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by NASP Team
Salespeople tend to make sales pitches that disrupt the natural flow of conversations. For this reason, people develop an aversion to them.
First off, people don’t want to be sold something they’re not interested in.
Secondly, prospects are only receptive to sales pitches at specific times. That means salespeople can’t approach leads with their offers and expect them to accept immediately.
So, if you want to become someone who can sell anything, you’ve come to the right place.
This post explains how you can close prospects strategically and successfully. This way, you can generate more sales and get more results from your effort.
Let’s begin!
While it’s possible to close people who aren’t your target audience, it’s best to reach out to your most highly qualified leads first. Doing so increases your chances of converting them into clients or customers.
If you have a list of prospects collected by your marketing team, you must research the buyers online. Identify the following points, among others, to help you shape your buyer persona:
Knowing these things allows you to customize your pitch in a way that addresses their pain points and grabs their attention.
Ideally, you will be able to see information about each prospect from your CRM. But if you don’t have one, you can start by searching for their social media accounts.
Check their bios and the posts they’re sharing in their feed. These give you an idea about their personalities and hobbies that you can leverage in your proposal.
Also, do a Google search of their name to unearth other information about prospects online that you can use in your research.
After collecting all the necessary information, you must choose the appropriate pitch deck template from your design platform. To grab your lead’s attention, choose a template that you think will appeal to their personality and interests.
To start, you’ll want to have at least one slide dedicated to the problem, the solution your product provides, your business model, your strategy, and your funding request.
What yours will look like will highly depend on its purpose, so feel free to add or edit from these basics.
The information gathered in the previous step is crucial in creating a personalized pitch to a prospect. Since every person is different, you must approach each with a unique proposal that targets their pain points and demonstrates how you can solve them.
If you’re reaching out to a corporate client, personalized pitch decks are a great way to approach the situation. Try using pre-made and visually appealing pitch deck templates to prepare your presentation and save time.
Below are other ways you can implement personalization:
A dedicated live streaming platform like OneStream Studio allows live selling and lets you talk to prospects in real-time online. It also has features that let you showcase your brand so you can leave a lasting impression.
All these enable you to communicate and build relationships with each lead properly.
If they don’t have time to sit down for a conversation or to watch your live stream, you can drop them a message on different channels. If they have a LinkedIn account, you can get in touch using InMail, a feature available with the tool’s Sales Navigator plan.
You can also send prospects an email by first finding their address. Email verifier tools like Hunter.io allow you to find the email addresses of people inside an organization.
From here, identify the best person to reach out to with your pitch based on their job description. This lets you increase your chances of getting a reply from them.
To further improve your chances of getting a response, consider when to send your email. Referring to their online activity, look at the hours when they’re most active.
This is probably the period of the day when you should reach out to them.
Once you’ve determined your prospects’ pain points and interests, use them as touchpoints in your pitch. You want them to be aware that you know what they need and that you can help.
In this case, you may decide that a traditional pitch isn’t the way to go. Instead, you might consider launching free ebooks for download and hosting webinars discussing topics that interest them.
For instance, your cash-strapped entrepreneur prospect may appreciate getting business ideas with low investments in your upcoming podcast.
By offering immense value to prospects, you foster trust with them. This leads to increased brand and product awareness. Through consistency, you can encourage them to eventually buy.
Prospects will question your pitch, and rightfully so. Since there is no trust developed yet when you start to sell any thing to them, you must earn it first. Even if you do create assets that provide solutions to their problems, they might still decline your pitch.
Objections are normal in sales. What’s more important now is how you respond and whether or not you manage objections properly.
The fact that they said “no” is valuable feedback for your sales efforts.
Also, you can defer to social proof to show how much your brand has helped customers with work and their lives. This can help sway their opinion towards your brand and encourage them to finally trust you.
The most interesting thing about sales nowadays is that it’s not about pushing your product at the forefront of your pitch.
These days, it’s all about providing value to prospects without getting anything in return (at least for a while). So if you’re expecting the transaction to go like some magic show where you say, “With these words, I can sell you anything,” and they’ll buy, you’re sorely mistaken.
Selling is not a one-off transaction or conversation where your potential buyer will either buy or not. In closing, here are some additional considerations:
Let’s say that you’re marketing automation software. If you’re selling this for any money, it’s important to reiterate that helping others with their problems first should be your main priority.
If they rejected your offer, it means you didn’t make a convincing case in your pitch, or you don’t have their trust yet.
Only when you have proven your worth to prospects can you build goodwill with them. From here, you get to move prospects down your sales funnel until you finally close them.
The good news is that it gets easier as you go down the funnel, as you’ll be left with potential buyers more interested in your offer.
Zappos’ “WOW philosophy” is proof of this. Their willingness to go the extra mile to help customers, even if it’s not relevant to their products, played a role in the brand’s popularity. More importantly, it allowed its target customers to put their faith in Zappos.
Do the same thing in your business by opening your customer support channels like:
The merits of providing value to prospects can never be understated. It is a way of getting a foot in the door, improving the odds of the prospect turning to your business should they decide to buy.
Once you’ve proven your value to customers, the price won’t matter to them. You’ve provided them with so much value that they’ll be more than happy to return the favor by patronizing your brand.
By following the tips above, you can ease prospective buyers down your sales process in no time.
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