Ditch Your Pitch

This is what I overheard last week: “I had this bozo stop at my home yesterday from [company name]. He gave me a sales pitch for his new [product name]. Unfortunately, he threw four balls and no strikes so I took him out of the game and asked him to leave. All he cared about was his product, not about us.”

And so goes the role of the “sales pitch” in selling. A sales pitch, to me, has a negative connotation and I don’t like using the term.

What is a “Sales Pitch?”

Wordnet gives the definition of “sales pitch” as “promotion by means of an argument and demonstration.”

That doesn’t sound very appealing (at least from the customer’s point-of-view it doesn’t). A demonstration sounds like it might be okay (especially if the product or service being demonstrated is applicable to the particular needs and desires of the prospect), but an “argument”? I’d pass on becoming part of an “argument” with a salesperson if I were a customer.

An “argument” is a principle of debate where one side presents an argument in favor of a proposition before the opposing side presents their argument against the same proposition. These arguments are very one-sided by design: The opposing debate team is required to passively listen to the argument made by the first team before the opposing team gets its turn to present their argument. Is there anything about these dynamics that we want to associate with the selling process of a professional salesperson? I say “definitely not!”

Wiktionary provides this definition of sales pitch: “Remarks or demonstrations intended to persuade a customer to make a purchase especially when vigorously delivered or exaggerated.”

There’s nothing I like more than an exaggerated salesperson – except maybe a vigorous exaggerated salesperson (are you picking up on my sarcasm?).

Vigorous exaggeration may work well for Billy Mays in his role as a TV direct response “pitch man,” but there are few similarities between what most of us do in our role as a salesperson with what Mr. Mays does on TV [Just for fun, here’s a Billy Mays video remix for your viewing pleasure].

Ditch Your Pitch

If you want to do infomercials, pitch away. I’m sure Billy makes lots of money doing what he does because for some reason he gets people to pick up the phone to order his goods.

But if you want to be a non-infomercial sales professional, ditch your pitch. Cast aside your tendency to pitch and replace it with the skills to engage, learn, and connect with your prospects. The world is full of salespeople who talk only about themselves, their product, and their company. That’s pitching. Focus on your prospect instead: what they need and what they desire (even if they don’t know what that is).

Selling is finding your prospect, engaging your prospect, learning what will cause your prospect to give you money, presenting your product within the framework of the prospect’s needs, completing the sale, getting referrals, creating trust, being likeable, persistence, managing rejection, being helpful, being perceptive, having a burning desire to sell more, and so much more. It’s not about “pitching.”

I recently coached a salesperson who had memorized his sales script and was reciting it during his sales appointments. I’m not against sales scripts. They can be very helpful in appropriate selling circumstances. What I’m against are scripts that don’t allow (or encourage) customer engagement. If a customer is relegated to the role of passive observer during the sales interaction, how possibly can a salesperson sell effectively? And how can a customer buy effectively?

Unfortunately, a large portion of the consuming public views salespeople as nothing more than self-serving pitch men and women. Customers have been talked at long enough. It’s time we start listening and engaging instead.

So ditch your pitch. Sell instead. Selling requires a different skill set than pitching.

Tennis, anyone?

In baseball, the pitcher pitches the ball to the batter. It’s a contest: either the pitcher or the batter will win. When pitching to a batter, you’re doing something to the batter.

But in selling, you’re doing something with, not to, the prospect (at least in the type of professional selling to which I wish to be associated). Both parties can and should win: seller and customer.

I think a better sports analogy for selling than the pitching analogy is playing doubles tennis: you and your partner work together to get the job done. Playing doubles takes coordination, understanding, respect, trust, and knowledge (all helpful things in selling with a prospect) as you work together to achieve a common goal.

[Billy Mays is obviously very successful at what he does. As a raging entrepreneur, I say, "Awesome, Billy!" But as a sales trainer, there's a much better way to sell to prospects during face to face sales interactions. If you see yourself as a pitch man, I ask you to ditch your pitch!]

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