As a salesperson, you may be familiar with the bane of a sales pitch; objections. Sales reps might make their livings off successful pitches, but we rarely get one that goes off without a hitch.
Thankfully, we are here to help. By honing your skills at crafting the perfect, convincing sales hooks, you can overcome any objections and convert your potential clients into actual ones.
In this article, we will help you work through any audience objections to your pitch by going over every step of the pitch process and giving you valuable tips for a deeper understanding of buyer personas. Read on for the best sales tips possible.
What is a sales pitch?
A sales pitch is the most fundamental part of a sales rep’s job. Your sales pitch is any method of messaging you choose to convince a prospect that your product or service can solve their issues.
A sales pitch should be thorough but brief. You want to explain or show the value of your product or service to your client, but you do not want to take up too much of their time. Nobody likes to feel like their time is wasted, and as a salesperson, you must stay on your prospect’s good side.
What is a sales hook?
Some people consider the sales hook the same as a sales pitch, which can get confusing. However, there is a difference.
Consider your sales pitch like fishing. Ultimately, the sales hook is a vital element of your sales pitch. The hook is the part of your pitch that grabs your prospect’s attention. Once you have them hooked, you just have to reel them in.
What is an elevator pitch?
An elevator pitch is a type of sales pitch known for its brevity. An elevator pitch is designed to catch buyers’ attention before the metaphorical or literal elevator doors close.
How To Make Your Most Effective Sales Pitch
The ideal sales pitch may vary from person to person. Your personality may lend itself more to a particular pitch style than your coworkers, but ultimately, the best marketing hooks fall into the same recipe.
The best sales pitches consist of the hook, the body, and the conclusion. Here are what each one does:
- The hook grabs your prospect’s attention and makes them want to engage with you
- The body explains what you are offering and why it will benefit them while keeping the audience curious
- The conclusion closes with a call to action, convincing your prospect that you are the solution to their issues
Important Components
There are three ingredients involved in making an effective sales presentation. You must thoroughly consider these components when crafting your sales hook.
Audience
Your target audience is whoever receives your message or sales calls. However, your pitch will not work for every audience; you must consider the needs of your audience to make your sales pitch more effective.
Problem
As a salesperson, you are selling a solution to your potential customer’s problem- or pain point. If your prospect is not facing a problem, or you can not convince them that they are, you may be wasting your time.
You must identify the problem your product solves and explain why your product is better than your competitor’s.
For example, some companies report an increase in their client’s sales via Instagram by over 12%. Explain to your prospect why your competitors cannot accomplish this.
Solution
Your solution is your product or service. You are selling a solution, so you must explain clearly what your product does, how it works, and why you believe it can solve your prospect’s problems.
However, it would be best if you tempered expectations. Do not promote your product as a magical cure-all. After all, some studies show that a 4.5-star rating attracts more customers than a perfect 5-star.
Types Of Sales Pitch
Here are some sales pitch examples that you may encounter.
One-word pitch
Brevity is the soul of sales pitch language. Remember, you do not want to waste anybody’s time. In most cases, you want to shorten your hook to one sentence. A great sales pitch is entirely one sentence.
However, the best sales pitches can be summed up in one word. Many large companies follow the ideal of the one-word pitch.
Cold call pitch
Sometimes you have to make a sale without having any leads through personal connections. In these cases, you will have to cold call.
Cold calling means approaching strangers without knowing anything about them. These pitches include door-to-door sales or some forms of telemarketing.
Email pitch
In the world of technology, email sales pitches are increasingly common. While email pitches typically lack the vital human interaction of other pitches, their convenience more than makes up for this drawback.
Consider following up with a phone call if you send a cold email pitch. This action will show your audience you are serious about your pitch and provide some much-needed human interaction.
Video pitch
With the advent of cell phones, everybody has a video screen in their pocket. As such, video pitches are increasingly popular.
People love the convenience of watching a recorded sales pitch as they are easy to consume. If an emergency arises, they can pause your video and resume it later.
Video pitches are excellent for user retention, as well. An estimated 40% of people respond to visual information better than speeches or plain text.
Examples Of Effective Hooks
The best marketing hooks increase your prospective client’s attention span and let you complete your sales pitch, hopefully ending with a close. These types of sales pitch examples are great ways to help you achieve your sales goals.
Tell A Relatable Story To Hook Your Prospects In
Everybody likes to hear a good story. Listen to when your prospects speak, as they may tell you about the biggest pain points in their business or simply something that happened in their life recently.
Storytelling is one of the best hooks you could use. Sharing a story your prospect can relate to helps build a rapport and make them feel more comfortable with you. If you have a relatable story to their issues, share it.
Ask Them Unexpected Questions
You may be giving a sales pitch, but remember that you are speaking to a human. Involve your prospect in the pitch process, learn more about them, and improve their perception of you by asking a surprising and intelligent question.
Asking an intelligent question about the prospect’s business can help them engage with your presentation. However, you should not pose personal inquiries, as your audience may not be comfortable revealing aspects of their personal stories.
Push The Pain-Point Buttons
For obvious reasons, you should not insult your prospect when giving a sales pitch. However, you can use their pain points to increase their perception of you and your product.
Try to understand the issues that pain your prospect and promote your product or service as a solution to their pain points. You gain their interest by using their pain points as a marketing hook. After all, everybody wants something that can solve their problems.
Flatter Them For Real
Everybody loves being complimented. Use this to your advantage. Pay your prospects a compliment before you start your pitch in earnest.
Consider complimenting their shoes or shirt. If you have a prior connection with your prospect, bring up a change in their hair or a new tie. Flatter your prospects, as it will earn their attention.
Tips For Sales
Here are some tips for creating an effective hook to keep your audience curious during a pitch process.
Do Your Research
Everybody wishes they could have an easy way out, but unfortunately, no product will sell itself. Crafting an effective hook means that you have to put in some work, including research.
Tailor your pitch to your prospect by researching anything of note before you make a first impression. Knowledge is power, and you will not make a sale if you do not know anything about your prospect.
Paint a Vision Of Their Future
Remember when we talked about telling a relatable story? The hook is not where storytelling skill begins or ends for the sales field.
Sales team leaders might not often discuss how powerful storytelling can be in sales, but a good story can set a good pitch apart from a great pitch.
Utilize your storytelling skills to help illustrate your vision for your company’s future and that of your prospect. You can guarantee a close by convincing your prospect that your vision aligns with their goals.
Share Your Insights
If you have researched your target audience, you may have some insights on how to fix their issues. These insights might not have anything to do with your product or service. That is okay as long as you don’t aggressively push your product as a solution to every issue; doing so will make your prospect wary.
Refrain from providing vapid, useless suggestions. Give your prospect some solutions of value that your competitors cannot offer.
Tell your prospect how others solved their issues and how your product can help.
Know How To Overcome Common Sales Objections
Let’s be honest. Objections are a pain. They are understandable, as any prospect wants to know they are making a sound investment. However, they can sometimes leave an unprepared salesperson floored.
If you thoroughly research your pitch, you should make no objectionable statements.
Frequently Asked Questions:
How long does it take to close a sale?
There is no single measure of how long it takes to close a sale. If you are a good salesperson and have an eager prospect, you can close a deal far sooner than the average closing time.
The average sales cycle is around 30 days long. However, many factors influence the length of the sales process. Some companies and individuals may have shorter cycles due to more efficient processes.
What is the difference between cold calling and prospecting?
There are a lot of unfamiliar terms in the world of sales. A new salesperson may not know all the details needed to thrive in this environment. Ultimately, there is a significant difference between cold calling and prospecting.
Cold calling is when you initiate contact with a person without any previous relationship. Prospecting is when you reach out to people you already know.
What is the best way to get feedback?
HubSpot Growth Specialist Jack Chacin says, “You could say something like, ‘How many hours does it take you a week to create reports?’ It is great when you get a response like, ‘Way too long.” He also encourages reps to consider how they might tailor their hooks toward the prospect in a way that promotes a positive response.
What is the pain of losing?
Nobody likes losing. Any good therapist will tell you that the pain of losing something is twice the pleasure of winning. However, losing is a reality that we all must face.
Even the best salesperson does not close a deal on every sale. Sometimes things go wrong that we can not control, or perhaps you are still a beginner and need to learn more to close more deals.
If sales were easy, everybody would be a salesperson. All you can do to recover from a loss is hit the books. Try to learn some new tactics and keep trying.
What pain points do customers have?
As a salesperson, you should remember one fundamental aspect of sales. You are pitching a product or service to fix your prospect’s issue. In the industry, these issues are known as pain points.
Customer pains may include:
- Positioning pains (i.e., “We don’t know who we are”).
- Financial pains (“Our revenue is up, but our profit margins are down”).
- Process pains (“Our service team is overwhelmed and can not handle the volume”).
What is the difference between a B2B and an e-commerce product?
With today’s rapidly-changing world of technology, terminology can get confusing. If you have heard of B2B and e-commerce, you might wonder what the difference is.
Ultimately, B2B and e-commerce are compatible terms. B2B stands for business to business and merely entails a transaction between two different companies.
On the other hand, e-commerce refers to any transaction that takes place over the internet. Therefore, there is no real difference between B2B and e-commerce products; one product can be both B2B and e-commerce simultaneously.
What is a good hook?
Everybody loves a cheat code, but unfortunately, there is not one single hook that works universally.
However, a good hook is easy to identify. In its simplest form, a good hook piques your prospect’s interest and helps you show the value of your product or service.
For this example, a good opening line would be: “I noticed that your company is active on LinkedIn and Facebook but has not yet used Instagram.”
What is the best way to get a lead?
Nothing good comes easy, and leads are no exception. You can use any tool or service to generate a lead, but ultimately, the best leads come from word of mouth. If a satisfied client recommends your service to a friend, that prospect could be the most effortless close of your life.
Word-of-mouth can be the hardest lead to obtain. There is no program you could pay to pump out good word-of-mouth reviews; you have to be a great salesperson with a good product.
Thankfully, word of mouth is common. Up to 60% of salespeople report having word-of-mouth leads.
What is Active Listening?
If you have taken any classes focusing on sociology and human interaction, you may have heard the term ‘active listening’ before.
Active listening is a four-part process and includes the following:
- Listening
- Understanding the customer correctly
- Asking appropriate follow-up questions
- Allowing the customer to take control of the conversation
What is the best advice for making a sales pitch?
There is a lot of sales advice floating around out there. We understand that it can get confusing. However, there is one piece of advice that many professionals consider the best.
Take the testimony of Tori Rotermunnd, an executive at Hubspot, a leading developer in sales software and marketing tools.
Tori says that the single best tip she gives her sales professionals is to listen to their prospects. By listening to your prospects, you can ensure that your hooks line up with their goals.
There are many unique methods to align your hooks with your prospect’s goals, but ultimately, this goal is the fundamental building block of sales.
If you do not listen to your prospects, you can never hope to achieve this goal.
Final Thoughts
Ultimately, crafting the perfect sales pitch is an art, not a science. While some techniques may be statistically better, you may find better results with one method than other salespeople.
Your best bet is to try a mix of, if not all, our recommended methods to learn what works for you. Alternatively, you could contact us today.
At The Brooks Group, we can help you and your sales team learn how to craft the most effective hooks possible. Do not delay- you don’t want to miss any more prospects.
