Wise Startup Blog

How do your potential customers feel when you reel off your sales pitch? Are they yawning or are they ecstatic and can’t wait to start throwing money at you?

Regardless of your effectiveness, your pitch can always get better, and from Jill Konrath at Selling to Big Companies, she has a great exercise:

Using a 1-10 (tops) scale, evaluate the following pitches:

• We offer one-stop shopping for all your (fill in the blank) needs.
• We’re the industry leader in (fill in the blank) and have been recognized for our exceptional (fill in the blank).
• We specialize in ( fill in the blank) and work with well-known clients such as Microsoft, Best Buy and Kraft.

thinking…

1

2

3

4

5

done.

How Good Of A Salesman Are You?

Got your results? How’d you do? Are these 5s? 7s? 10s?

When Jill conduced her experiment, she found that most participants rated the propositions on a scale from 4 to 6 because “they were nice benefit statements about the company but not quite as punchy.” The fact of the matter is:

All the above value propositions really deserve a score of one. Not four. Not six. Just a measly score of one.

While those commonly used value propositions listed above might be important at some point in the decision process, they’re totally and utterly worthless when prospecting.

When it comes to capturing a decision maker’s attention, here’s what you need to think about:

* Strong value propositions pique curiosity and entice. When prospects hear them, they want to learn more.

* Strong value propositions create a stark contrast from the status quo. When prospects hear them, they’re willing to consider making a change.

How Would You Respond To This Pitch?

Say a salesman calls you up and says the following:

“Eric. Jill Konrath calling from Selling to Big Companies. We offer one-stop shopping for all your sales training needs – everything from lead generation to closing. We use state-of-the-art methodologies to ensure our training sticks.”

Would this cause you to get up in your chair and throw handfuls (yes, handfuls) of money at the man? Would it cause you to even flinch as you tell him, kindly, that you aren’t interested? Me too.

The key driver in getting people motivated and interested is providing value to your clients. The reason the above “pitches” didn’t work is because they’re not pitches, they’re simply statements about your company.

3 Steps To Getting Effective

To put together a new sales pitch, Jill has 3 steps:

Talk results.
Decision makers don’t care about your products or services. They only care about the results they’ll see. Stress that and you’ll catch their attention. Omit those results and you’ve lost them.

Get real.
Refer to actual client successes and include measures or statistics. Success stories from other companies in their industry are especially compelling. By giving specific examples, you really pique their curiosity.

Test your message.
After you’ve planned what to say, ask, “If I were the decision maker, would this message entice me? Would it make me want to spend an hour of my valuable time with this person?”

Anyone care to test their pitch in the comments below?