Sary's notes on Sales Pitch

buyers placed the most value on a sales rep's teaching skills. They found that the key characteristics of a world-class sales experience all related to the sales rep's ability to help customers figure out how to make an informed purchase. Research tells us that in a sales call, buyers expect sellers to help them understand their options. Buyers would like vendors to help them understand the trade-offs between different approaches to solving their problem. They want to understand potential pitfalls and how to avoid them. Buyers are looking for ways to understand what choices are available to them and how they should choose between them.

Go to most technology companies' websites or talk to their sales reps and you won't hear anything about the market or competitors. They are talking about the company and the product in complete isolation. You may be highlighting what you believe your best features are, but you are leaving it up to the customer to determine why those features matter and whether or not other alternatives can accomplish the same thing. Buyers are left doing all the work to figure out what is important and what isn't, and how different vendors stack up for businesses like theirs.

Three things to happen before a sales pitch: - Qualification Qualification is important because you don't want to waste critical sales resources (not to mention the customer's time!) pitching a product to a company that isn't a fit for what you do. - Discovery a conversation during which the buyer teaches the seller about their pain, problems, and situation, but the seller is also teaching the buyer about their point of view on problems and solutions in the space. - Product Demonstration The most used one I've seen is a "product walkthrough." This is simply a guided tour of the key functionality of the product. I've seen other variations, including a "day in the life" demo that shows how a user would complete typical tasks. Some companies prefer to do a highly customized demo, tailored to what they believe the customer wants to see.

you learn that a great sales pitch should be oriented around your differentiated value, I guarantee you will sell more. Many of us working in technology come from a technical background, and it isn't surprising that most start-ups will naturally focus on features in their sales and marketing. It's our comfort zone. But as much as we love features, what really matters for customers is the business value they get from those features.

Value is the answer to the question, "So what?" • Your database supports advanced usage metrics, including query runs. So what? So support personnel can better assist customers. • Your CRM automatically sends status updates to managers. So what? So your sales reps can spend less time building reports and more time selling. • Your accounting system supports adding an expiration date on inventory items. So what? So you can ensure you never sell an expired item and can easily know when to apply discounts to items that expire soon.

Exposing your differentiated value, and helping a prospect understand why it is important for them, is the key to winning business. A great sales pitch tells the story of the value that only your product can deliver and why that value is very important to a certain kind of buyer. It is the answer to the question, "Why pick us over the alternatives?"

You cannot teach customers your differentiated value and why it matters without talking about the alternatives in the mar-ket. A good sales pitch addresses the alternatives and helps customers understand how to categorize them, and what their strengths and weaknesses are for different types of buyers.

1. The Product Walkthrough Some walkthroughs simply click through each menu item and explain what it does. Others describe how a user would accomplish certain tasks. Some do a more customized walkthrough based on what they know about the prospect. This style of narrative works best when the buyer is highly educated or the solution they are using now is very similar to what you sell. Buyers in this situation will be better able to translate the features they are shown into business value.

1. The Product Walkthrough (Downside) - It is focused on features, not value. Prospects don't necessarily understand why they should care about particular fea-tures, so they may not be able to figure out why those features are important for their business. - You spend too much time on capabilities that are not differentiating. Most product walkthroughs try to show everything they can do without highlighting what is differentiated. Is the way you log in innovative?… "Why pick you over the alternatives?" - The product walkthrough does not accomplish what most B2B buyers want: a way to understand all the alternatives so they can confidently make the right choice for their business.

2. The Problem/Solution Pitch It is generally very similar to the product walkthrough pitch with bit of setup before you jump into the demo. In these pitches, you describe "the problem" the customer has and then position your product as "the solu-tion" to that problem, before following up with a demo that shows how you deliver the solution. Like the product walkthrough, this style of narrative works best when the buyer is highly educated and can translate the features they are shown into business value.

3. The Vision Narrative In technology companies that are raising money, the CEO will have a narrative that is used to pitch the company to investors. This narrative structure is often formed around describing the current approach to a particular problem (the tired and crappy "old way"), and then painting a picture of an alternative approach (the amazing and shiny "new way") that, if current trends continue, will be a much better way to do things in the future. The vision narrative is less about the current state of the product and more about its future state and the company's strategy to get there. It works best when pitching to investors.

4. The Hero’s Journey The most famous narrative structure for storytelling in general is known as the "hero's journey." The hero's journey starts with a hero who goes on an adventure or quest, learns a lesson, uses that knowledge to achieve victory, and then returns home transformed. This story structure is widely used in entertain-ment, so much so that the most common example of this structure is the plot for the movie Star Wars.

4. The Hero’s Journey The StoryBrand structure moves through seven steps: The hero (the customer) has a problem and meets a guide (you!), who gives the hero a plan and calls them to action. This action ends in success and helps the hero avoid failure. The thing I like the most is that this structure makes it completely clear that as a vendor, your role is to be a guide, helping the hero (the buyer) achieve success and avoid failure.

4. The Hero’s Journey The hero's journey is used when the primary goal is to entertain and engage your customer through a story. It's a structure that works well for content like customer case studies, where your goal is to tell the story of a customer's journey from having had a problem, to choosing you to solve that problem, to experiencing success afterward.

4. The Hero’s Journey (Downside) - "The plan" is focused on execution, not on how to decide what action to take. In Miller's book, the hero (the customer) encounters the guide (you), who gives them a plan. One of the sample plans provided includes these three steps: 1) download the software, 2) integrate your database into the system, and 3) revolutionize your customer interaction. This is the answer to "How do I get started?," not a plan to help a customer understand why to choose you. Prospects need help understanding their options and how to make a confident decision. - The concept of alternatives is missing.

IBM’s sales pitch always started with a discussion about IBM's point of view on the market. Reps would talk about what iBM perceived to be important considerations for companies looking at any solution in the market. They would then discuss how different approaches to providing a solution stacked up. Reps were doing discovery at this step, but also giving the customers a big picture of the entire market and teaching them how to make informed choices. The sales reps were skillfully positioning our product in the minds of customers, relative to the competition, and that was winning us deals.

A great sales pitch should: 1. Help prospects understand the entire market, including other common alternatives beyond your product and the pros and cons of those alternatives mapped to their particular situation. 2. Accommodate the salesperson's need to do in-depth dis-covery. 3. Help prospects clearly understand your differentiated value versus other alternatives and why the unique value only you can deliver is critically important. 4. Accommodate a product demonstration (should you choose to do one) as a natural part of the narrative flow of the pitch. 5. Include a clear call to action for what the prospect should do next.

To accomplish this, I've broken the sales piteh structure into two distinct phases: the setup and the follow-through. 1 The setup focuses on offering your insights about the mar-ket, competitive alternatives, and discovery, 2 The follow-through focuses on your solution for the eus-tomer or, more specifically, on the value that only your product can deliver, including a demo (if you want one), and ends with a call to action.

1. The Setup The setup is where you have a conversation with the prospect about the market. Specifically, this is when you teach prospects the market context they need to know to understand the importance of the value only you can deliver. It makes sense to do this before you talk about your differentiated value. The setup consists of three distinct components: Insight, Alternatives, and The Perfect World.

2. The Follow-Through Your sales pitch will transition from the setup to the follow-through. The follow-through is focused primarily on exposing the value only your product can deliver to the prospect. This section has five distinct components: Introduction, Differentiated Value, Proof, Objections, and The Ask.

Positioning: Competitive Alternatives There are two main types of competitive alternatives: status quo and direct. As the name suggests, status quo alternatives are the things your current customers were doing before they adopted your product. That could include using a spreadsheet, hiring an intern to do it, or even doing it manually with a pen and paper. This could also include using a legacy solution or functionality that is included in a software package, such as a CRM or accounting system, to get the job done. Direct alternatives are products that buyers put on a shortlist of solutions during a purchase process.