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Sales Pitch Q&A Tips: 4 Reasons to Master Negotiation

Your sales pitch is the last hurdle before you can seal the deal, but even that has a final step: the Q&A.

In every pitch, clients always have questions or concerns. These can be about how your company does business or the package options you have to offer.

Listening to and clarifying their questions will help them understand your position, making them more likely to trust you and close the sale. Experienced sales executives will always plan for these scenarios for 4 main reasons:

1. Clients Always Want Options

People will always look for a better deal to get their money’s worth.

You could be the best supplier of electronic gadgets in the industry, but if you don’t have any favorable options to offer your clients, like a bundle purchase deal with lower price points, or gadgets that they need, chances are they’ll give their money to the competition.

This is why having a fixed set of options rarely works: If you say you can’t give something to a client, you will have a harder time convincing them to invest in you. According to business consultant Larry Myler, giving alternatives is one of the negotiation techniques that salespeople use as a common ground for both their desired outcome and the clients’ desires.

2. Listening Lets You Learn Their Expectations

Our last article talked about knowing your audience’s expectations to help you give a more understandable pitch. While it’s good to know these beforehand, nothing beats getting these firsthand when you need to address their questions on the spot.

This lets you come up with better responses, whether it’s clarifying your previous statements in the pitch, or suggesting alternatives to the options you offered them. Listening also helps you get a better handle on what your clients expect from business partners.

For example, they may have objections to the pricing of your mobile service provider package, but if you let them explain why, you might have the advantage of using that information for either justifying the package or offering them something that fits their budget.

3. You Control the Argument

Learning to say no is another important skill in the Q&A. As the presenter, you need to be clear on what you can and cannot offer to remain in control of the deal. Let’s go back to that example of the mobile service provider: Your package may only be offered at a certain range, but a client might want to lower it further.

If your company knows that the proposed discount is unacceptable due to cost reasons, it might be better for you to refuse and suggest another package. While it’s true that you need to think about your client’s expectations, your company will most likely have their own standards to uphold, making an ultimatum necessary.

By dictating the terms of the offer, you make the deal profitable for both sides. It also boosts their perception of you as a reliable seller.

4. You Project Yourself as a Partner

In every pitch, the objective is all about offering solutions to a problem. This is why every seasoned sales executive takes time to know their clients as much as they can in order to solve their difficulties.

Getting clients to talk about what they need is always a good starting point. Keynote speaker Sherrie Campbell lists presenting yourself as a partner who’s willing to listen among her strategies for mastering sales negotiations. .

If your client can’t agree with your offer, you can always ask why, or replace your offer with a better one. This leaves a better impression than using a “take it, or leave it” approach because you involve clients in coming up with a solution.

The Lesson: Listening Always Helps

Handling the pitch’s Q&A is just as important as giving it. This lets you know your target market and what will convince them to invest in you. Listening to their concerns lets you adjust your offers as needed.

Instead of simply handing out a limited set of options, you give them more possibilities that can sweeten the deal for both sides. At the same time, you have to make it clear that there are things that you can’t compromise on, like a lower price for quality goods.

At your pitch’s last stage, you can impress your clients with your delivery. If you can give them that last nudge to bite into your offer by hearing them out, jumping that final hurdle will be easier for you. Handling this step needs every advantage you can get.

To sharpen your selling edge, take a few minutes to get in touch with a professional pitch deck designer and spice up your pitch deck.

References

Campbell, Sherrie. “7 Psychological Strategies for Mastering Sales Negotiations.” Entrepreneur. November 6, 2014. Accessed August 7, 2015.
Myler, Larry. “Four Ways To Win Any Negotiation.Forbes. June 1, 2015. Accessed August 7, 2015.

Featured Image: “Signed Contract” by Mads T.F. on flickr.com

The Secret to an Effective Sales Pitch Rehearsal

The best sales pitches are planned weeks in advance, with rehearsals taking several hours.

Presenters refine several factors such as speech tone, body language, hand gestures, demonstrations, and even slide timing.

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The Secret

What’s the overarching secret to getting the most out of your rehearsal?

Deliberate practice.

According to brand communications expert Carmine Gallo, this is a form of training which involves setting specific goals (say, giving a sales pitch in five minutes), asking for feedback, and continuous improvement during your career as a professional presenter.

Setting Goals

Using this method of training means being specific down to the last detail.

How powerful will your tone be? What sort of emotions do you need to use for presenting? How long will your speech take per slide?

Gallo presents Steve Jobs as an example because of his meticulousness. Jobs spends several hours practicing the sales pitch’s every aspect, right down to how much lighting to use for showing his products.

Similarly, a skilled presenter notes his pitch’s every detail and how they’ll work during the actual show date. This lets you plan how your deck work, including your speech’s timing, for an effortless sales pitch.

Properly Using Feedback

Do the pitch rehearsal with your team, supervisor or even in front of a mirror.

If you have someone or something to help spot your errors, take note of your mistakes and avoid doing them during the actual pitch.

Note if there were likable things you did (ex. building rapport with the audience, poking good-natured fun at yourself) that you can repeat.

Sales strategist Marc Wayshak suggests that another effective way of getting feedback would be to ask prospects what works for them or what doesn’t. This won’t diminish your credibility. In fact, it will make you seem even more determined to connect with them and understand their needs.

Continuous Improvement

As simple as this sounds, improving yourself can take years. Practice is essential to a sales pitch, especially if you want to sound spontaneous.

Over the course of your career, improve yourself by studying both your performance and your audience’s feedback.

Combined with rigorous deliberative practice, you’ll eventually define and improve your mix of personal pitch techniques, letting you sell better than you ever could before.

The Bottom Line

Practice everything, down to the tiniest detail. If you’re as passionate about giving a pitch as Steve Jobs and the top TED speakers are, rehearse, rehearse, rehearse.

Learn from your mistakes and strengths to reach your fullest potential as a presenter.

Once you’ve honed your skills, work with a pitch deck design specialist to give you the right selling tools!

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References

Gallo, C. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2010.
Wayshak, Marc. “5 Tips to Giving the Perfect Sales Presentation.” Salesforce Blog. January 23, 2014. Accessed June 19, 2015.

Sales Pitch Tips from The Art of War: Know Your Craft

In their breakthrough book, The Art of War for Managers, business veterans Gerald and Steven Michaelson cite one of history’s greatest military tacticians, Sun Tzu.

Drawing from one of Sun Tzu’s famous lines, “…the general who understands war is… the guarantor of the security of the nation,” these business gurus suggest that if you spend time knowing your business well enough, you’ll lead it effectively.

The same principle applies to sales pitches.

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CEOs and sales teams take time to know their businesses and products before pitching. They also have a firm grasp of the public speaking techniques they need to sell.

As a presenter, here are three aspects you should master:

Your Product

Knowing your tools is the first step to building a selling idea. According to renowned author Jim Aitchison, learning every aspect of your product or service lets you explain its features correctly. It also helps you outline the benefits your prospects are interested in.

Ask yourself these questions:

  • What is it?
  • How does it work?
  • What benefits does it give to clients?
  • What situations can they use it in?

These should lead to what clients need to know, more specifically: how the product or service help their business.

Your Pitch Techniques

Once you know how your business and products work, rehearse. There is no shortcut.

As brand communications expert, Carmine Gallo, says, even some professional presenters spend several weeks rehearsing for a single pitch. They also take note of what works and what doesn’t so they can improve their public speaking.

Professional presenters deliberately practice until they get their pitch just right, almost as if their work was effortless.

Learn how to use the techniques and tools at your disposal before entering the boardroom to give yourself an immense advantage over others.

Your Pitch Deck

Once you know everything about your product or service and have spent hours rehearsing your speech, it’s time to prepare your third and most crucial component: your pitch deck.

Your deck is not a script, but it’s there to help your audience visualize what you have to say, so keep it as simple and understandable as possible.

You can even hire professional pitch deck specialists to help you design a deck that effectively sells your pitch.

Learn the Tools and the Trade

Pitching skills and techniques are acquired over time. Some spend hours practicing to gain them, while others have built them up over their careers. The same thing goes for knowing your business well enough to sell it.

Know every aspect of your product first. There’s nothing to pitch if you don’t understand your own offering. Rehearse until you master your tone, gestures, and timing. All the information you have is useless if you can’t deliver it clearly.

Finally, make your deck simple but packed with meaningful content. Don’t use them as your cue cards. Instead, use them to emphasize what you want to say. With enough practice, you’ll know how to best persuade a crowd by combining all these factors into a great sales pitch.

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References

Aitchison, J. Cutting Edge Advertising: How to Create the World’s Best Print for Brands in the 21st Century. Singapore, New York: Prentice Hall, 2004.
Gallo, C. The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs: How to be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience. New York: McGraw-Hill. 2010.
Knowing Your Products and Services.” Queensland Government. Accessed June 15, 2015.
Michaelson, G., and Steven Michaelson. Sun Tzu: The Art of War for Managers: 50 Strategic Rules Updated for Today’s Business. 2nd ed. Avon, Mass.: Adams Media. 2010.
The Secret to an Effective Sales Pitch Rehearsal.” pitchdeck.com, Inc. 2015. Accessed June 15, 2015.

Featured Image: “Chinese Brush for Writing Calligraphy” by epSos .de on flickr.com

Get Back in the Game: Regain Your Sales Pitch Skills

It’s challenging to get back on your feet after losing your touch. Failing to deliver is unacceptable when rejected sales pitches result in lost profits.

Humans are prone to mistakes and these happen with sales pitches, too. You might trip, lose your touch, and wonder how you even got there in the first place.

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While there’s no set timetable for recovery or a rock-solid formula to regaining your edge, there are three factors to assess if you want to get back in the game:

What defined your style?

Over time, presenters develop their own personal brand. These define you as a presenter.

Remember which pitch skills worked for you. Review your old pitch deck sales presentations and identify what made them work.

Were your slide designs simplistic?

Did you share any relevant stories from personal experience? Did you connect to your audience with shared beliefs?

Find answers by looking at your past performances. Know your style, take notes on what you can improve on, and start practicing again.

How can you make yourself relevant?

Look at how successful brands sell their products through advertising.

According to Interbrand group chief executive, Chuck Brymer, effective branding techniques define what a business stands for.

Coke is a refreshing drink, Nike is for sporty go-getters, etc. They understand what their customers want and adjust their ads to stay relevant in the market.

As presenters, you also represent your company’s brand.

How you do your sales pitch reflects how your company does business with others, whether you speak professional or casually. You embody what your company stands for, so bank on those beliefs to re-establish a connection with your clients.

How can you rebuild credibility?

Successful companies stay that way is because they never compromise their core beliefs.

As cited in Jim Aitchison’s book, Cutting Edge Advertising, Avis consistently positioned its message as the number two brand for car rentals. This gave customers the impression of a hard-working company.

In order to stay relevant, companies continuously understand how their customers behave to pitch their products effectively. Take this same practice and apply them to your sales pitches. Remain consistent with what your company stands for and understand how these can relate with what your clients believe in. This builds up that relationship with promises and trust.

Regaining your edge shouldn’t be limited to these three factors. Keep practicing and trying out new ways to make yourself unique.

Focus on how you want your listeners to see you and what they’d miss if you quit.

To get that edge, call a pitch deck partner to help you out. All it takes is fifteen minutes.

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References

Aitchison, J. (2004). Cutting Edge Advertising: How to Create the World’s Best Print For Brands in the 21st Century. Singapore: Prentice Hall.
Brymer, Chuck. “WHAT MAKES BRANDS GREAT?Marketing Magazine. Accessed May 11, 2015.
Sales Presentation Skills: Stay Relevant to Pitch Ideas.” pitchdeck.com, May 11, 2015. Accessed May 15, 2015.

How to Plan for Your Next Successful Pitch

Sharpening your pitch skills isn’t limited to preparing before the actual thing. You have to take a look at the results of your pitch, too.

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Every idea you present will affect others in some way. After every pitch, you need to look into two types of general feedback:

  • How your audience reacts as you present
  • What you did to invoke those reactions

Knowing exactly how your audience reacts will give you information on what you need to fix. Looking into these lets you sort between what your listeners like and don’t like about your performance. By gauging the quality of their feedback, you’ll know what techniques to keep and which to remove.

In fact, this method of evaluation is so crucial that companies such as Volkswagen and marketing experts like Northwestern University’s Philip Kotler (1972) highly recommend it to keep their customer relationships healthy. In his article, “A Generic Concept of Marketing,” Kotler discusses how these help gauge audience behavior and what it costs to achieve the results you want.

Attitude & Behavior-Related Responses

No matter how you present your ideas, they will affect your viewers in some way. Positive responses, such as smiling and nodding in agreement encourage better rapport between speaker and audience. Negative behavior, such as blank stares or people dozing off, might hurt your reputation in the long run.

As a presenter, monitoring audience behavior during and after your pitches can help identify points for improvement. For example:

  • Were your slide designs relevant to your content?
  • Was your information presented in an easy-to-read format?

Observing and remembering these simple reactions allow you to build your skills as you go along.

Costs and Efficiency

Preparing a pitch deck and getting the needed information costs time, sometimes even money. While it’s true that positive results matter, you also need to consider what it took to get to that outcome. When evaluating this aspect, you can ask yourself things like:

  • Did you spend a longer time formatting content than you should have?
  • Did you have to buy any information for your pitch deck?
  • Was there anything you could save up on or do more efficiently next time?

As with any business, costs—time, manpower, and money—matter, especially when it comes to marketing and advertising. It’s no different when making a pitch deck to sell your services, products, and ideas. Finding out what to save up on and what to invest in can make the difference when planning for your next pitch.

Audience feedback can sometimes be so overwhelming that you don’t know where to start. However, applying these two control skills will help you clarify what you need to improve on and how to do it.

At the end of the day, considering your audiences’ reactions can give you an edge over other presenters. Using that to improve your pitch deck will become second nature once you realize that you deal with people, too.

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References:

Kotler, P. (1972). A Generic Concept of Marketing. Journal of Marketing. Vol. 36, No. 2. Retrieved from: http://www.8pic.ir/images/rommbbx28bfgpry1idn.pdf

Lost Impact: 4 Words to Avoid in Pitch Deck Delivery

Remember the saying, “sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never harm me?”

It might be true for the playground, but not for your pitch decks.

As powerful as language is, there are certain words that seem to have lost their impact through constant use. We’ve been using them far too much in our everyday, casual conversations that they lose power once delivered on stage. Here are 4 low-impact words that you should avoid when you’re delivering your next pitch deck:

1. Really

We commonly use the word “really” to emphasize certain points. Casually, we might say something like, “I saw this really good movie the other day”.

But in formal settings such as business pitches, there’s often a lot at stake. If you want to emphasize something, it’s better to offer an accurate description.

Instead of saying “our new product is really revolutionary,” you can share a concrete example or supporting evidence instead. “Our new product has proven results and made plenty of sales in the past year” would sound more impressive than giving a vague suggestion of how good your product really is.

2. Amazing

You often hear the word “amazing” when describing something high-quality. For example, you might have heard it casually used in sentences like, “the new iPhone 6 is amazing.”

Again, it’s better to offer your audience something more descriptive. Let them deduce that what you’re presenting is amazing for themselves. Help them come to that realization by showing them specific details and examples. In our given instance, you could give the features of an iPhone that other phones wouldn’t be able to compare with. This would certainly be more impressing than simply saying it’s amazing.

3. Maybe

You don’t want to seem uncertain in front of your audience. To deliver a memorable pitch, you need to exude knowledge and confidence.

Words like “perhaps” and “maybe” leave the opposite impression, making you seem completely unsure and unprepared. Stop hedging and go straight to the point with active and urgent language.

4. Stuff

This word offers no real description. It’s a vague way to refer to something that’s crucial to your pitch deck. Instead of using this, look for a word that actively describes what you’re trying to say. If you can’t think of one, go for a descriptive phrase. Be specific with everything you say to allow your audience the opportunity to recall and internalize your main points.

Get rid of the “fluff” and make your pitches stronger. Achieve that goal by making use of words that are tangible and concrete. Avoid these 4 words and give your audience information that’s more meaningful and memorable.

Featured Image: marc falardeau via Flickr