Salespeople often make sales pitches that disrupt the natural flow of conversations. For this reason, people develop an aversion to them.
First off, people don’t want to be sold something they’re not interested in.
Secondly, prospects are receptive to sales pitches at specific times only. That means salespeople can’t approach leads with their offers and expect them to accept immediately.
So, if you’re a salesperson stuck in this position, you’ve come to the right place.
You will learn how to close prospects successfully and strategically in this post. You can generate more sales and get the most results from your effort.
Let’s begin!
Research the Buyer
While it’s possible to close people who aren’t your target audience, it’s best to reach out to your most highly qualified leads first. Doing so increases your chances of converting them into clients or customers.
If you have a list of prospects collected by your marketing team, you must research the buyer online.
Knowing their interests, needs, wants, and problems allows you to customize your pitch to address their pain points and grab their attention.
Ideally, you can see information about each prospect from your CRM. But if you don’t have one, you can start by searching their social media.
Check their bios and the posts they’re sharing in their feed. These give you an idea about their personalities and hobbies that you can leverage in your proposal.
Also, do a Google search of their name to unearth other information about prospects online that you can use in your research.
After collecting all the necessary information, you must choose the appropriate pitch deck template from your design platform. Select the one that fits and reflects their personality and interests to grab their attention much easier.
Personalize the Approach
The information gathered in the previous step is crucial in creating a personalized pitch to a prospect.
Since each person is different, you must approach each with a unique proposal that targets their pain points and how you can solve them.
Below are other ways you can personalize your interaction with prospects.
- Use a dedicated platform — Find one from B2B service marketplaces that allows live selling and lets you talk to them in real-time online. It also has features that let you showcase your brand to leave a lasting impression. All these enable you to communicate and build relationships with each one.
- Reach out on their preferred channels — You can email them by first finding their address using tools like Hunter.io. If they have a LinkedIn account, you can send the message using InMail.
- Send a personalized pitch deck — After collecting all the necessary information, you must choose from pre-made & visually appealing pitch deck templates to prepare your presentation and save time.
- Consider when to reach out to a prospect — Referring to their online activity, look at the hours when they’re most active. This is when you should contact them.
Anticipate Objections from Your Sales Pitch
Even following the correct steps, there’s a chance they will reject or ignore your pitch.
The truth is they will question your pitch, and rightfully so. Since there isn’t trust established, you must earn it first.
And even if you create assets that provide solutions to their problems, they might still decline your pitch.
Well, I’m here to say that objections are normal in sales.
What’s more important now is how you respond and manage objections properly.
The fact that they said “no” is valuable feedback for your sales efforts. Instead of giving up, you need to create more assets that help fortify your sales pitch to prospects.
Also, you can provide social proof to show how much your brand has helped customers professionally and personally. Using positive testimonials can help sway their opinion towards your brand and gain their trust
Don’t Focus on Closing
It’s important to realize that helping others with their problems should be your main priority. If they rejected your offer, it means you didn’t make a convincing case in your pitch or don’t have their trust built yet.
Only when you have proven your worth to prospects can you build goodwill with them. From here, you get to move prospects down your sales funnel until you finally close them.
Another important part of closing prospects without selling your products is to provide excellent customer support.
You can implement the same thing in your business by opening your customer support channels like:
- Live chat — This feature allows customers to contact you with their questions, and you can reply instantly.
- Ticketing system — Asks customers to submit a ticket regarding their query. You can then reply to each one according to priority and importance.
- Chatbots — Set up a widget with pre-made replies and templates that customers can choose from to help them find answers to their questions.
- AI-powered product personalization — While not a customer support feature, this online merchandising strategy allows you to spotlight products that each user is interested in. That means the products shown on your site’s homepage will be based on their previous purchases and most recent views. This results in putting the focus on your customers by providing them with things they might like.
- And others!
Giving them access to these channels enables you to solve their problems easier and more efficiently.
Conclusion
The importance of providing value to prospects shouldn’t be underestimated. It is a way to put your foot in the door, create leads, and convert them into customers.
Once you’ve proven your value to customers, the price won’t matter to them. You’ve provided them with so much value that they’ll be happy to return the favor by patronizing your brand.
By following the tips above, you can ease prospective buyers down your sales process in no time.
