Your sales pitch is not working.
Prospects are getting switched off. No clients are coming in through the door.
You’ve failed as a salesman. Or have you?
Every salesperson knows that having a great sales pitch is an important first step to closing a deal. And literally any salesperson can create a sales pitch.
But not every salesperson can create a sales pitch that WORKS.
Sure, you have a product or service that will improve your clients’ life by leaps and bounds. You have prepared answers for every question they ask, and reasons for every doubt they may have.
But will it matter if your client isn’t even willing to listen to your pitch in the first place?
Today’s clients are vastly different from the clients of yesteryear.
Expectations these days are often NOT what we read in our college textbooks. With information easily at the tip of their fingers, they are far more educated about the wide range of options available out there, apart from the one you have just offered them.
So what makes you and your sales pitch stand out? How can you lock in your client’s attention from the get go? How do you seal the deal without looking too desperate?
Don’t Go Into Your Sales Pitch So Soon!
Ironically, for a sales pitch to work these days, you should not be pitching at all.
Clients get turned off when you approach them with a ready prepared script of what your product or service can offer. They can smell hard-sell from a mile away and will close their doors to anything you have to say.
Instead, start a conversation with them. Build a relationship with your client the best way you know how. Find out what are their needs that require solutions? What do they wish will happen to get their problems out of the way?
From there, introducing your products or services will come naturally. You will be able to easily demonstrate how you can help them in the problems that they are facing. You can specifically address how their pain points will be lessened or diminished with your solutions. Which brings us to the next point…
Have Your Client’s Interest at Heart
You have to believe in this. If you do not have your client’s interest at heart in the first place, you can forget about ever closing a deal.
Traditionally, salespeople tend to try and grasp the attention of their clients by dumping information about their product or service onto their clients. This strategy might have worked 30 years ago. But with the large number of distractions present today and with people’s generally shortened attention span, your client will lose interest less than a minute into your introduction.
Instead, let them do the talking. They want to be listened to. They want you to know what problems they have so you can offer a solution that caters to their specific needs. Let them dump the information on you instead. It will give you the opportunity to gather more information about what they need. It allows you to understand your clients’ frustrations and even understand them better as people as well.
Through understanding their needs, you are not selling a product or a service your company provides. You will be selling your clients the ability to overcome their persistent issues.
Remember, the clients don’t care about your story.
They don’t care what your company’s history is, or how you plan to save the world one step at a time. They have enough on their plate as it is, dealing with their own stories. They want to know how you can help them make their own story better.
Be Yourself
Ever spoken to a salesperson and secretly called bluff to everything they have to say, share or offer from the very start of the conversation?
Clients know when you are sincere about helping them find solutions, or if you are just putting on a front and trying to quickly seal this final deal to meet your monthly quota.
Connect with them the best way you can, and that is genuinely you. Be it over a casual lunch chat, a friendly game of golf, or even evening drinks at a bar. Don’t model your sales technique after the world’s top salesperson.
Don’t follow the cookie-cutter way of being the perfect salesperson.
Create YOUR OWN best methods and be the top salesperson in your very own unique way of selling.
In today’s world, personalisation is almost always preferred over professionalism.
Genuineness is appreciated over false preparedness. Admit when you don’t know the right answer to something and tell them that you will get back to them once you do. Don’t make up an answer on the spot, especially if you are not sure. Clients can easily identify when you are smoking your way through.
They might not be saying anything, but you can be sure that in their minds, the deal is already off.
Clients appreciate making real human connections, and that means that you cannot stick to a standard script that you have prepared ten clients ago. There is ‘one size fits all’ solution or response to everything.
Every interaction you have will be different, and you need to be present, and be yourself to readily respond to the situation.
Don’t be afraid to be yourself.
Don’t rush the interaction. Enjoy the process.
If you’ve enjoyed this article, and you would like to know more, you can download the FREE Strengths guide that we’ve prepared for you down below.
Aly is StrengthsAsia’s marketing and communications guru and lead editor. She's over the top inquisitive and everyone in the company knows her as “The Googler” as she practically googles everything. Honestly, we all worry for her… She is also the Principal Trainer for our one of a kind ice cream team building workshops in Asia.