You will be sh*te at pitching your service if you pitch like I used to.
And it will drive away the leads you have…
I treated every pitch like a product tour.
I would put together an INCREDIBLE slide deck.
List our best features.
Talk about our biggest, most famous customers.
Speak in acronyms (made me think I sounded smart…)
And then at the end of the pitch I’d hear a variation of this: “we’ll get back to you.”
But they never did…
Here’s what I had not fully understood: nobody cared!!!
(I mentioned this law a few emails ago - that nobody cares about you or your business until you give them a very good reason to care)
And that pitch structure was NOT the way to make them care.
It took me years of f**k ups and losing literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to understand this.
Your prospect is the hero.
You are the guide.
Every good story has a hero and a guide. Tinkerbell and Peter. Donkey and Shrek. Obi-Wan and Luke.
Your prospect is the hero. You’re the guide, the one who gets them from point A to point B.
So the pitch isn’t about you. It’s a story about them, built from what they told you in discovery.
Here are the six parts of a successful pitch.
Before you use this please note: each idea should be a new slide. Keep every one as simple as possible. And use your prospects words from discovery as the narration across each slide and lastly, make it feel like a STORY.
Slide 1. The changing world order. Open with what’s changed in their world. It answers the question in every prospect’s head: why now?
Slide 2. Their core problems. Name the core problems your ICP has. articulate why those problems exist in the first place. If you have successfully picked a niche then there is a high chance that your prospect has already named these problems during your discovery. Doing this will make them think “WOW this person knows their stuff”
Slide 3. What they’ve tried, and why it failed. Name their previous attempts without trashing them. They’ll nod, and sometimes laugh out loud: “we tried that, you’re right.” That laugh is the sound of them realising you understand their problem and that you know the space better than they do.
Slide 3. The perfect world. Paint success in their language and their numbers. The prospects brain turns ON when the future is clear and it’s actually what they’re after.
Slide 4. Someones already there. Mentioned 1 - 3 customers who have already achieved the person world with your solution or service. The specificity of these stories beats a wall of irrelevant logos…
Slide 5. Your unique approach. Finally, this is about you. Two or three things that make you different, aimed squarely at the failure modes from part 2. This could be your unique approach, system or product.
Slide 6. The prescribed next step. Not “so… what do you think?” but “the next step I’d suggest is a proposal meeting where I can give you a more accurate plan of how we can work together to solve X. Does Thursday at 2pm work?”
Prescribe, like a doctor would.
Two things make this story driven pitch even better:
Ask questions while you pitch (“does that match what you’re seeing?”), and keep your energy identical to discovery. Discovery was warm and curious. If a “presenter” shows up to pitch, the problem solver they trusted gets replaced by a salesperson, and the guard goes straight back up.
They’re buying a person, not a deck.
Do this today: build the six parts as one simple deck, one slide for each point. The template never changes. Only the words you use to narrate it does.
Power to you,
Mike
P.S. Ask good questions in discovery, then pitch a story about them instead of about you, and you’re ahead of 99% of whoever else they’re talking to.
P.P.S - Sollo’s Sales Agent builds this narrative for you. Access it here 👉 www.gosollo.com
P.P.P.S - the next Sollo Sales Accelerator starts next month! Free for Sollo customers. More details here 👉 Sollo Sales Accelerator
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