There is no doubt that sales is about communicating, and as such sales is very much about semantics. For most people when they hear the word pitch they either think of baseball or sales. Not wanting to get nasty notes, yes some in the UK may also think of cricket or a soccer field, indulge me here, for most it is likely baseball or sales. It is also likely that sales adopted the term from the sport.

If we look at baseball and see that the role of the pitcher is to get three balls past the batter without allowing the batter to connect and move forward to base. It is very much an adversarial situation, where the pitchers pitches of choice are the hard ball, fast ball, knuckle ball, the screw ball, or the ever favourite curve ball.  Not terms you want to practice on your prospects, although many still do, we’re all familiar with the expression “hard sell”.

I am sure that when sales adopted the term pitch it wasn’t for the potentially negative connotations. More likely it was to describe tossing ideas to buyers as a means of finding common ground; done right and for certain transactional products it is a viable means of achieving a mutually beneficial deal between buyer and seller.

As the sale gets more involved, layered or complex, “the pitch” becomes less effective as a productive way to sell and achieve mutual value. Don’t get me wrong, every sale contains a pitch somewhere, but in the “solution” or “interactive” sale it is a much less significant part of success.

In fact I recently wrote about an experience I had with a rep as we were getting ready to sell to a group of ‘C’ level buyers (Have Your Say: To Pitch or To Sell). He was itching to pitch, but the situation called for a more interactive approach to discovering and understanding the buyer’s reality and mutually defining the value. While it is true that we had an idea of the potential solution based on past experience, going in and delivering a pitch would have fallen short and cost us the deal. We are now on the short list of three vendors, and were told that one reason was the patience we displayed with our questioning style versus some of the other providers who came in with a pitch

Taking the time to peel back the layers and understanding how the buyer sees and wants things; engaging in an exchange that allows for a transaction that delivers value to both partied. Now don’t get me wrong, I am not going soft in my old age, at one point you have to pitch your ideas, differentiate yourself from the competition, but that is a logical part of the process with a greater likelihood of success than if pitching was the whole process as it is with many sales organizations and individuals.