It seems strangely ironic that the end of our two week festival of posts on Pitching has been marked by the untimely death of veteran TV pitchman Billy Mays.

My fellow Sales Bloggers have quite rightly highlighted the flaws in the pitching model – particularly that it is a combatitive model of selling rather than a partnership model. Certainly, given the choice of building a relationship with a potential client vs pitching at them, we should choose the relationship every time.

But in my experience, pitching is becoming more, not less common nowadays. Not because salespeople want it that way – but because our buyers do. Beauty parades and pitches are common in the professions, and are extending their reach continually as procurement of services is “professionalised”. Procurement professionals often view building relationships with clients as an attempt to circumvent the “objective” procurement process and many prefer to keep vendors at arms length and to select based only on written material and presentations. Some even go as far as to disallow members of their organisations with personal experience with the vendors from taking part in the selection process in case they are biased in favour of one of the bidders. In fact they seem to value a “level playing field” over actually making the right decision using all the available information.

While I hope that some day they’ll come to their senses and realise that the ability to build a productive relationship with your clients is at the heart of good service delivery and so should be a critical part of selling and buying – I don’t hold out hope for a change soon. So pitching is here to stay: whether you’re a startup pitching for VC funding, or an ad agency pitching your ideas, or a salesperson pitching your product in front of a selection committee.

So if pitching is here to stay – what can we learn from the veteran “pitchmen” that will help us pitch better.

Well, first of all, let’s look at what a “pitchman” actually is. Despite the temptation to drop into a baseball analogy, a pitchman is not a pitcher. I believe the origin of pitchman came from the the fact that the salesman (it was always a man) used to travel with county fairs or other travelling events and had to put up a pitch (as in “pitching a tent”) to sell from at each new location. So pitching is not about lobbing a fastball at an unsuspecting customer – it’s about setting out your stall as attractively as possible. If nothing else, the pitchmen were entertaining – I wish I could say the same about the sales presentations in corporate situations I see.

Now since they travelled from town to town, the old pitchmen were dealing with brand new prospects all the time. Prsopects who didn’t know or care who they were. They didn’t have the time or the opportunity to gradually build relationships with their customers – and frankly, for the price of the products they sold, it wasn’t worth it either.

Instead they had to grab the attention of passers-by in only a few seconds. They used loud noises and loud voices – echoing the approach of buskers and street performers. Ron Popeil (founder of Ronco) opened his pitch for the Chop-O-Matic with “Ladies & Gentlemen, I’m going to show you the greatest kitchen appliance ever made!”

How can we do something similar today to begin our pitches in an impactful way? Well we certainly shouldn’t do what most people do in sales presentations: begin with long winded descriptions of who we are and the history of our company. By the time you’ve got through that, our clients will have switched off. Instead, focus on what’s going to grab the attention of of the client. And that’s usually his problem. Begin with a brief statement of value, what problems you’re going to solve and what it’s going to do for them.

What did the pitchmen do in the middle of their presentations? They always demonstrated the product. They proved it did what they said it could do. And they often got up audience volunteers (or later on TV, celebrity guests) to use the product too to prove anyone could do it.

We face the same problem in pitching our services. How can our potential client really know we can do the things we claim we can? It’s all well and good focusing on the benefits they’ll get from working with us (or from funding our company, or from using our ad campaign) – but if they don’t believe we can do it, the claimed benefits are meaningless.

Just like the pitchmen, our best course to prove ourselves is to demonstrate. To show our capabilities in action. Perhaps we can walk through a similar example of work we’ve done; or perhaps we can even use our time with them to actually start working for them by sharing ideas, jointly brainstorming & problem solving. That way they get to see what it would be like to work with us for real.

And how did the pitchment close? With unexpected value.

Just when you thought the product was going to be hugely expensive, they told you it was really cheap. And not only that, they were throwing in something extra: “But wait, there’s more….”

Now the “but wait, there’s more…” approach has become a bit clichéd, but the principle still works. Make sure what you’re proposing is perceived as so valuable they just can’t say no. And then add some more value.

Now, of course, there’s plenty more to do in sales – and pesonally I try to avoid getting involved in a pitch whenever I can.

But sometimes it’s just unavoidable. And when it is, we could do a lot worse than learning from the old-time pitchmen. Billy Mays knew this – he’d have been completely at home at the county fair selling vegetable chopper or knife sharpener. And when the time is right, you need to be too.