What makes a good sales pitch?
The top characteristic of a good pitch is that it responds to the client’s needs — 69 percent of buyers cited it as the best way to ensure a positive sales experience, according to HubSpot research. To do that effectively requires not only a deep understanding of which needs the product is capable of solving, but active listening skills and an inquisitive attitude.
“You might be the expert on the product or service you’re offering,” said Alex Swan, account executive at ActiveCampaign, “but it’s more important to learn from the prospect and ask the right questions, so you can understand the viability of the offering and whether it may solve their problems.” As a company dedicated to using customer experience automation to create individual communication campaigns, ActiveCampaign’s reps need to be experts on tailoring their sales pitches to address specific needs.
To hear more about the secrets of a good sales pitch, Built In Chicago sat down with Alex Swan and sales leaders from nine other companies to hear what makes their product great to pitch — and the skills that sales reps need to hone to make it perfect.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
The great thing about pitching ActiveCampaign to prospects is the familiarity everyone has with the problem ActiveCampaign solves: Helping businesses grow by scaling their customer experiences. Almost everyone knows what it feels like when a business tries to communicate with them without making any effort to tailor the communication to their wants or needs. The messaging is typically generic, irrelevant or unimportant. When a company speaks to customers on an individual level — taking their likes, dislikes and feedback into account — the experience can be entirely different. It helps customers appreciate the communication and find value in what the sender has to say.
ActiveCampaign solves a problem everyone understands, is easy to explain and can help thousands of businesses form better relationships with their customers — all through customer experience automation.
When a company speaks to customers on an individual level — taking their likes, dislikes and feedback into account — the experience can be entirely different.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
The ability to choose your words carefully and be mindful of your place in the conversation is imperative: Make your words count. Too often, reps will try to dominate the conversation or discuss how amazing their product is to try to simply get the sale — I prefer an approach that includes spending more time listening, inquiring and trying to understand the needs of the prospect.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Simple: I believe that Tock is the best product on the market.
It’s an all-in-one platform for reservation and table management, prepaid and deposit bookings, event ticketing, delivery and takeout. Hospitality businesses such as restaurants and wineries have long been plagued by having to use disparate systems that are both outdated and expensive. Our software helps them save money, improve efficiency and sell more. We were also founded by — and are led by — an active restaurateur, so our product is constantly improving and evolving based on the needs of the industry. It’s also very helpful to be able to point to other restaurants that are our raving fans and highlight their success when pitching new prospects.
Tock is the only organization I’ve worked at where every department, from engineering to customer service, wants proactive feedback on what’s helping the sales team, as well as what new features should be built to provide even greater success.
Tock’s pricing is also very favorable to our customers. Unlike other companies, our pricing is simple, transparent and fair. Tock only requires a 12-month term which makes selling easier than trying to lock customers into long-term contracts.
Successful salespeople at Tock sell consultatively — they listen to prospect’s needs and are adept at objection handling.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
Our top priority at Tock is doing what’s best for our customers, and that extends to the sales process. Tock is the only software designed by restaurateurs to specifically help restaurants operate more efficiently and sell more. Successful salespeople at Tock sell consultatively — they listen to prospect’s needs and are adept at objection handling, which is key to building a robust, highly-qualified pipeline.
Being a self-starter is very important. Given Tock’s explosive growth, a new account executive (AE) is in charge of building out their own territory. Management provides oversight — but the responsibility of developing your own territory plan, mapping out prospects, managing your pipeline and running the full cycle sales process resides on each individual. For me, that’s the most exciting part — building out a territory that I’m responsible for.
Tock sales are high volume with unlimited greenfield, so being detail-oriented and a strong multitasker are musts for success. Given these required skills, sales reps geared towards small and medium-sized business (SMB) selling are typically the best fit. Being able to manage your pipeline, accurately forecast and know where to focus your efforts are important to achieve quota and kickers.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Upwork is great to pitch because it solves a real problem. We understand that the world of work is changing, and we have a solution for everyone. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to hiring anymore — our product allows companies to customize a plan that fits their unique hiring needs without sacrificing quality. We are removing the barrier of location and connecting top businesses with top-in-demand talent across the world. The results are amazing!
Some of the most important skills are active listening, storytelling, objection handling, time management and problem-solving.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
When pitching Upwork, some of the most important skills are active listening, storytelling, objection handling, time management, problem-solving and — most importantly — the ability to run an effective discovery call.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
What’s great about AvePoint is that we have the ability to sell our products and services to any and all industries — but more importantly, we offer solutions that can address every need a prospect may have when it comes to their Microsoft 365 (M365) journey. If a company is planning on moving to M365, we can help migrate their content — or if they have been using the platform, we can help ensure it is properly managed, protected and secured. We like to say we paint the full story when it comes to a customer’s M365 journey.
It’s important to be a great listener to identify all the areas where we can help our customers and prioritize the importance of them.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
Since we do offer so many solutions, it’s important to be a great listener to identify all the areas where we can help our customers and — if there are multiple areas — prioritize the importance of them. We also must be persistent to stay on top of opportunities and think outside the box when it comes to prospecting, because finding new opportunities is the hardest part of Sales. Once we start speaking to a prospect, I think our solutions sell themselves!
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
There is a global awareness and need for cybersecurity products like Keeper. Prospects are generally aware of the prevalence of ransomware and how it is impacting organizations worldwide — deploying Keeper is one of the most impactful things an organization can do to improve their overall security posture and reduce the risk of a breach from compromised credentials.
Selling our product takes strong listening skills and the ability to translate concerns into solutions.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
The most important skills required for selling Keeper’s products are an understanding of the cybersecurity landscape and the ability to communicate how Keeper can solve specific use cases and scenarios brought to us by customers and prospects. It takes strong listening skills and the ability to translate concerns into solutions.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
We offer a truly great product — we present a unique concept and introduce each business owner to an opportunity they’ve likely never heard about before. Every business owner is passionate about the business they’ve built, and we tap into their desire for further success by offering them a new, valuable asset for their brand.
Not only that, but our process is unique. We can put world-class audio demos together in just a couple hours and come present the next day. This quick turnaround is great because it catches owners when they’re most excited about what we have to offer. I think they not only appreciate, but also respect how prompt and professional we are.
Approaching people in a conversational way makes it way less ‘salesy’ and establishes a sense of trust that makes it easier to influence people.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
I think it’s important to communicate excitement and passion for our product and process, which everyone learns about during onboarding.
Being personable and charismatic helps. We’re normal people, pitching to normal people. Working in sales at PHMG isn’t about being book smart, it’s about emotional intelligence — being able to speak with anyone and bring them around to your way of thinking. Approaching people in a conversational way makes it way less “salesy” and establishes a sense of trust that makes it easier to influence people.
As with any selling role, it’s also important to be persistent and maintain your enthusiasm about the product, regardless of what happened on the call before.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
We help our AEs sell more effectively because we understand what makes Gearset the perfect solution to solve our prospects’ problems — and what makes us stand out from our competitors. We’ve developed a significant amount of content educating our prospects on industry best practices — many of which were developed by Gearset.
Gearset Software solves a major problem that tens of thousands of companies are trying to solve right now — how to deploy and release Salesforce updates more often and more reliably. It’s called DevOps, and Gearset helps our customers build changes faster, deploy fewer bugs and deliver more value. The end result is that we’ve become a highly-rated DevOps software on G2. Our customers are more agile, grow more rapidly and retain more of their best talent.
Gearset has grown 100 percent per year for the last five years and earned thousands of amazing customers including CocaCola, Comcast, Disney, Johnson & Johnson, Maersk, McKesson and United Airlines. We believe we are the leading DevOps solution — delivering clear value and ROI solving big, complex, expensive problems that our target market is trying to solve right now.
We understand exactly what makes Gearset the perfect solution to solve our prospects’ problems and why we’re better than our competitors.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
An amazing combination of proven B2B software sales skills, comfort with a more technical sale and strong ability to collaborate with team members to hit individual, team and company sales targets. We have a team of sales engineers working with AEs, but we expect all of our AEs to be able to do a basic demo of our products. This is critical for understanding how our product maps to their prospect requirements.
We also need AEs that know how to clearly align their selling approach with an organization’s buying process. It’s critical to ask questions, listen closely, analyze and develop a plan to help your buyers move through their buying process.
We also encourage our AEs to help us improve how we sell, support customers and market, and the products we develop — so we hire AEs that are willing to speak up in a constructive way.
We have a generous, achievable and uncapped compensation plan — AEs have averaged 104 percent of target for the last eight quarters — and we invest heavily in sales and product training. We will double our sales team this year, and we would love to speak with proven software AEs about joining our US team.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
In today’s world, consumers have a high standard for an acceptable experience and where they’ll spend their time, attention and money. Leading companies understand the consumer expectations and hire research teams who are looking for ways to collect information about how to make the experience more enjoyable, easier, better or faster.
Dscout’s research platform gives those companies the opportunity to make decisions about features they build, products to improve or innovations taken to market — with the context of authentic, human behavior. Within the marketplace, no product is more flexible in providing “aha” moments for research teams via a variety of different research methods.
At the same time, our product is great for pitching to prospects and leadership because it helps drive real value for businesses by creating more loyal customers or users, attracting new users and driving more long term value per user.
All of this helps research teams make the case for dscout as they strive to influence the strategy of the company to be centered around what their customer needs and expects with every experience.
A successful salesperson knows there is a ton of value in good questions.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
In order to connect this opportunity with so many companies, there are a few core skills needed as a sales person.
First, you need to be adaptable to the environment. The flexibility of our tool and the variety of research needs across different verticals require a salesperson to adjust the messaging and the key points of value based on where the prospect is in their research journey.
The second piece is curiosity, which goes hand-in-hand with adaptability. Curiosity is at the core of dscout. A successful salesperson knows there is a ton of value in good questions, and so do researchers. Going beyond surface level questions to ask level two and level three questions will better align our solution to their pain and identify the value we can drive over time.
Finally, you need to thrive in a team environment. Our sales cycle requires support from cross-functional teams internally and the ability to build strong internal champions within our prospective companies. No one completes the sales process alone. The beauty of our team environment is that we can pull more weight together — and make a bigger impact inside the companies we’re selling to.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Smartly.io is focused on building a social cloud ecosystem that makes creative content and media easy, effective and enjoyable for brands and agencies. Clients continuously face workflow and performance challenges within the social space — Smartly.io provides solutions that solve brands’ challenges by connecting and streamlining all of the dispersed pieces that go into paid social. We are a workflow automation tool to help alleviate manual work so that marketers can focus on higher level strategy. By doing so, Smartly.io believes in community, so we hold fun events throughout the year — such as Sofa Summit, where we bring social marketers from different industries across the globe to share insights and successes so that everyone can learn and have fun doing it.
Smartly.io are ambitious to become the best at what they do — yet they’re humble when it comes to their approach with clients.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
One of my favorite values of Smartly.io is that everyone is a humble hungry hunter. Successful sellers within Smartly.io are ambitious to become the best at what they do — yet they’re humble when it comes to their approach with clients, making sure they listen and truly understand their business. Smartlies take ownership for their roles, focus on a customer first mentality and — not to be left out — have fun. Our organization believes in educating our sales team to be experts in the social space so that they can consult clients on winning across the different platforms. We are a company that believes in our people and supports those who want to grow their career in sales or try positions in other fields.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Bringg is designed with a client-first approach in everything we do. When engaging with prospective clients and partners, features and functionality are rarely discussed due to the enterprise nature of the projects we work on.
Bringg’s approach is to design the entire order-service flow in the context of the client’s existing and future tech stack. This methodology entrenches our ability to engage executives in value-based conversations, knowing that our platform has proven itself with existing Fortune 500 client projects.
As a platform-based localized fulfillment system, Bringg’s approach isn’t to determine how the client’s needs can fit into it — we mold Bringg to fit the client’s use case no matter the geography, service or product, SLA or mode of transport.
Bringg’s approach isn’t to determine how the client’s needs can fit into it — we mold Bringg to fit the client’s use case.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
Our client engagements require us to do more than actively listen and interpret their needs. You have to be suggestive in nature when it comes to what an organization should do based on its current situation. The future state is the objective — but without knowing a client’s industry and their specific business, technology becomes irrelevant if you aren’t targeting the right areas.
The same goes for the internal client teams that are working with you. You need to have a strong rapport — down to a personal level — so that unfiltered feedback and information flow to you. No transformative fulfillment project that directly impacts a Fortune 500 client base will go without speed bumps, as there are always status quo groups pushing back. Having the foresight to work with those hindering groups to respectfully challenge their stance while allowing their feedback to mold the project allows these instances to be minimized.
