Part 2 of Why the Sales Culture today sucks. There’s a whole bunch of reasons – selfishness, sales professionals being self-absorbed, everything related to the last 50-75 years of shitty sales culture.
There’s one thing about the sales culture we’re in that sucks – it drives buyers and prospects away – the pitch. It’s time we ditch the pitch. The pitch had its day, but it’s time, send it out to pasture, put a bullet in it and let’s call it a day. Let’s move on.
Why?
The pitch is telling – and telling is not selling. The pitch is wasting everyone’s time, nobody wants to be talked at, yelled at, etc. A pitch is obnoxious. At Gap Selling we don’t talk about the pitch, as a matter of fact we say the pitch is one of the 5 myths of good selling.
It’s really simple, when you pitch somebody, you’re talking at them. They have no idea what value you can bring, they have to do all the value calculations and the associated work on their own. You’re asking them to first off listen to you and secondly do the dirty work and see how you fit in to their day to day. You’re not thinking about them, you’re throwing everything and anything at them and hoping some shit sticks.
Instead, what you need to be doing is diagnosing. Take the time to understand what is happening in their world. But listen carefully, you’re discovering this information not so you can pitch but so you can genuinely understand their environment. You need this information to understand what they’re struggling with and to genuinely understand novel concepts.
Once you’ve diagnosed and you properly understand what’s going on with them, what their problems are, then and only then can you do a demo. A customized demo or customized breakdown of your services so you can show them how or what your product does as it relates specifically to them and then from there a recommendation.
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This is not a pitch. There’s never a pitch, you make a recommendation. I’m sure you’re aware of this, you can’t make a recommendation with a full understanding of their environment, their problems, the negative impacts, what’s causing them and the root cause of the problem.
To make a comprehensive recommendation you also need to know where they want to go and why they’re having difficulty accomplishing these goals.
Recommend, don’t pitch. Pitches are for bitches. We don’t need it. Pitching is at the core of our shitty sales culture. It’s self-absorbed, it’s disconnected, it’s disrespectful, and it doesn’t take the buyers needs and wants into account.
Can we all agree here that if we want to change the sales culture and change the sales world – putting the buyer at the center of it and the buyer’s problems at the center of it then we need to ditch the pitch.
If you or your organization want to start changing the sales culture, click here to schedule a call with our sales team.
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