Table of contents
- What Makes a Good Sales Pitch?
- 15 Tips for Writing a Killer Sales Pitch
- PRO TIP: How to Set SMART Goals for Your Sales Team’s Performance
- Wrap up
“The most successful sales pitches our clients make are short, personal, to the point and, more importantly, handwritten. ” shares RoboQuill’s Stuart Dixon.
Jotting all this down, already?
Wait till you learn more as this guide answers the A-Z of how to write a sales pitch.
Frankly, writing a winning sales pitch is no easy feat. It takes lots of trial and error till you figure out what works and what backfires.
But to speed up your process of creating the ultimate sales pitch template that gets you clients all the time (well, almost all the time), we’ve put together this guide on how to write a sales pitch.
You’ll learn:
Ready to take notes? Let’s cut to the chase:
What Makes a Good Sales Pitch?
To begin with, let’s quickly recap what is a sales pitch.
A sales pitch is your attempt at selling your service. It puts your persuasion skills to test without giving you the liberty to be salesy.
Typically, sales pitches are pre-planned. It’s a line or two that you say that captures your audience’s attention, who then agree to give your product or service a shot.
Your sales pitch could be a social media pitch, an email pitch, a phone sales pitch, etc. In all cases, it’s better to be prepared than find yourself dumbfounded when someone asks what you sell or how you can help them.
So, what makes a good sales pitch? Three things:
- One, a killer sales pitch speaks to its audience. Meaning, it’s relevant to them, they can relate to it, and the moment you begin, your audience can tell you understand their pains. After all, the better you understand their pain, the better the solution you can offer.
- Two, it’s short. With dwindling attention spans that are getting shorter than a goldfish’s attention span and lots of choice at their fingertips, brevity is a must. Within this limited word count, quickly tell your prospect you understand their pain point and give them a solution to those troubles (by introducing your service).
- Lastly, a good sales pitch is focused on the prospect. It doesn’t talk about your product features or takes a salesy approach (even if it’s called a sales pitch). Instead, it talks about how you can improve your audience’s life.
In short, an A1 sales pitch template is brief, to the point, and talks about the prospect, not your service.
Related: The Best Sales Pitch Your Agency Can Have
15 Tips for Writing a Killer Sales Pitch
Now that you have a full picture of what makes a good sales pitch let’s give you tips on how to write a sales pitch. For this post, we’ve over 25 experts sharing their insights and successful sales pitch ideas.
So let’s get started with the rundown of all the tips, followed by the details:
- Understand your audience inside out
- Put your target’s imagination to work
- Focus on your value proposition
- Add a touch of humor to your sales pitch structure
- Keep things genuine to win your target’s trust
- Stir your audience’s emotions with your pitch
- Make your pitch interactive
- Make it personal
- Be direct
- Keep it simple and short
- Open with a quantifiable example
- Make sure your pitch is relatable for your audience
- Prove your product works
- Instill FOMO
- Present your service as a solution to your customer’s problem
PRO TIP: How to Set SMART Goals for Your Sales Team’s Performance
To decide which goals meet the SMART criteria, sales managers need to look at sales analytics for their teams and monitor sales KPIs, for example:
- Average Time to Close Deal
- New Deals Amount
- Number of Customers
- Average Revenue per New Customer
Based on these metrics, and in light of other revenue-based and activity-based goals, you can identify and set desired goals for future performance, but how to get this information?
Now you can benefit from the experience of our sales experts, who have put together a great Databox template showing an overview of your sales team’s performance. It’s simple to implement and start using as a standalone dashboard or in sales reports, and best of all, it’s free!
You can easily set it up in just a few clicks – no coding required.
To set up this Sales Analytics Overview Dashboard, follow these 3 simple steps:
Step 1: Get the template
Step 2: Connect your HubSpot account with Databox.
Step 3: Watch your dashboard populate in seconds.
1. Understand your audience inside out
“First and foremost, you need to know who you are talking to,” shares EJ Mitchell of LiveCareer.
“It’s essential to identify a target group that you want to address in your sales pitch. My advice is to find out as much as you can about your audience’s background, psychographics, and preferences. Based on similarities, create different customer personas and assign each person to the most suitable group.
The more you know about each customer segment, the more likely you are to design a customized sales pitch that will resonate with your target audience. Delivering the right message to the right customer group will also help you scale your sales pitch across multiple channels.”
Slyecom’s Pir Fahad Momin also notes, “Developing an effective or ‘killer’ sales pitch relies on your ability to identify the specific needs and pains that influence your target market. Therefore, the best way is to first develop a better understanding of the demographic, social, and cultural factors that define and influence the behaviors of your target market before developing a killer sales pitch.
When you’re pitching to a prospect, you need to understand their goals, motivations, and pains. This will help you create a sales pitch that is precisely configured to appeal to the target audience through either pathos, logo, or ethos.”
“Really get to know their characteristics and personality,” adds Dima Suponau from Number for Live Perso. “And then, on that basis, satisfy their needs. Getting a firm grasp of your customer’s needs, on a personal level even, is critical for your sales pitch to be successful. It will create a feeling of understanding and trust, and you will be able to work on a relationship with your client.”
In short, “Deeply understand your ideal customer profile and their pain points is what makes a killer sales pitch,” MicroAcquire’s Andrew G Azdecki says.
To do that, you need to know how to identify your target audience, which involves researching demographics, psychographics, and behaviors to create a detailed customer persona.
2. Put your target’s imagination to work
Yep, you read that right. Like Words Have Impact, LLC’s Brandon Towl puts it, “Bring them from ‘can’t’ to ‘can.’
One of the best pitches of all time was penned by John Caples: ‘They Laughed When I Sat Down At The Piano – But When I Started to Play!’ It works so well because it brings the audience from imagining the person’s embarrassment to imagining their triumph. And the reader wants to be able to do that, too. Every sales pitch should make the reader feel that same way.”
Khabeer Rockley of The 5% Institute echoes the same: “Our tip is to bridge the gap between their pain, and how your solution will overcome this pain. Many Sales Professionals deliver their pitch only to find it fall onto deaf ears because they haven’t demonstrated what it will mean (pain alleviation wise) when they buy.
Always present your features and benefits, only if it solves their pain points. By doing so – you’ll be able to successfully demonstrate what it will mean when they buy.”
3. Focus on your value proposition
Or, what makes you unique so your prospects have a solid reason why they should buy from you.
Lynell Ross of Education Advocates recommends, “Focus on what makes your product or service different from competitors. Showcase your offering’s strengths, and hammer how that highlight gives you an edge over competitors. Whether it’s price points, quality of service, efficiency gains, cutting edge tech, whatever your strength is, craft your pitch around that and keep it concise. No one wants to hear a long-winded pitch that covers everything you have to offer, hit the highlights, and be direct.
4. Add a touch of humor to your sales pitch structure
“Tell a joke,” suggests Online Optimism’s Keyoka Kinzy. “While it’s important to be informative, you also need to be attention-grabbing. Let your personality shine through with a pitch to reel people in. By using humor, you can catch the eye of a potential customer and create a memorable sales pitch. Humor can be that first connection to establishing a lasting relationship.”
5. Keep things genuine to win your target’s trust
Being genuine in your sales pitch is another way to build lasting relationships.
“In these unusual times, customers are opting to go with companies that they trust,” writes Travis Killian from Everlasting Comfort. “So, that means that any successful sales pitch should be genuine and earnest so that it instills this trust in the customer. Be direct and include information that the customer needs to know upfront.”
This is true not only for the present times but also generally as people have tons of choices. And one way to stand out is by being genuine in your pitching approach.
Mailbird’s Andrea Loubier adds to this: “If you want a proven, successful sales pitch tip, then stay away from gimmicks. Be straightforward and explain your offer in a simple way. If people need your services, then adding ‘salesy’ content won’t help you build trust with a potential client.”
6. Stir your audience’s emotions with your pitch
“Focus on emotion and removing pain,” comments Netpaths SEO’s Cayley Vos. “Nothing will resonate with a prospect like a promise of removing pain from their business. The most common pain points our clients face is the lack of high-quality customers.”
For example, Vos shares, “Our best pitch: You are currently spending $xxxx.xx on SEO. This has given you an increase of x% traffic but no new sales. What do you have to show for the money and effort spent?
What do you tell your partners and employees when they ask how your marketing campaign is going? How do you better understand your marketplace relative to your competitors? The problem isn’t ranking for more keywords; it is ranking for the keywords that your ideal prospect is searching for. In as soon as 1 month, we can tweak your site to make this happen.”
David Toby of Pathfinder Alliance speaks on this too: “Our top writing tip for a killing sales pitch is to include emotions in your writing, make the potential customer feel understood.
Focus on the problem that your product or service solves, such as what is causing your client pain. Don’t dive into your solution, but talk about their pain and problem. Most humans only take action when they decide to stop living with the pain. When you talk about and articulate their pain, you build understanding and get the prospect’s attention.
It’s known as ‘pushing the pain points’. The pain point is a motivator that triggers an emotional response in your customer, leading them to buy your product or service. When you identify with their problem, you make a deeper connection and move towards closing the sale. You can’t sell without emotion, so identify the real problem. Stir it up. This gets the prospect’s attention and focus.”
7. Make your pitch interactive
Edward Solicito from ToTheTop makes this suggestion. “My best tip is to always make sure to encourage questions and interaction from your audience. Pitches don’t have to be a one-way street, and getting your prospects to engage in your pitch, especially in social media, is absolutely critical.”
In fact, all of our expert respondents think that social media pitches tend to be the most successful. Here’s their take on what makes a good sales pitch:
Either way, “whether it’s an email, phone call, presentation or social media post, always try to get feedback during your pitch to improve your odds when pitching any product or service,” Solicito concludes.
Related: 33 Effective Social Selling Tips for B2B Companies
8. Make it personal
“A tip to get your pitch to be well received is that the pitch should feel personal,” outlines Luke Smith from https://www.webuypropertyinkentucky.com/.
“It shouldn’t be a blanket statement. It should feel like the client is the only one that has received this, and your focus is wholeheartedly on them. We aim to make our pitch feel like we are collaborating with the client. We ask a bunch of questions and lead the conversation, and then we present the solution.”
9. Be direct
Beekeeper’s Alexandra Zamolo adds to how to write a sales pitch. Zamolo outlines, “When writing a persuasive, successful sales pitch, you’ll need to focus on being direct, and fitting in the most important aspects of your strategy in as few words as possible. In a world where the average attention span is dropping, don’t lose a potential client through ‘over-explaining.’”
10. Keep it simple and short
Several of our expert respondents emphasize keeping your sales pitch ideas short. Starting with DDI Development’s Tatiana Gavrilina, who insists, “the killer sales pitch should be as short as possible and contain numbers.
It should be a text listing your most outstanding achievements in a concise and informative form, mentioning the brands you have managed to collaborate with and the results achieved.
The essence of this pitch can be distributed across many marketing channels, including social media posts, presentations, videos, and personal emails with more detailed case studies descriptions.”
Related: 23 Foolproof Sales Presentation Tips to Help You Close More Deals
Simon Skovborg of Hycon A/S adds, “KISS (Keep it simple, stupid). Simplicity makes your message clear and easy to understand. Leave out in-depth descriptions and instead link to a page where your audience can read the details.”
For example, Skovborg shares, “For our Business, one-line sales pitches, presentation sales pitches, and follow-up sales pitches have been the most effective. One-line sales pitches have always been a part of our written communication and have functioned well alongside graphic illustrations. We are mainly using one-liners when outlining the advantages of our products and in comparison with tools alike.
We are an ‘old-school-b2b-business’ who relies on good relationships with the customers. We do our best to get to know our customers before they invest in our products. By doing so, when we finally demonstrate and present our products, it’s much easier to win a sale.”
Nick Epson from Blue Label Labs shares another example: “It’s about making the most meaningful statement we can, based on the circumstances we’re presented – most often, our pitch is refined to a couple of sentences that state some derivate of how we’re a recognized agency with a formidable number of successful products under our belt. From there, we often pepper the CTA with an example of something else we’ve created that parallels what our customer is seeking.”
So remember, “The best sales pitch is ‘short and sweet’ besides providing value (this part is obvious to me,” as Thrive Agency’s Tim Clarke puts it. And “Remember that sales pitch is not about bragging and boasting – you almost shouldn’t talk about your company. The best thing is to put your client in the first place and focus only on your company’s best advantage – solving his specific problem. You need to present a solution to their problem first!” Clarke writes.
Summing up, Mavens & Moguls’ Paige Arnof-Fenn says, “Stay focused –strong headline as a hook with 2-3 data points as support then close with a clear call to action. It works on every platform.”
Related: How 17 Agencies Use Data To Pitch Prospective Clients
11. Open with a quantifiable example
“Open your pitch a concrete and quantifiable example of how you helped a similar business,” advises Nikita Agarwal from Milestone Localization. “Include non-round figures. This really grabs the attention of the person reading the pitch.”
12. Make sure your pitch is relatable for your audience
“Strongly relate to your audience,” advises Alexandre Yunus Mahe of Skuma. “This tip was given to me by a marketer that I look up to tremendously. If you really want an effective sales pitch, you must focus on how does your product or service relates directly to your target consumer’s life. The moment you uncover that information, little to no persuasion will be needed post-pitch to further convince your soon to become customer.”
13. Prove your product works
Constant Delights’ Jill Sandy highlights, “One important tip that works for all sales pitches is to show current progress and growth. If you can prove your product is already liked by many, you will be able to gain more audience with that information. The product’s current growth ensures a new buyer that they are investing in is something durable that offers quality. You can choose a specific time period, like the last six months, to show the rise in the number of users for a lasting impression.”
14. Instill FOMO
“My number one tip for writing a killer sales pitch is to use genuine scarcity in your copywriting,” adds MattressNextDay’s Martin Seeley to how to write a sales pitch.
“You want your customers to make purchasing your product a high priority, or else they’ll procrastinate or give up altogether. The goal is to make your product seem limited somehow, and therefore harder to obtain, so your prospects have a reason to buy it right now.
There are four different types of scarcity that I usually use in my marketing:
- Price Scarcity: Get it now before the price goes up. When applying the price scarcity, you should find a reason for the limited-time discount. Explaining why you’re offering your product or service at a discounted rate creates more trust and buy-in from your audience. It can be an early bird discount, holiday deal, or seasonal promotion.
- Quantity Scarcity: This type of scarcity works very well with physical products, so I often use it. It’s helpful when there is a limited number of inventory units or when our support team can only handle so many orders.
- Offer Scarcity: Offer scarcity is launching or re-launching a product or service for a limited time, after which it will be completely unavailable at any price. It helps to make your audience buy when you tell them to buy it because they know that they might be out of luck if they wait.
- Premium Scarcity: If you don’t want to offer discounts or limit the number of sales, I advise you to give limited-time bonuses. It will temporarily upgrade your offer’s value by including premium products or content along with the main sale. The greater the value of your bonuses, the more effective the scarcity will be.”
15. Present your service as a solution to your customer’s problem
To sum all these sales pitching tips together, here’s a final golden nugget from our respondents: position your service as a solution.
Valentina Lopez of Happiness Without, for instance, says, “The number one tip for writing a successful pitch is to present your service as a solution to your customers’ problem. Maximize the opportunity, and make sure your solution can reach all channels, appeal to them through powerful images, animations, videos, and texts.”
STOICA.CO’s Elena Iordache-Stoica further notes, “Know what your audience cares about and address it in such a way that they understand what they miss if they don’t buy from you.”
So, start with understanding, “What problem does your product help them solve?” according to Iordache-Stoica. “Show your users how your product makes them successful as well as what they are missing out or risk when they don’t use it.
As opposed to focusing your messaging around your product’s features. Do you have an app that keeps track of worked hours? For you, it’s a time tracking app, but for your users, it’s an app that helps them track billable hours and get paid accordingly. It enables them to be paid for the delivered work and prevents them from losing money.”
In short, Dror Wayne from Acumen Talk says, “Rather than telling your customer what their problem is, explain how the world has changed and how your product comes to help them navigate the new world. Frame your product as a tool for succeeding in a transformed environment, not as a solution to a problem that implies your client is weak.”
Wrap up
Ready to draft your sales pitch? Don’t forget to refer to our guide and checklist. To sum it up, when writing a winning sales pitch, make sure you understand your audience inside out, talk about them, not your product, and while you are at it, keep it short.
