing an effective sales pitch that you can use to improve your sales numbers:

1. Identify the Buyer Personas for Your Business

It's essential first to create detailed buyer personas for your business to write an effective sales pitch. Here is a simple way to do that:

A. Describe your offer and how it can help people or businesses solve their problems.

B. List all the features of your product and then write down the corresponding benefits. While writing benefits, you need to be highly creative. Go beyond the general benefits and think about benefits to a wide range of people and customer segments.

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C. Now brainstorm the buyer personas of the customers who are likely to buy your product. You can also dig into your CRM database and customer profiles to get deeper insights into the buyer personas you can target using your sales pitch.

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The idea is to use a different pitch for each buyer persona to make it even more effective.

2. Create Attention-Grabbing Headlines and Email Subject Lines

According to Copyblogger, 80% of people will read your headline, and only 20% will read the rest. Readers' attention span is decreasing sharply with increasing content on the web, so you need attention-grabbing headlines to hook them. The same is true for email subject lines.

With a flood of emails in users' inboxes, it becomes highly critical to choose the subject lines that can instantly attract the user. A slightly dull subject line can reduce the open rate significantly. Again defining buyer personas will be extremely helpful here as it will help you craft the headlines and email subject lines according to the interest of your audience.

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Here are a few tips for writing better headlines:

A. Use emotions in your headlines because it increases the engagement manifold. The articles with emotionally charged headlines perform better than articles with straightforward headlines.

B. Don’t keep your headlines short. A study by CoSchedule reveals that headlines between 16 and 18 words produce the most engagement.

C. Still, as mobile users are growing exponentially, it is advisable to use short and sweet headlines so people can read them on their tiny screens without being distracted by the wordiness.

D. Use power words such as “horror stories,” “never again,” “price break,” “Frenzy.” and “Frugal,” to boost conversions.

However, consistent testing of your headlines is recommended as it will help you figure out the types of headlines that grab your audience’s attention and lead to increased response.

3. Support Your Claims With Data

People love to read the data that is reliable and is backed by authentic references. According to a study by Dimension Research, 90% of respondents confirmed that positive online reviews influenced their buying decisions in a big way. Because online reviews are taken as proof of your claims, your pitch needs to be full of facts and stats.

Since you are making a serious claim that you can solve a problem for your buyer, it would help you support your claims with case studies, stats, survey results, and references from authentic sources.

4. Ask for Sales

In the previous points, you learned how to use a sales pitch to address your customers' pain points and tell them how your product solves their problems. You also learned how to use facts and data to support your claims. The next step is highly crucial, and most people skip that. 85% of the meeting sessions between sales guys and their prospects end up without the sales representatives ever asking for the sale and it's a considerable number.

The above stats also explain the reason why most of the sales pitches fail. Now that you have convinced your prospect that your product has excellent features and can solve their burning issues, it's time to tell them what to do next. Otherwise, it will fade away from their memory, just like a Netflix show or an Instagram post.

The call to action may include asking them to click a website link or dial a phone number to close the sale. Make sure that all your efforts may go to waste in this noisy world if you don't use a pre-decided call to action.

5. Refine Your PitchĀ

A few last-minute tweaks can completely change your pitch and make it more professional and feeling. So, run a spell check and a grammar check, look for missing information, broken sentences, and missing words and phrases.

A rushed or hastily written pitch can throw a negative impression, so polish it before clicking the “send” or “publish” button. And don’t forget to add the touch of personalization in the end as it might make it much more effective.

6. Write a Follow-up Message

Even the best pitch written by an expert will not work if you don't have a follow-up schedule. There is a 21 percent chance that your follow-up email will get answered even if your first email is not responded to. After several follow-ups, the possibility that the recipient will respond increases by up to 30%.

For sales pitch examples on how to write sales emails and follow-ups, refer to these templates.

7. Be Consistent and Systematic

Even the best pitches and follow-ups aren't going to work if you aren't consistent and lack a systematic approach. Decide how many pitches you have to send in a week and follow-ups with the clients you have already approached. If you are consistent, the conversion will keep on happening, and it will keep your business afloat.

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To be consistent, you can do the following:

1. Decide the number of pitches to be made every week.
2. Decide the number of appointments to be made every week.
3. Spend some time on improving your pitches to achieve better performance and results.

With this kind of planning, you will maintain consistency despite your busy schedule, meetings, and other obligations.

8. Keeping on Experimenting and Tweaking Your PitchĀ

Like other marketing strategies, you should keep experimenting and tweaking your sales pitch to figure out what kind of messages are most effective. It will help you write beautiful sales pitches that produce the best results.

Conclusion

With the above steps, you can consistently improve your pitching and keep on adding clients successfully. You will also be able to write your sales pitch within 10 minutes.

So before you approach your prospective customer the next time, use the tips given above and see the results for yourself.

Remember, traditional pitches are no more effective in sales because these are more about your brand, products, and features. Your customers might not be interested in who you are and what you do. They are more interested in how you can solve their problems. Keep the customers' requirements before everything else and tailor your pitch accordingly.