You’re prospecting an important client, you have worked hard to get into a meeting with him and all is set for your big pitch, something a mediocre sales person would do is make sure the pitch goes well with everyone smiling through the pitch and the client slightly gives a nod by the end of pitch and you wait forever for his final yes/no. That’s to be true a failed pitch, charisma and energy are instrumental when you’re pitching but relying just on these energy dynamics will just get you smiles and a nod.
We have all been in situations as salespeople where are stuck in an endless loop of meetings and we still gather no answer and no quantifiable outcome. Our sales targets haunt us while we keep pushing ourselves in the wrong direction.
The answer to this hurdle lies in behavioral finance, by the end of the blog you will be well equipped to deliver short concise pitches that have instant quantifiable outcomes. This obviously will be a detailed account so sit back and read.
1) Just as you enter the pitch room make sure that you establish that you really are running short on time, this puts you across as a person who will not waste time and will talk right to the point, from a CE0’s or a decision maker’s perspective this is a green signal to start with.
2) Now that you have set the time frame, you have unleashed the control technique, you not only assured the target that the pitch will be crisp and short but you also have conditioned yourself. The time constraint of 20 minutes is well backed by the theory of mind attention. No one can hear and consume information for more than 20 minutes; a pitch that is longer than this is more likely to bounce off the target leaving him irritated.
0-2 minutes
Introduce your background, give the target your human context, skip the generic pleasantries to be true the exchange of business cards is enough to pass your personal information to the target you needn’t waste any time over doing that, stick to just one accolade your company achieved in terms of client satisfaction, just one and the best. This leaves the target with a much clearer thought of you and the accolade acts a driver of the meeting for long, you don’t want to start off with the entire history of clients that were good, almost good and average. Prepare a case study graphic for every industry your company has worked for and show it off in 2 minutes.
2-10 minutes
You have had a good start, by now you have surpassed all the salespeople who take forever in background showoff, while the attention of your target is sustained, you should quickly move to the big solution you want to present, but wait, don’t dive into technical details of your solution this early. Every idea/solution/service has socio-eco-technical drivers that make it relevant and investment ready; we call these drivers as the market forces.
Example, your idea is to develop a unique dating application, in which the dates can review and rate the date, a smart sales person would start with establishing the social driver on how people are readily moving to online dating and how there is a pleasant psychological welcome to online dating apps. Followed by an economic force that establishes competitor analysis and why this is economically the right time to tap into such an idea. Finally comes the technical driver, wherein you explain that how the idea or solution to the business problem can be realized through technology.
You have consumed 10 minutes of your pitch and up till this point you’ve done all the right things, you fully have the target’s attention and the target has just the right kind of context about the solution. Usually, salespeople cause change blindness to the target by jumping to the idea and portraying that how the world will be a better place after the service is implemented, this triggers a sense of disbelief in the target’s mind.
10-12 minutes
These 2 minutes are reserved for explaining your big idea; all you need to do is present the set of problems and how the idea solves it, shouldn’t take you more than 2 minutes.
12-15 minutes
Explain them the budget, by now the target is fully immersed contextually and literally in the pitch, something that we suggest is as follows “Okay folks you’ve heard it all let’s keep the budget aside, do you trust me and the idea? If yes budget shall not be a problem”.
15-20 minutes
This probably is the most important 5 minutes of the pitch, the part that will procure you your final answer without delay. The target’s attention is the result of two neurotransmitters, dopamine, and tension.
Dopamine is triggered when you give your target a sense of reward “Please listen to the idea and by the end of the next quarter you’ll be driving a jaguar”, I know this sounds bogus, but remember you’ve tactically spent 15 minutes building up for the reward, tell the target something that you think he’ll yearn for professionally, by now he has all the dopamine flowing.
The second part is building tension “From the looks on your faces you don’t really seem very interested which only prompts me to the exit door”. This might seem a little intense but it immediately establishes the urgency of the answer. The above technique is called frame stacking and hot cognition, all the above-stated techniques are templates that can be applied to any kind of a sales pitch, feel free to use them and let us know if you realized any success from it.