Do all your salespeople have the gift of the gab? Can they sell ice to a polar bear in winter? A good sales pitch doesn’t sound like a pitch at all. It sounds like a natural conversation. But getting to that level takes practice, energy, and the right approach.
Many salespeople start off feeling unsure of themselves, talking too much, over explaining, or struggling to connect with potential customers. This can be off putting, resulting in a resounding “no” before they’re finished pitching their product or service.
The good news? Anyone can learn sales skills if they put their mind to it.
This guide will walk you through the techniques sales teams can use to improve their pitch, taking them from awkward to articulate with a little training and practice.
How to Improve the Sales Pitch
A sales pitch is about more than delivering the perfect speech or presentation—it’s about communication and relationships with potential customers. Interacting with people in a way that generates sales may not come naturally to everyone, but as a team leader, manager, or business owner, you can help your team boost their sales skills.
Understand Your Audience
The best salespeople go beyond just memorizing product features or their pitch and take time and effort to understand the potential client. Before jumping into a pitch, research your prospect. What are their biggest pain points and their daily challenges? What has worked or failed for them in the past, and what are their buying habits?
When you speak directly to their needs, your pitch stops sounding like a sales script and becomes a solution. Instead of a work chore, your time with the client becomes something of value to them.
Exude Positivity
The saying “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar” is as applicable in sales as anywhere else. People with a positive, captivating, and confident demeanor are more likely to close deals than those who come across as insecure, negative, dull, or disinterested.
When coaching a sales team in improving their pitch, remind them of the following points:
- Clarity: Encourage your sales team to thoroughly understand their product or service so they can properly convey the message to the client. Clarity also comes from speaking clearly and projecting your voice well.
- Build a cheat sheet: Keep a few bullet points on hand to keep your thoughts organized.
- Persuasion: Being passionate about your product or service will help convince clients that you are the solution to their problem.
- Confidence: Clients are more likely to buy from confident salespeople. Preparing well beforehand will help your team feel more confident, including doing their homework regarding their customers, current market trends, and statistics.
Ditch the Script, Keep the Structure
Reading from a script is a guaranteed way to sound like a robot and make a potential client yawn. Instead, build a flexible structure:
- Opening Hook: Start with a relatable question or a quick insight.
- Problem and Solution: Clearly explain the challenge and how your product or service solves it.
- Proof: Share a quick success story or statistic.
- Call to Action: Guide your customer to the next steps – whether it’s a demo, a follow-up call, or a free trial.
Having a framework instead of a word-for-word script makes conversations feel more natural while keeping you on track. Of course, there must be enough opportunities between the framework stages for the customer to express their pain points, opinions, and objections.
Master the Art of Active Listening
Many salespeople talk too much. A strong pitch isn’t about dumping information – it’s about listening to your client’s needs and guiding the conversation to the desired endpoint.
Using active listening techniques builds trust and rapport with prospects and customers, which is an essential criterion of any sales deal. The key elements of active listening include:
- Paying attention: Your focus must be entirely on the prospect. Maintain good eye contact, nod occasionally, or use other affirmative cues through your body language.
- Showing Empathy: A prospect needs to know that you understand their needs and point of view. This establishes trust and rapport.
- Open-ended Questions: Avoid asking questions with dead-end answers, like “yes” or “no.” Rather, use leading questions that start with “Why, how, when, what, or where?” This will give your prospect a chance to provide everything you need to know about their needs.
- Summarizing and Clarifying: When you’ve heard what the prospect has to say, paraphrase it briefly to show that you understand what they’ve said, and ask clarifying questions if necessary.
Speak Clearly, Confidently, and Professionally
It’s not just what you say that matters, but how you say it. Fast talkers can seem nervous. Monotone voices lose attention. Over-explaining can confuse clients and make them lose track of the original point of the call or meeting.
Focus on speaking at a controlled, steady speed. Keep your tone warm and natural, like talking to a colleague. Pause now and then to give key points a second to land instead of rushing along to the next stage. Without being too formal, remember to use businesslike language to sound professional.
This sounds like a lot to remember, and it is. However, with practice or the help of communication coaching, it becomes easier to speak with confidence and clarity, even when under pressure.
Make it Relatable with Stories
Use stories as well as stats. Of course, customers want to know that you are on top of market trends, etc. However, telling a relatable story of how a client who struggled with similar issues and switched to your product or service with excellent results inspires trust. Stories also make your pitch memorable. Keep them short, though. Nobody needs a ten-minute backstory – just enough to paint a clear picture!
Handle Objections Professionally
Objections aren’t rejections – they’re opportunities to clarify. Salespeople should expect them and prepare for them. The golden rule in handling objections is never to interrupt or contradict a potential client. Instead, acknowledge their concern so they feel heard and offer a response that keeps the conversation open.
You can often anticipate typical objections before a call or meeting. This gives you the opportunity to prepare your responses and solutions beforehand.
This could look something like this:
- Customer: That sounds expensive.
- Response: Yes, budget is always a factor. Many of our customers felt that way at first, but once they saw [key benefit], they found it was worth the investment.
- Customer: We already have a solution.
- Response: OK, what do you like about it, and is there anything you wish it did better?
A good response keeps the conversation moving forward rather than shutting it down.
Use AI Tools
Team training can cost your firm a small fortune and eat up a good slice of company time. AI coaching tools can be a godsend for training your sales team to improve their pitch. These tools have the necessary capabilities to:
- Repeatedly listen to the team’s pitch
- Give measurable and trackable feedback
- Analyze each section of the pitch and indicate which parts need improving
- Give suggestions on how to improve the pitch
End with a Clear Call to Action
A great pitch falls flat if there’s no clear call to action. Don’t leave things with a vague “Let me know what you think.” Instead, guide the prospect to the next step by setting follow-up arrangements with dates and times.
Creating a sense of urgency also helps drive the pitch to a positive end—so much so that it can increase conversions by a whopping 332%. For example, “We’re having our annual sale this week, and after that, prices will increase.” The goal is to keep the momentum going, not to let the conversation fade out, with the customer forgetting who you are when they put the phone down or leave the meeting.
Final Reminders
- Watch your body language
- Sales is all about relationships and trust
- Know and be passionate about your product
From Good (or bad) Pitches to Great Ones
Great sales pitches aren’t about flashy presentations or aggressive tactics. They’re about honest conversations, genuine connections, and real value. With the right approach, you can go from feeling awkward to sounding articulate and knowledgeable, and then closing deals will become second nature.
