LLM Book Knowledgebase

Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win

34 min read

Sales Pitch: How to Craft a Story to Stand Out and Win

Metadata

Highlights & Notes

Positioning defines how your product is the best in the world at delivering something a certain type of customer really cares about. Positioning is the answer to the question, “Why pick us over the alternatives?”

Our pitches were lifeless product walkthroughs, drowning customers in a river of features that looked and sounded like every other product on the market.

That’s because not all purchases are the same. And some purchases are more difficult than others.

Considered purchases take more time and effort because there are potentially negative consequences if you make a poor choice.

Most technology purchased by businesses, from accounting software to project management tools, are highly considered purchases. The stakes are high in a business purchase. Often, the purchase must be justified to a manager who might question your competence if you make a bad recommendation. Users might be upset if your newly selected product is difficult to use. Bad technology could impact the performance of the business and, in extreme cases, cost the purchaser their job. In short, buying software for a business is nothing like buying a new pair of shoes.

“Customers, it turns out, are much less worried about missing out than they are about messing up.” Matthew Dixon & Ted McKenna

Think about this for a minute. If it’s this hard to buy a toilet, how hard is it to buy your product?

I can almost guarantee it’s much harder for prospects to buy your stuff than it is for me to purchase a toilet.

What he did was give me a way to categorize all of my options so I could make an informed choice for myself based on what was most important to me. He was acting like a knowledgeable guide, and in doing so, he taught me how to confidently make a purchase. I believe that for any considered purchase, we can create a pitch, in the form of a story or narrative, that teaches customers how to buy. Not only that, but I also believe that we can create a narrative that helps our best-fit customers easily understand why they should choose us and feel very confident in making that decision.

The easiest, safest purchase decision is often no decision.

In their 2022 book, The JOLT Effect: How High Performers Overcome Customer Indecision, Matthew Dixon and Ted McKenna reveal that between 40 and 60 percent of purchase processes end in no decision.

Not making a purchase at all is an incredibly attractive option for a buyer who is worried about making a poor choice. A buyer won’t get in trouble for simply suggesting the company keep doing what they are doing.

As vendors, we underestimate the pull of “no decision” at our peril.

As a vendor, you always need to position against the buyer’s status quo, even if there are other vendors to worry about on the customer’s shortlist. Part of positioning against the status quo is making the case for change.

Fear is the granddaddy of B2B emotions. Fear of failure. Fear of the repercussions of making a poor decision. Fear of looking stupid. Fear of getting fired. In a sales situation, invoking feelings like trust and confidence can go a long way toward helping buyers overcome their fear.

Many of the technology start-ups I work with assume that helping customers buy isn’t really their job as vendors. Their job is to sell their product.

They believe the vendor’s job is to understand customers’ problems and show how their solution solves them.

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.

The person leading a B2B purchase process is tasked with making a well-informed, low-risk, defensible purchase decision. Vendors tend to assume the question the prospect wants them to answer is, “Why pick you?” Instead, the question the customer really wants the vendor to answer is, “Why pick you over all the alternatives?” If the vendor really wants to answer that latter question, they need to go beyond talking about their product and its features in isolation.

Discovery usually happens in a first sales call. Done well, discovery is 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.

So I strongly believe that when a prospect comes to your site and clicks the button that says, “Book a demo,” what they crave most is knowledge that spans both the market and your product. Prospects want to understand how to make a good choice that doesn’t get them fired. Yes, they want to see the product, but they also want insight to help them make sense of what they are looking at.

In some cases, demonstrating how your product works is the best way to communicate the value of what it does.

No matter what format you choose for your product demonstration, a first call should show customers the best of what you can do, whether or not they requested to see what you would consider your best capabilities. As I showed earlier, buyers aren’t always exactly sure what their purchase criteria should be. A first demo is a chance to firmly position yourself in the prospect’s mind by showing what makes your product different and better than the alternatives in general.

It is impossible to differentiate yourself without addressing the alternatives.

Differentiated Value Value, and more importantly differentiated value, is at the core of great sales and marketing. Yet, of all the concepts in marketing and sales, value is probably the least understood. More than anything else you might learn in this book, if you learn that a great sales pitch should be oriented around your differentiated value, I guarantee you will sell more.

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.

In a B2B sales situation, beyond simply the value you can deliver, you win deals based on your differentiated value—the value you can deliver that no other alternative can. It may be true, for example, that your product saves time for companies. But what if all your competitors also help companies save time? Suddenly, your value is interesting but not a reason to buy. 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 market. 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.

And then there is the sales pitch that sells a product or service. Unlike the investor pitch, which is all about the future, an effective sales pitch is firmly oriented in the present. This is the story that companies tell prospects to answer the question, “Why choose us over the alternatives you could choose today?”

sales and marketing teams use one of four distinct approaches to craft a narrative or pitch: 1  The product walkthrough 2  The problem/solution pitch 3  The vision narrative 4  The hero’s journey

The Product Walkthrough

“Identify stories that pique buyers’ curiosity and move them to action.” Jill Konrath

The product walkthrough generally does a poor job of answering the question, “Why pick you over the alternatives?”

The product walkthrough is all about your solution and leaves no room to discuss the market. 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. To confidently choose you, buyers need to understand why the alternatives can’t meet their needs better. It leaves no room for discovery. Most product walkthroughs don’t have a natural place for a rep to have a discovery conversation.

The Problem/Solution Pitch

This style of pitch is also more effective when the only competitor in the market is the status quo. It is dramatically less effective when there are many alternatives for the prospect to consider.

Your competitors define the problem the same way you do.

It is focused on features, not your differentiated value.

This pitch is all about your solution and leaves no room to discuss the market. Much like the product walkthrough, the problem/solution pitch does not give buyers a way to understand all the alternatives so they can confidently make the right choice for their business.

“You can’t sell anything if you can’t tell anything.” Beth Comstock

It ignores competitors beyond the status quo. For most solutions, there are many alternatives a customer might consider. Attempting to position a wide range of alternatives as “the old way” simply doesn’t work when there are competing “new ways” to consider, as well as alternatives that cannot be credibly classified as simply “old” or “new.”

The vision narrative gives buyers yet another reason to delay a decision.

There’s no urgency to buy something when it doesn’t exist yet, not to mention the added risk that you may never deliver on the vision. Prospects on the receiving end of a vision pitch often respond with, “Hey, that’s great. Come back next year and pitch this to me when it exists!”

It isn’t centered on differentiated value. It assumes that “new” is valuable (and the only value that matters). For B2B buyers, newness isn’t always obviously valuable. Worse, it can have negative associations—untested, unreliable, lacking in features, or insecure. The vision narrative is not oriented around differentiated value—what your solution can do for their business that no other solution can—which is the core of any good sales pitch.

The Hero’s Journey

Many marketers have been introduced to a version of this storytelling structure through the work of Donald Miller and his book Building a StoryBrand, which teaches marketers how to use elements of the hero’s journey to build marketing messaging. 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.

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.

Prospects need help understanding their options and how to make a confident decision.

the step that a prospect is primarily concerned with in a sales situation: “How do I confidently choose between seemingly similar options?”

Once leads got passed to the sales team, they weren’t hearing that story. Instead, they were hit with a barrage of features and a bit of information about our company history.

The most interesting thing to me about the IBM pitch structure was the way these pitches started. The conversation never began with a discussion about the company or the product. Instead, it 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.

“Stop selling. Start helping.” Zig Ziglar

The goal of a great sales pitch is to help customers understand all their choices, the trade-offs between each, and when to pick your solution.

To accomplish this, I’ve broken the sales pitch structure into two distinct phases: the setup and the follow-through. 1  The setup focuses on offering your insights about the market, competitive alternatives, and discovery. 2  The follow-through focuses on your solution for the customer 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.

The setup consists of three distinct components: Insight, Alternatives, and The Perfect World.

A Great Sales Pitch Starts with Solid Positioning

A good sales pitch doesn’t begin with a blank sheet of paper. You need to gather a distinct set of inputs before you start. A great sales pitch will be a story rooted in your positioning.

If your positioning is weak, the sales pitch is going to be weak. As you work through building a sales pitch, you might find that some of your positioning components are not particularly well defined.

In marketing, positioning defines your differentiated value and the target buyer for your message.

How the Positioning Components Work Together

A great sales pitch starts with great positioning.

Since your positioning is a critical input, before starting the process to develop your sales pitch, you will want to document your positioning.

If you are a single-product company, then the focus of the sales pitch will be your product. If your company has multiple products, then the focus of the pitch will depend on your sales process and what you usually try to sell first to a new account.

Regardless, if you are a multi-product company, it is very important to decide what you want to position in a first sales call before you build the pitch.

In a typical B2B purchase decision, there are usually between five and eight people involved in that decision. So, do you need different positioning and a different pitch for each of them? The key is to figure out who is your champion.

In the early stages of a purchase process, the champion matters much more than any other person. It’s the champion who is doing the research to determine what the requirements are and making a shortlist. They are frequently the person sitting across from you in a first sales call. If you can’t get the champion interested, you don’t even get a chance to worry about all the other stakeholders because the champion is going to eliminate you from the process before they get those other groups involved. It is critical that your positioning and sales pitch are tuned to resonate for the champion if you want to be considered for a purchase.

“How do you beat Bobby Fischer? You play him at any game but chess.” Warren Buffett

Once the champion has decided to consider your product as a potential solution, then a key part of your job is to understand the potential objections of all the other stakeholders and to arm the champion with the information to handle those objections.

You don’t need to position against competitors your prospects don’t know about. You may know of companies that could compete against you, but the sales department never sees them land on a shortlist. If so, for now you don’t have to worry about positioning against them. Although your product and strategy teams might want to keep an eye on these competitors as future threats, your marketing and sales teams can ignore them for now. If at some point you see these competitors show up in actual deals, you can adjust your positioning to handle them at that time.

You can create this list by starting with your most common competitor and working down the list to the least common alternative. Differentiated capabilities might not be differentiated when compared to every alternative, and that’s okay. Simply make a note of which competitor doesn’t have that capability and move on.

Differentiated Value The most critical component of your positioning is the value that only your product provides. Customers don’t care that much about features; they care about what those features can enable for their business. You can determine the unique value your product delivers by going down the list of differentiated features and asking yourself, “So what? Why does a customer care about this feature? What value does this feature enable for a customer’s business?” As you move down your list, you will see value themes start to emerge, and you can cluster groups of features under the value theme they enable. That’s a good thing. Customers can’t digest and remember dozens of value points, so try to keep the number of value themes down to three or fewer.

Your interpretation of your unique value is deeply informed by what you know about the good customers you already have, including their business situation, the job they want to get done with your product, and their business priorities. The more you understand that, the better job you will do in translating your unique features to value.

“Which customers care a lot about that value?”

Typically, the characteristics of a target account will be a combination of firmographic characteristics of the company (for example, number of employees, revenue), but also characteristics that are more specific to the type of solution you are selling. These could include things like the number of employees in a particular department, or other technology platforms the company has already adopted, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Salesforce, or Microsoft Office.

An effective sales pitch tells the story of the business value only you can deliver.

A good way to assess your market category is to look at your unique value and best-fit customers and ask, “Does this market category point best-fit customers toward my value or does it point them somewhere else?” In the case of LevelJump, we can see that sales enablement works for the company as a market category because it clearly points the prospect to the product’s value (sales training that drives improved revenue).

I like to recommend that teams document their positioning in a long-form file, where you can also capture relevant details about each component. Start-ups I work with like to summarize their positioning in a one-page format. I have used a template to do that, which you can download at aprildunford.com/books.

Your first wave of customers will help you validate your thesis. In my experience, you should expect your positioning to shift a lot as you learn more about which customers love your product and why. I recommend you keep your positioning a little loose as you work with your first wave of customers. Once you feel as though your positioning is validated with a group of paying customers, you can work to tighten it and the sales story that reflects it.

I recommend you check in on your positioning a couple of times a year—and when there are changes in the landscape, differentiators, and buyer behavior, be prepared to adjust your position and the sales pitch to reflect where you are in the market.

Mapping Positioning Components to the Sales Pitch

I am a big believer in cross-functional team efforts for positioning and pitch development. In my experience, most weak positioning comes from misalignment across the team. Often, marketing and sales don’t totally agree on what the differentiated value is, or product and sales don’t see eye to eye on which competitors you need to position against. Founders can sometimes be focused so much on the future vision of the company that they lose sight of how to position the product as it exists today.

When I work with teams on their positioning, I like to make sure there is representation from sales, marketing, product, and customer success in the room, in addition to the founders/CEO and anyone else on the executive team who has a strong opinion about how the company wins in the market.

In my opinion, it’s much more important that you get the flow of the sales pitch right before dive into the details of the exact words or graphics you need on particular slides. Similarly, I think it’s better to determine where the demo should fit and what you want that demo to convey conceptually first. You can worry about the specifics of the demo script later.

You want to start a sales conversation in a way that sets up your differentiated value right from the start. The best way to do that is to start with the market insight that makes your differentiated value important to customers.

“A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.” Steve Jobs

Your insight is the key element a prospect needs to get to understand the importance of your differentiated value. One way to think about insight is to view it as “the problem inside the problem.”

Problems Aren’t Unique, Insights Are

If done correctly, your insight into the market should direct the conversation toward your value from the onset.

I believe that every successful company has a unique point of view on the market—they just aren’t always great at articulating it.

Consider the Point of View of Your Best-Fit Customers One way of thinking about your unique market insight is to ask this question: “What do your best-fit prospects need to know to understand why your unique value is important to them?”

  • Importante

Your unique insight into the market is what leads you to build a product that is different and better than the alternatives.

LevelJump’s unique insight into the market is that a company realizes the value of sales onboarding only if it can measure the impact of it with sales metrics.

it. Sometimes, you will want to follow up your insight with industry research that proves that your insight is true.

Your insight doesn’t need to be complex.

The goal is to establish that the prospect finds your insight credible and then to move on to the next step as quickly as possible. You never want to skip this step—it’s super-important for setting up your differentiated value—but you want to get to the discussion of that value as quickly as you can.

Many companies avoid talking about competitors because they don’t want to be seen as bad-mouthing the competition, which only makes them look bad. Most companies also feel that no buyer would believe their opinion about a competitor because they are inherently biased. But to make a good choice, buyers need to understand the entire market and the pros and cons of different approaches to solving their problem.

Think of your competition as “approaches to the problem” rather than individual companies.

In a good sales pitch, you are contrasting the different approaches to the problem, rather than trying to compare individual products.

The biggest difference between a considered and an unconsidered purchase is that in an unconsidered purchase, buyers don’t spend much time, if any, considering their options.

But in a considered purchase, they can spend days, or months, figuring out what their options are and how to make a choice. So what’s going on in that time frame? The buyer is working through a purchase process to: •  Clarify the problem. Why do we need a new solution? What does success look like? •  Build a list of solution requirements. What is important for us in a solution? What isn’t important? What is possible and what isn’t with the current technology on the market? •  Explore multiple vendors. Who should be on the shortlist and how do I evaluate these vendors?

But there is always an alternative way to accomplish what your solution does, even if that alternative is manual processes and Excel spreadsheets. The key here is to understand what a customer sees as an alternative to your solution, not what you would necessarily consider a direct competitor.

You need to view the customer’s option to stick with the status quo as a competitive alternative, even if you don’t view the solution they are using as direct competition.

Consider Direct Competitors, but Only if They Land on a Prospect’s Shortlist

Just as you need to look at the status quo the way a customer does, you also need to look at shortlist competitors from the customer’s point of view.

Although your product and strategy teams might be tracking dozens of potential “horizon” competitors (competitors you may have in the future), you don’t need to position against anything a customer does not currently consider. There is also a real danger associated with giving prospects new approaches to think about.

Companies that orient their marketing and sales stories too closely around a future vision of the market are only giving buyers more reasons to do what they are most inclined to do—delay making any purchase at all.

The easiest way to make sense of a market is to think of it as groups of vendors that share a particular approach to the job they satisfy.

We don’t compete with companies or products. We compete with approaches.

Grouping Competitors Helps Your Customers Understand Your Value

Should You Call Out Competitors by Name? This is your decision to make, but I generally prefer not to name competitors unless we are almost guaranteed that the prospect has already looked at them as a potential solution. We don’t want to give buyers a reason to go away and research a new set of competitors. As part of the discovery the rep is doing during this step in the sales pitch, they can easily ask the prospect what other solutions they are considering, and then categorize them. That said, if there is a competitor that is seen in nearly every deal, I wouldn’t hesitate to explicitly name the elephant in the room.

Your role is to be an informed guide—one who has the customer’s best interests at heart. Nothing will destroy a customer’s trust in your advice faster than catching you out in a lie.

Discovery is a conversation, not a lecture.

How are you handling this today? How is that approach working for you? What other solutions are you looking at?

The purpose of this step in the sales pitch is to clearly state what you believe the purchase criteria should be for a solution, assuming the buyer is a best-fit customer and they agree with your point of view.

That perfect solution would provide prospects with the important upsides of each alternative while avoiding the major drawbacks. If you have done this well, the list of characteristics of the perfect solution will map to your differentiated value.

Right? That “right?” from the sales rep is a critical turning point in this pitch. It goes one of two ways now: 1) The customer doesn’t agree, which generally means they have disqualified themselves. If they don’t see your point of view as critically important to them, then your unique value simply isn’t going to resonate, and essentially you have nothing to sell them. Or, 2) the customer responds with, “Yep, you’re right,” and you have already done the hard work of making the sale. The customer has agreed that their purchase criteria should look like the above list. They have chosen the value only you can deliver. Now all that is left to do is show them how your solution delivers it. Most importantly, if the prospect agrees with you at this point, they have also agreed that the alternatives can’t meet their needs. The deal is yours to lose from this point forward.

“Proactive guidance has a demonstrably positive effect on win rates.” Matthew Dixon & Brent Adamson

Helping customers understand the value only you can deliver should be the centerpiece of everything you do in marketing and sales. Value is why customers buy your product.

Remember, the point of the Differentiated Value step is to demonstrate how your features deliver the value. But the most important thing you want the prospect to remember at the end of the step is the value—not the features. If one or more of your value themes don’t lend themselves to a demo, using a mix of slides and a demo works for this step. Value themes related to support/services, pricing models, or packaging would fall into this category. You can work those into the script or cover them in a slide.

This is not a product walkthrough. You should not be highlighting every feature of the product. The goal is to reinforce your differentiated value by showing how the product delivers that. If you have three distinct value themes, the demo should be organized around them. The script for the demo should be organized along these lines: •  We deliver a combination of Value A, Value B, and Value C for our customers. •  Let’s start with Value A: here are the features that deliver that. •  Now let’s move to Value B: here are the features that deliver that. •  Lastly, we have Value C: here’s how we do that.

A great product demo puts features in the context of the value they enable.

Buyers have learned that just because the company says it can do something does not make it so. So, if you are going to make a claim of value, you will need to back it up with some proof.

Here is a list of some ways you can prove that a value point is true: 1  Customer case studies 2  Third-party verification 3  Certification—for example, you have SOC 2 compliance for security 4  Statistics that are validated by your customers 5  Customer quotes 6  Quotes or reviews from industry analysts 7  Industry research or survey results from third parties 8  Awards

“Facts tell, but stories sell.” Bryan Eisenberg

A good salesperson will handle any questions or objections a customer may have as they occur in the sales meeting. However, you may notice that there are common objections that are crucial to address in the first meeting, whether or not the customer has raised them.

Helping Customers Understand How to Move Forward For many of the companies I have worked with, this step is when they address potential objections in regard to deployment or change management.

clients are fearful of change and will often stick with their status quo solution, even when they dislike it.

Most companies will try to help smooth the transition to their software through professional services help, training, onboarding assistance, hands-on technical support, and more.

Anticipating and handling unspoken objections is often a critical component of a first sales call.

Just like the other stages of the sales pitch, you want to be deliberate about the way your conversation comes to an end. That includes helping your prospect decide what to do next.

It isn’t unusual to see inexperienced sales folks get to the end of a sales meeting and leave it up to the prospect entirely to decide what the next step should be. Now is the time to embrace your role as a guide helping the buyer through the purchase process.

The goal in the first call should not be to get every customer closer to making a purchase. Instead, your goal is to get every good-fit buyer past this stage. A good first sales call will get good-fit prospects excited to move forward; it should also make clear to bad-fit prospects that this is not the solution for them. Ideally, your qualification step will weed out most of the bad-fit clients, but don’t expect it to weed them all out. Quickly getting misaligned prospects out of your sales process is good for everyone. It’s good for buyers, who don’t want to waste their time, and for sales teams who can concentrate their efforts on prospects that are less likely to chew up resources and then drop out of the sales process later.

If your company is new and your sales process is less evolved, a good starting point to get some structure is to be consistent in what you ask the customer to do after the first sales call.

Marketing can help with crafting slides, getting graphics created, and wordsmithing the script. Sales needs to ensure that what gets built fits the timeline of a first conversation and makes sense in the context of a sales call.

Obviously, you don’t want sales robots, but you do want to get some standardization in the first call for several reasons.

“Don’t sell life insurance. Sell what life insurance can do.” Ben Feldman

First and foremost, a standardized first-call deck ensures that you are consistently positioning your offerings in the best way you can. You agreed on your positioning at the executive team level, using everything you know about your customers, competitors, and differentiated value. You need to ensure that you are telling your best story to every prospect.

Third, it’s impossible to measure and learn what’s working and what isn’t if every rep is having a different conversation in the first call. Standardization helps you understand when and where things need to change.

There is also a tendency for sales reps to drift off message over time. The mature sales organizations I have worked with will periodically “recertify” reps on the pitch by having them pitch to the sales executive to ensure that the story remains consistent. Without regular check-ins, it becomes very hard to ensure that your sales team is delivering the message in a consistent way over time.

Getting the sales team to adopt a new sales pitch is often much harder than you think it is going to

Ideally, during the testing phase, the folks who created the sales pitch should be listening to each call the rep is doing. After every call, the team should sit down and compare notes on what they felt did and did not work in the meeting. •  Where was the prospect getting lost? •  Where was the prospect getting excited? •  Were there questions asked that might indicate there was something confusing in the pitch?

We don’t know if we have the best story possible, but we know if it’s better than the old one.

The rep has made a decision to use the new pitch because it is clearly better than the old one. This is the key. If your best salesperson thinks this sales pitch works better than the old pitch, despite their obvious bias toward a pitch that they are already experienced and comfortable with, take that as a sign that you should move forward and roll the pitch out to the rest of the team.

Insight That Isn’t Unique Some companies will try to use a common industry trend as insight at the start of their sales pitch, rather than the company’s unique insight into the market.

The key to Step 1, Insight, is to go beyond these surface-level observations and get down to the insight that makes your solution uniquely valuable. Your insight should be unique and differentiated because you need it to set up the reasoning behind why your unique, differentiated value is important.

Weak or Undifferentiated Value Themes Your positioning is the fundamental input to the sales pitch. Weak positioning leads to a weak insight statement and will result in an ineffective story about how you are differentiated from the alternatives. Your Differentiated Value step is the most important input to the pitch because this is where you articulate what your solution can do for prospects that no alternative solution can deliver. If that value is weak or not very differentiated, then the pitch will not be compelling and is unlikely to work.

“The customer’s perception is your reality.” Kate Zabriskie

study for every prospect. If your prospects are similar, this might be fine. But ideally you want your proof to connect to both the value themes you’ve covered and the individual prospect’s situation. Wherever possible, you want to have proof that matches the prospect. For example, if you are using a case study, it should reflect a similar industry or show a similar use case, such as moving from the same status quo solution.

The Ask step should move the deal forward (assuming the prospect is a good fit for your solution) by giving the prospect a next step that is easy to say yes to.

In particular, once the pitch is developed, it will become a key input to your company’s marketing messaging and can be used either directly or indirectly in different types of marketing content.

Using the sales pitch structure for that video ensures you are clearly communicating your unique insight on the market, how you are different from competitors, the value only you can deliver, and the proof you can do what you say you can.

A good guide gives buyers a way to think about purchase criteria. It may include checklists of features that a buyer should look for, but more importantly, it helps buyers understand when and why they should be looking for those features.

One caution here, however. It is not uncommon for a company to have a version of the product that end users can freely download and use, and for the sales team to later sell an enterprise contract to a different, management-level buyer. In these cases, often the end-user positioning is different from the positioning for the economic champion, and therefore the sales pitch for the ultimate buyer will be different from the narrative for end users. The important point here is that if you are telling a story through the product itself, it is essential to understand what story you are telling and to whom.

“A well-told story is a gift to the reader/ listener/viewer because it teaches them how to confront their own discomforts.” Shawn Coyne

That insight is often a great topic for a conference talk.

Buying is hard. Do not underestimate how difficult making a purchase decision can be for your prospects.

“Do nothing” is the most fearsome competitor you have. If customers cannot figure out how to confidently make a purchase decision, they simply won’t make one.

sales pitch is special. Companies tell different stories for different audiences and for different purposes. A sales pitch is a unique style of story designed to guide the customer to a place where they can say yes with confidence.

A great sales pitch starts with your company’s unique insight into the market. Sales pitches that start with generic problems or trends will not lead prospects to your unique differentiated value.

Help customers understand their options and they will be better informed to make decisions confidently. You don’t need to bash the competition to do this.

Differentiated value is the star of the show. Customers don’t care about features. They care about what those features can do for their business.

Knowing how to do something is not the same thing as teaching someone else how to do

Stay focused on helping the buyer make a confident decision.

Backlinks