Sales Pitches


Sales pitches are used by businesses to help them win and renew orders, contracts, work and tenders. Any business that sells products or services will need to use some form of sale pitch. This may be as simple as having a sales pitch on a website to try and convince people to buy or do something.

In their traditional form, however, sales pitches will involve sales people pitching to other people with a responsibility to buy. This can take place on a face to face basis at a meeting or it can take place over the phone. These pitches, if they are done by phone, are often known as telesales.

Most of us will have had a telesales based sales pitch at some point. Companies use their telesales staff to call up consumers and businesses to try and persuade people to buy something. It’s become more common in recent years for these sales pitches to be recorded messages. The aim here is to get you to listen to the message and then to respond.

Traditional sales pitches tend to be seen as the meetings that take place between a sales person and someone who may buy from them or contract them to do something for them. So, for example, a doctor may be visited by medical sales reps who will pitch their products to him. A company may be targeted by stationery sales people trying to get orders.

These meetings require specific skills. Getting into sales pitches can be hard enough sometimes and it is important that the person that is pitching at the meeting has the kind of skills to excite interest and, hopefully to close the deal. This may happen on the spot or a decision may be made at a later date.

Some sales pitches can become fairly formulaic over time. If a sales person is selling the same kinds of products or services to the same kinds of businesses all the time then they will soon learn what to say and how and when to say it. Larger pitches, however, such as tenders for large contracts or orders, may take a lot more work and may involve more than one salesperson to lead the pitch.

All sales pitches require a strong and broad mix of skills. Sales skills alone may not be enough to win business and the ability to listen is as important as your verbal skills. Understanding what your customers or prospects actually want and what their drivers are may make any pitch easier to manage.