How to Give a Killer Sales Pitch

I still remember the blank look on their faces.

Let me share a bad and then a good example of sales pitches that my cofounder and I used, when we were starting our own consulting agency.

Over ten years ago, when we began selling analytics services at e-Nor, most people didn’t know what analytics was.

At networking events, when people asked me what we do, I enthusiastically said,

“We have an analytics consulting company!”

They had no idea what I was talking about. Needless to say, I hardly got any follow up discussions with any of these potential leads.

I was talking about a legitimate pain point. Business owners and marketers had a gigantic amount of data from their websites, emails, and call centers, and they did not know how to get any value from the data. That is exactly what our company offered.

Despite the clear and unmet need, I constantly failed to convey my value proposition, and, sadly, I frequently lost many highly qualified leads.

After much frustration, my business partner and I recognized the issue:

What we do doesn’t matter – what matters is how it helps people.

We sat down and came up with a conversation starter, a concise pitch that would clearly express what we do. We started saying:

“We help businesses derive actionable insights from data.”

This 10-second pitch got a day-and-night better response than our boring “we sell analytics services” pitch.

A well crafted sales pitch will get you closer to signing contracts. Sales pitches aren’t some sort of formal busy work salespeople have to do; sales pitches are essential and have real impact.