How to Begin Your Pitch

When someone pitches you on a product or service, what is going through your mind? Most of us do not automatically begin wondering if or how we could use this product or service; neither do we begin a quick price assessment to see whether the proposition is worth our money. Instead, what we instinctively wonder is why should we care. In your sales situations you should be answering the question of what is in it for the prospect as soon as you possibly can.

Cost, effectiveness and process are all issues that matter to the customer, but they will rarely begin to consider them before they even know why they should care about your proposition. Answer this question at the beginning of your presentation and you will have your prospects’ attention throughout. Add a personal element to every sales proposition in order to explain to people how they personally benefit from what you are selling.

Take the following example: Petra sells packaged consumer products for a large corporation. She goes directly to store managers at large retail chains all over her territory. In trying to sell a special seasonal promotional item, Petra comes across a particularly uninterested store manager. “You can have these products on consignment, the projections are excellent,” she insists. She goes on to explain how well other stores are doing and how great this profit will look on the store’s bottom line so close to the end of the year.

Petra was surprised to hear the store manager, a particularly miserable young man, say “what else you got?” He dismissed her promotional item without even looking at it. This may seem hard to understand at first, this store manager was passing up the opportunity to increase store profits. This would be extra unexpected revenues that would come in at the very last minute. Also, there would be no risk to him because they would take everything back at the end of the season.

So why did he say “no?” The answer is simple. He said no because he could not have cared less about any of those things. His salary was not determined by the store’s bottom line. He answered to the purchasing department and didn’t care about the extra profit. In addition to that, the whole thing just seemed like a lot more work for him; adding in another seasonal product in the last few weeks of the year, knowing that maybe half of it would have to be shipped back to the manufacturer after the season ended. He just didn’t care enough to go to all of that trouble.

Action step: When considering your product or service, imagine a prospect in front of you, asking you “what’s in it for me?” Keep asking the question until you come up with an answer they could actually care about.

First of all, there is no substitute for research. Petra cannot hope to explain to her prospect what’s in it for him if she doesn’t even know herself. She needs to find out whether or not the bottom line affects her prospect’s salary before she presents it to him as the major reason he should go forward. In this case, he didn’t care about that, but he did care about the extra work. If Petra had focused more on explaining how she would take care of the store display and even come back after the season to pack up any returns, she would have come closer to a proposition he would have actually cared about.

Never assume that your buyer will make a connection between the benefits you lay out and how they personally relate to him or her. You must make this connection yourself in order to ensure that your buyer sees what is in the transaction for him or her. If you leave this important element to chance then you leave your close to chance as well.

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