How to improve sales pitches

Pitching is one of your sales team’s most important responsibilities. You want your representatives to bring in as much revenue as possible, but unless they hone their pitching skills, they could be missing opportunities. There is a delicate balance within the sales process, and prospects need to be approached at exactly the right time. Contacting cold leads could alienate them and reduce the chances that they will ever become customers.

However, you don’t have to contend with poor pitch timing any longer. An online marketing system scores and nurtures leads so your employees can deliver pitches at exactly the right moment for a more effective sales process.

How salespeople derail pitches

There are many different factors that can cause a pitch to go wrong. Inc. Magazine listed the following things that can negatively impact sales pitches:

  • Not building suspense: Pitching involves storytelling. If a prospect can immediately discern the point of your pitch while you’re giving it, he or she may lose interest.
  • Being too accessible: Prospects can end up feeling like you are wasting their time unless sales meetings occur within a set timeframe. Establishing the time limit at the beginning of the meeting can make reps seem more important.
  • Not being truthful with experts: This problem is growing bigger all the time. Leads spend more time researching product and vendor options than ever before, so reps can’t lie to them, whether it’s about the offering, expenses, or projected return on investment. Depending on how much individual research the prospect has done, any misinformation could be detected during a pitch.

How to make an excellent pitch

This is an aspect of sales that many skilled sales professionals struggle with. It isn’t easy to say the appropriate thing at the right time. This is why your employees need to do their homework before approaching leads, according to a blog post for Salesforce by Stuart Leung. The sales process is more complex than it used to be, and rather than having a sales meeting during which reps talk at prospects for 20 minutes, it should be a conversation. Your sales team needs to demonstrate that it understands clients’ pain points.

Because buyers do a great deal of research before ever contacting a company, your reps need to spend time learning about prospects before pitching. Conducting an effective sales meeting means you need a deep understanding of the potential customer. The blog stated that 82 percent of buyers feel like salespeople do not grasp their needs. Each client is different, which means your employees can’t give the same pitch every time.

The more you know about prospects, the deeper connections you can form with them. It also helps you create a more relevant pitch, which boosts engagement during the meeting. However, don’t overwhelm them with your message. Instead of discussing every feature of your product offerings, talk about the ones that matter most to prospects based on the needs they are trying to fulfill.

Marketing automation can streamline the sales process and allow reps to focus on pitching

Sales has become more complicated than ever, and teams need tools that allow them to maximize effectiveness. Marketing automation gives salespeople greater visibility into the buyers’ journey, which can help them streamline their processes. These platforms allow you to nurture prospects with targeted emails, score leads as they are captured, and generate reports on campaign effectiveness. While these tactics may seem more like marketing responsibilities, marketing automation can improve the sales process without requiring you to hire a marketing team. In particular, you can benefit from integrating marketing automation with your existing customer relationship management platform, a separate blog post for Salesforce by Jenna Hanington said.

This integration can significantly improve Internet lead generation because you can quickly score prospects based on their fit and level of interest. Your CRM provides a record of when a rep last contacted each prospect, which is helpful for determining how to follow up. In addition, lead scoring allows your team to quickly identify the best leads, which can then be assigned to the most appropriate rep to handle their unique needs. With increased visibility into the sales cycle, your employees can easily track leads through the entire sales cycle. Having access to this type of information is one of the first steps to refining pitches.

By monitoring where prospects are in the sales cycle and which materials they are interacting with, your team can more effectively tailor how they follow up with and pitch to leads. Much of the lead nurturing activities performed through this software can be triggered automatically so sales reps don’t have to constantly get in touch directly. This frees up their time to craft a unique approach for each potential client.