Refine Your Pitch: 5 Secrets to Succeeding in Sales

Your sales pitch represents your bread and butter. It's your secret sauce. It builds interest in your product or service. Refining and improving your sales pitch increases your results. The following represents 5 secrets that can help you succeed in sales.

1. Focus on Your Customer

People are naturally vain. They want to talk about themselves and they want others to talk about them in a positive way. You can talk all day about the benefits of a product or service. It can be the best product on the market, but if the customer doesn’t see how it can benefit them, then sales will suffer. A customer shouldn’t have to figure out for themselves how the product will benefit them. That’s the job of a sales professional. Focus on the customer and ensure that the customer knows the product will specifically benefit them.

2. Keep the Pitch Simple

Think about TV and radio ads. They give their entire sales pitch in under 30 seconds. Each word and phrase is thought out in advance for maximum effectiveness. When you are developing your sales pitch, try to keep it limited to about 60 seconds. Most people will give you about a minute to pique their interest. In that 60 seconds, you have to explain what your product is, how it will benefit them, and how they can take advantage of it. These are called the three essential parts. Don’t kill them with details because details are good question fodder that can be followed up on.Develop your pitch with this in mind and understand that every sales situation is different. Just keep in mind the three essential parts. Your pitch might be less than 15 seconds and then quickly move into a conversational banter with your prospect. It doesn’t matter if you’ve communicated the three essential parts.

3. Practice Your Pitch

Whether you’re selling from a company like Xyngular or in a bigger business, practice your pitch regularly with people in your life. Look for their reactions and try to adjust your delivery. Ask for feedback during practice sessions. Let them be brutally honest, but don’t take 100% of their advice. Write the advice down and use it during the optimization stage for ideas on what you might need to change.

4. Optimize Your Pitch

As you practice and use your sales pitch, you'll start to think about changing it. Changing your pitch needs to be done in a methodical way. You could run a full Design of Experiments engineering experiment to capture all of the effects and interactions, but that is probably overkill. You can simply run A/B split testing experiments. Try a significant number of pitches (10 or more) with an element and without an element. If sales are the same or better without the element then the element can be eliminated. Next, you can add what you think is an improved element and test it as well. If it improves sales then keep it. You could explore deeper on the statistics involved, but this form of testing should be more than adequate.

5. Ask for Customer Feedback

You need data to refine your sales pitch and improve it. One of the best ways is to survey your customers. Your company will probably already be surveying customers. Ask for access to this data so that you can see what your customers thought about your pitch and any feedback for improvement. If possible, contact customers a few weeks after the sale to check on how they are enjoying their purchase. It’s good time to offer them tips on improving their experience and it’s a great time to get feedback with a couple of survey questions. Tailor the questions to your pitch and use the data to refine your pitch.Utilizing these 5 secrets to sales success, you will refine your sales pitch. You’ll get higher sales and better conversion rates. You’ll see the personal benefits that come from focusing on the customer, getting the right feedback, and simplifying your pitch.