Many people believe that to be successful you need great ideas. However, the key to success is knowing how to effectively present and sell your great ideas to others. Anyone can have an amazing idea or design, but without a great pitch it goes no where. Learn these 5 essential tips to help you master your sales pitch and sell your designs.
1. Understand and Know Your Audience
An idea is not a one-size fits all.
Everyone has different views and opinions. Therefore, the first essential step in crafting an amazing pitch is to research and analyse your audience. By knowing your audience, you can tailor your pitch to address their specific needs and make your offer more enticing. Think about their motivations, goals and limitations. Consider how to sell your design as their missing solution. Additionally, learn their industry’s jargon and use this language throughout your pitch. As a result, this will build rapport and credibility with your audience. Thus, knowing your audience will demonstrate that you have invested time in understanding their circumstances and make you more persuasive.
2. Sales Pitch with a Strong Opening & Ending
Did you know people have the tendency to remember the first and last items in a series? This is a cognitive bias known as the serial position effect. In 1885, German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus conducted a series of memory experiments where he realised the position of an item in a list had an impact on a person’s recall. Thus, the opening and ending of your product pitch is important because it sticks to your audience’s minds, and influences their further actions.
Firstly, your opening must grab the audience’s attention and motivate them to listen carefully to your pitch. Get to the point with concrete sentences. Introduce the the problem with a personal anecdote, interesting statistic or a question. Remember that the audience needs to know what your company can do for them before they can consider hearing how your design is a solution.
Similarly, a great pitch needs to end with a bang. Ray Ehrensberger’s experimental study showed that information delivered at the end of the pitch has the highest level of recall. For a strong closing, you need to give a one-sentence pitch summary, state a clear CTA (call to action) and thank your listeners. A one-sentence pitch summary should state three key points that you want the audience to remember. For instance, the problem, the solution and your unique value proposition. Likewise, your pitch objective is to persuade the audience to take action. Thus, you need a specific CTA to direct you audience on what you want them to do to after your pitch. Finally, after you give them a clear CTA, its a good time to thank your audience for their time. Being polite and respectful is always appreciated and ends the sales pitch on a good note.
3. Tell a Story
Telling a story helps people feel emotionally connected to your sales pitch and remember it more. This is because people are more likely to remember a story rather than data. By appealing to people’s emotions, you can build a stronger connection. As a result, it is easier to persuade and pitch your idea. Storytelling can easily be incorporated into your pitch’s structure with an attractive opening, a middle problem and a solution at the end.
4. Visual Elements in Your Sales Pitch
Visual elements and interactive models are essential for a great pitch. This is because it makes your pitch more engaging, persuasive, and memorable. As there’s only so much detail words and descriptions can provide, images are needed. Showing product demonstrations and having a powerpoint with graphs and statistics is a good way to add visual elements into your pitch. There are a few things to consider when choosing visuals elements to add such as relevance, clarity of visuals and integration.
5. Improving Public Speaking Skills
People are more likely to listen to someone who speaks clearly and with confidence. Therefore, if you want someone to listen to your pitch, you need to improve your public speaking skills. This can be achieved through changing your posture, tone of voice and pacing of speech. Having a good posture with a straight back and your head up gives an air of confidence. Also, good posture helps with projecting your voice. Now with better control of your voice projection, you can add different tones to your speech and make it more engaging. Overall, to improve your public speaking skills, being confident is important and it takes a lot of practice.
In conclusion, to sell your designs you need to master your pitch through audience research, having a strong opening and ending, telling a story, using visual elements and improving your public speaking skills. Mastering a pitch takes a lot of practice, but it is a life long skill.
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