Making an Effective Sales Pitch

An effective sales pitch can determine whether a business invests in you or not. With many businesses transitioning to an entirely virtual climate, it can be daunting to deliver that first presentation, especially if you're used to giving talks in person. Here are some strategies and tools in the market today to help you perfect your pitch to potential clients.

Making an Effective Sales Pitch

First, let's talk about your client. Whether you want to provide goods or services, the fact that you're in the pitching stage means that your client already has an idea about a need they want to solve. On your part, it's to be able to tailor your presentation to meet their needs and set proper expectations for them about your service or solution. A tailor-fit pitch can only come from doing adequate research on the company you're pitching to and answering questions such as who they are, what they do, and what their problems are. Empathy also goes a long way—that you care about their business—and you can show this by asking them questions before the pitch and adopting their jargon (i.e., catchphrases or vision), which will help your presentation get across to the company you're pitching to.

Creating your presentation

Online pitches have many benefits over traditional ones, such as having control over what technology you want to bring to manage your presentation. One solution for managing and delivering presentations is VideoCom Presenter, which, apart from building new slides, also allows you to import your slides if you made them on PowerPoint, Google Slides, or if they are saved as PDF files. VideoCom Presenter gives you a varied toolset where you can add extra media directly to your slides, like cameras, videos, webpages, and even screen shares.

With your toolset ready, it's time to add content to your presentation. You might already have a company pitch deck ready to go, but based on what you learned from the company you're pitching to, the best course is to tailor-fit a custom presentation highlighting how you can help cover their needs. To what extent does the client want their needs solved? Make sure you address their concerns, then throw in any extra information they would consider beneficial. Once you've gathered all these, look into your options for presenting your pitch: for example, will you need a mood board, a portfolio, a YouTube video, or mainly just talking with slides? VideoCom Presenter can pull from multiple sources and add them as media elements on your slides.

Pitching Tips

With your presentation created, here are some useful tips to make sure everything is in order.

• Test the presentation and your tech to make sure it's ready to go before you deliver it to your clients.
• VideoCom Presenter has a preview of how it will appear to your audience, and you can click and drag the new elements you added for each slide on the fly.
• If you plan to share your screen, close any windows that you don't want to share. VideoCom Presenter has a setting that hides itself from its own screen capture, so only you can see the main program and not your audience.
• If you imported slides from PowerPoint or Google Slides with pre-existing notes, they will appear on VideoCom Presenter and will not be seen by your audience. VideoCom Presenter also has an area to enter notes, which only you can see.
• For practice, record yourself and review any part you want to improve on, whether it's a particular method of delivery or an element in the presentation that doesn't fit quite right. VideoCom Presenter has this feature and lets you review particular slides if you save them on the VideoCom Cloud.
• After the pitch, keep the client in mind by thanking them in an email and adding any relevant material. If you recorded the pitch with VideoCom Presenter, you could choose to save it on the VideoCom Cloud, and from there, you can send a share link to your clients so they can go back to it anytime.

Whether a company decides to invest in you or not depends on how effective your sales pitch is. Remember, online presentations are advantageous to you thanks to the flexibility of technology and methods available. Visit our blog and our article on how to create an online presentation.