Use This B2B Sales Pitch For A High Impact Presentation

When I used to work in a company (before I came out on my own as a trainer), I had a so-called sales manager who wasn't really a good salesperson.

I was told to bring our corporate profile whenever I meet my customers. Right from the start, I will take five to ten minutes to briefly share about who our company is, what we do and what kind of solutions we provide for the customer.

Now, what is the problem here?

Today we live in an attention deficit – there's so many distractions and people wanting our attention. Imagine spending five minutes talking about yourself or your company.

By the time you have something great to share with your customer (like how you can solve their problems), they might have already switched off.

This framework I’m about to share is based on the experience I've accumulated over the past ten years – what I had to learn through trial and error.

The 3S Framework for delivering high-impact presentations.

First, you want to start off by talking about the setup.

The setup needs to talk about the problems the customer is facing. What are the problems that are creating a lot of headaches for the customers?

There are many things we can potentially touch on. We can be talking about triggers in the customer's industry like a change in government regulation. For example, when I'm selling a sales training program, this could be something I can talk to my customer about.

At this point, I can probably start off my session in two ways. Imagine that I go to my customer and say:

“Mr. Customer, first of all, let me just introduce myself…”

I proceed to bore him with who I am and what my company is doing. The customer will be bored and they switch off because nobody cares what you know until they know how much you care.

Here is the alternative:

B2B Sales Pitch Part 01: The Setup

Instead of spending the first five minutes talking about myself, I take the time to talk about the problems the customer is facing. This is called the setup. What are the triggers that are causing these issues? I can talk about what has just happened because of the pandemic.

“Mr. Customer, are you aware that based on a study that's been done, these are the three key challenges that many people have been facing since the start of the pandemic?”

Do you see how this introduction changes things? From there, I might continue to explain:

“One challenge is that many people do not know how to build virtual relationships. Second, many people are not equipped with the right skillset and mindset to deal with a world that has shifted towards remote selling. They are still using the conventional method which doesn't work.”

B2B Sales Pitch Part 02: The Struggle

After the setup, the next step is the struggle.

What is the struggle the customer is facing? That's where we amplify the struggle by talking about all the issues that they're facing.

I talk about the problems and what's happening in the industry as a whole. Most people need to be able to adjust, but they're not able to adjust now.

Then I talk about their business objectives of being able to increase revenue, and this is what you need sales training for. After I talk about their business objectives, I bring up the operational issues. Maybe the issue is that their salespeople are not well trained.

If they are not going to resolve the issues now, what are the challenges that they're going to face? Here is where you want to be able to build the buying urgency as well. You want to show them the pain for not solving the problem.

B2B Sales Pitch Part 03: The Solution

Finally, we come to the solution part but we focus on struggling solutions.

This is where we bring up the other options available which are not able to solve the problem yet. I'm telling them these are potential solutions, but my final solution is the offer that I have for them. I then follow up by getting the order.

A lot of times, salespeople will talk about the struggle before going straight to the solution. This is the typical way of selling,

However, I do not want to go down that route because the customer will want to look for other options after you have presented your solution.

Instead, you guide the customer and direct them towards what the market is offering right now, including your competitors. You can say, “Mr. Customer, today I'm here because I’d like to share a few potential ways we can resolve your challenge right here.”

At this point, we can describe the options in the market without mentioning specific names. Let me use the sales training example again.

You can say, “Mr. Customer, you can look at the options out there. Number one, you can even consider doing in-house training yourself. But when you do in-house training, there are certain drawbacks.”

From there, I’ll talk about the drawbacks. Another method is to say “a lot of people might consider doing this kind of training, but the challenge with the typical way people do it out there in the industry is…”

What I'm trying to do here is to set myself up for the next stage. Once I talk about the drawbacks of all these other options, I can move into the next phase.

Now I can say “Mr. Customer, I have this wonderful solution for you that's able to solve this problem.” I'm also suggesting I can also solve the problem which the other options out there are not able to solve for you.

That is called the 3S structure here: the setup, struggle, and solution.

It is a simple and powerful approaches to making a sales presentation that's likely to create a huge impact.

How To Do A Great Virtual B2B Sales Pitch

Today, salespeople have to do a lot of virtual sales presentations instead of face-to-face ones. In fact, before the COVID-19 pandemic even started, people were gradually shifting towards virtual presentations.

I will be sharing with you some ways to sell better virtually.

There are quite a number of differences between virtual selling and face to face selling. For example, you're able to engage your customer very easily in face-to-face selling. But in a virtual selling context, it's very hard to engage your customers. This is one of the biggest changes that salespeople often face.

The last thing you want to do is a PowerPoint sales presentation.

In fact, I tell my salespeople to never just do a PowerPoint presentation. Many studies were done and they realised PowerPoint presentations are one of the least well-received forms of making a sales presentation to high level executives.

This is because they won’t be able to see why you're different from another salesperson. How many salespeople will be coming to present in PowerPoint? Probably 90%. In other words, if you're not doing something different, you're not going to stand out.

You're not going to be outstanding, whether you're doing a face to face or a virtual selling. Presentation is important and we need to learn how to engage our customers by not using PowerPoint. Instead, we do something called a white board presentation.

In software like Zoom, there is a whiteboard you can use. I highly encourage people to use the whiteboard to present because it’s a better way of engaging your customer. Whenever I use the whiteboard, what I'm suggesting to my customer is that I can ask them certain questions during the sales presentation itself.

You can also get them to participate by writing on the whiteboard. Let’s say I’m in a sales presentation. Halfway through, I want to talk about the customer's business objective.

“Mr. Customer, you mentioned your goal is to achieve a 20% increase in sales revenue in the next six months.”

When you use the whiteboard board, you can change things as well. The customer might say “it's actually not 20% but should be 25%.” You can immediately make an adjustment and engage your customer with these little changes.

Another key benefit of a whiteboard presentation is that it activates multiple modalities.

PowerPoint only activates your visual aspect. When a salesperson starts talking, the customer hears what the salesperson is saying. With PowerPoint, you’re only engaging the visual and auditory aspects.

Additionally, people are conditioned to believe what they see but to doubt what they hear. This is why having the visual element is important. It's still a good start, because salespeople don't even have very good visuals to share.

To make your presentation even better, we introduce the kinesthetic aspect by having feelings, participation and engagement by using white board. Instead of just showing the customer information, I can get them involved as well.

The key here is to ask yourself:

How can I engage them and get them to participate by what am I writing on the white board, or doing something so they are engaged?

We don’t want them to be distracted by other things.

If all you're doing is showing them PowerPoint slides and talking all day long, you're going to lose them before you even know it. Therefore, it’s important for us to engage the visual, auditory and kinesthetic aspects.

The three ways to engage your prospect over a virtual selling environment.

We can also talk about other parts of virtual presentation like connecting with your customer effectively.

These are basic tips you might have seen before, but we’ll cover it for the sake of completeness about making an impactful online presentation. In my own training, I introduced something called a LAW of success.

The L.A.W. For Virtual B2B Sales Pitches

This stands for Lighting, Audio and Webcam.

In making a presentation online, lighting is number one. Where should the light be facing? It should be in front of you and never behind your back. Otherwise, your customer wouldn't be able to see your face.

The second part is audio. Some people can be easily distracted by what they hear. If you don’t minimize noise distractions, you're going to have a problem engaging certain customers, especially when we're working from home.

We can be in an environment where our kids are talking, or your dogs are barking. I was doing a presentation to one customer and that was exactly what happened. I could hear the dogs barking and it was very distracting. Imagine if I am the customer and he's the salesperson!

Now the webcam aspect: this is about how we should be looking right through the webcam. Some of the common mistakes people make are shown here:

Some camera angles to avoid in virtual presentations.

Have you seen this before?

You're talking to someone, but this person's looking away because the webcam is positioned maybe at the bottom.

Some people put it on your top, so you cannot even see the whole face there. Or some put their webcam so low and they can actually see myself looking down. Those are the common mistakes I will see. I often see people making when they are doing an online presentation.

Regarding the webcam, studies have shown engagement rate is likely to drop by more than 50% when your video is turned off.

If you've ever attended a virtual presentation with your video turned off, the tendency for you to multitask and do something else is high. For the customer, turning off the webcam can affect the quality of a sales presentation.

Before I meet my customer online, I ensure they're expecting themselves to be seen through the webcam.

I might tell them a day before, “Hey, Mr. Customer, how have things been for you? I'll be looking forward to meeting up with you tomorrow. You might want to use this link to test your video camera before joining the meeting.”

Or I can say something like, “To ensure we have an effective and engaging meeting tomorrow, you might like to check if your camera is working.”

Or you can have someone dropping a very simple hint.

“Mr. Customer, I look forward to meeting you face to face virtually when I look forward to seeing a smile on your face tomorrow at 10 am.” All these statements subtly suggest you’re expecting to see him or her face to face.

They might not switch on their video if you only tell them on the day itself.

Your customer might not be prepared – maybe the location they're in is inconvenient or there are people in the background. On the day itself, you need to give people the time to prepare for it.

These are some simple tips on virtual presentations.

To wrap up this part on acing the sales presentation, we've talked about how to sell with stories using the 3S method. This is how we are positioning our pitch as a story that a customer is in, and how we can simplify that to the setup, struggle and the solution.

Finally, we talked about why it is important to avoid making a presentation based on PowerPoint.

I taught that to a group of salespeople some time ago and they really began to realise a sales presentation is much better when they use a whiteboard and talk to their customers.