Five ways to deliver a killer sales pitch

You might have a great product that solves a pain point for your customers and a hard-working team who believe in your mission.

You might also have identified a target market ripe for innovation and change.

All of these are key ingredients in building a successful company in any industry — but they’re not the only things you need if you want to grow your business. Without a compelling sales pitch that helps people understand why they should buy your offering, your business will struggle to go far.

In many ways, the sales pitch is the lifeblood of a company. Whether you’re B2C, B2B, or ‘B2C2B’, it’s crucial to articulate the value of your product or service in an engaging and persuasive way.

Today’s sales landscape is more competitive than ever and your prospects’ attention spans are ever dwindling.

If you want to close the deal, you’re going to need an irrefutable sales pitch that forces your target customers to pay attention.

Here are five strong presentations from a wide range of different industries and companies that each offer something different to consider for the creation of your own sales pitch.

1. Create a story

Try combining different visual aids (in the case of this healthcare solutions company’s pitch — a PDF-style document, a video, and a Google search result) to create a visual story that will keep your audience engaged throughout the presentation. This will help your audience understand how the product might fit into their business or everyday lives.

One section of this presentation invites the audience to self-navigate through the information presented — choosing the most valuable information and jumping straight to it instead of having to click through all of the other information. When you build interactivity into your sales deck, you’re more likely to ensure your audience remembers the message — which in turn allows you to make an impact and close the deal.

2. Structure your pitch

Placing all of your key pieces of information in the pitch overview will make it easy for both you as a presenter, along with your audience, to dive into the details that are most interesting. Social Media Week Miami’s sponsor pitch is an example of a sales deck that is easy to navigate, for prospects and presenters alike.

When presenting to a diverse range of audiences, it can be tricky to know how each audience is different and how they value information. Using an overview like this one makes it easy for your sales reps to tailor the flow of each presentation on the go, so that each prospect receives a customised pitch.

3. Visualise

Complex topics can be difficult to engage your audience with and break down into easily digestible information. This was an obstacle faced by AgriMORE, who presented a pitch about food distribution and convoluted supply-and-demand chains.

However, the challenge can be simply solved through a highly visual sales deck. Try using visual aids to break complex information down and bring your ideas to life, making your pitch feel more like a video than a dry text-heavy deck.

4. Bring the narrative to life

If you want to compete with YouTube and Facebook for your prospects’ attention, try to turn your sales presentation into an engaging story, like this pitch from IBM.

Turning your sales pitch into the format of a narrative will help your audience understand exactly the problem that your product solves, as well as exactly the kind of solutions that you offer. IBM’s whole story is told with simple, yet effective visuals that bring the narrative to life. If you want to keep your audience engaged, ditch the dry bullet points in favour of a visual story.

5. Get creative

Get creative with your sales pitch and think outside the box to create a pitch that will captivate your audience. Instead of leading its prospects through a plain slide deck, Navis opted for a more playful and meaningful approach by arranging its information onto a visual of “Navis Island.” The pitch takes the form of a journey through different aspects of the company and its services, all placed on different parts of the island.

Taking an approach like Navis’s will result in a far more memorable pitch than the sort of plain slide presentation your prospects would have viewed many times before. Instead of trying to remember whether that key piece of information was on slide nine or slide 17, the audience only has to remember where that information was on the island. Humans’ brains are hardwired to remember this kind of information much more effectively than text or number-based information — so a spatial layout is a clever way to make your pitch more memorable.

Drew Banks is head of international at Prezi.