Pitch Materials and Concepts

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

Let’s talk about where the rubber meets the road—the actual pitch we’ve been diligently lining up and preparing for!

Tools and Materials

Depending on the location of your pitch, the tooling you’ll employ will change. However, just as you’ve been intentional with respect to your materials and preparations, so too you will be with your tooling.

If you’re pitching on-site, don’t assume that your prospect will have everything you need to present. Moreover, any hiccups will reflect poorly on you. The prospect will just remember an awkward, terrible meeting, even if it was his bad internet that caused the demo failure or his dysfunctional projector that kept blinking out. Things will invariably go wrong, so plan for it.

It sounds obvious, but you’ll want to make sure you have a laptop, loaded with your sales deck and demo materials, with which to present, and all the relevant connectors needed to connect your laptop to a projector. (This is another reason why showing up early is great. Projectors seem to be designed to derail the beginning of pitches!) I like to keep them in a little mesh bag in my backpack so there’s no frantic digging required. Or, if it’s just you and a prospect, present off your laptop screen, with the two of you looking at it side by side. Less risk, more intimate.

Recently, it’s become fashionable to connect to large flat-panel displays via Apple’s AirPlay. As far as I know, unless you download extra software to your Windows machine, you need an Apple laptop to AirPlay to one of these screens. So if you have an Apple machine, figure out AirPlay. And if you don’t, think about adding that third-party software. Beyond knowing how to use existing projectors, bringing your own mini projector can be excellent as well. It isn’t very costly, and you’ll be 100% confident that you can project at a moment’s notice.

Bringing your own source of internet access can shortcut issues associated with office Wi-Fi access—you’d be amazed how hard it can be to track those passwords down, eating 15 minutes of your demo time. Just flip on your personal hotspot or pair your phone, and you’re on your way. All of this makes you look super prepared and awesome, like the kind of person the prospect would like to be in business with. Lastly, make sure you have a lab notebook to take notes in. (Perhaps you already have your pre-call planning results in it for reference!) You’ll be using your machine to present, so you won’t be able to take notes with it. And you’ll want to make sure you’re diligently recording everything you cover in the discovery part of your conversation.

If you’re presenting digitally, tooling is more straightforward. First, you need software that allows you to share your screen so you can show your slides and demo. One great, cheap option is join.me. Showpad is a little more involved and expensive, but integrates well with Salesforce. DocSend is a lightweight screen-share and document-sharing system that is a happy medium. All of these allow prospects to immediately see your screen without having to download any software—something that was always a huge pain with WebEx and GoToMeeting. If you use those last two, prospects invariably won’t have the most recent version, or won’t have the ability to administer and install software on their machine, and you’ll spend the first ten minutes of your call trying to get the software installed. It’s just a total disaster. I haven’t personally used Google Hangouts or Skype for face-to-face digital sales communication, which is something I find potentially interesting from a rapport-building standpoint. Whatever software you choose, you want to optimize for ease of use, so the prospect can just hit the hyperlink that was included in the meeting invite and reminder email you sent them and, poof, be seeing your screen and hearing your voice.

You’ll also want some sort of earbuds or headset for your phone. You’ll be using your hands to mouse, type, or take notes, so occupying one with a handset is silly. And speakerphone makes for a poor user experience for the prospect, so don’t do that. You’re going to be on the phone a lot—I like to buy a half dozen Apple earbuds so I know I’ll have one in a pinch, even as I lose them. (You will.) As with on-site pitches, you’ll want your lab notebook with your pre-call planning notes, ready to record the information (typing it while on the phone never seems to work for me).

We covered the construction of your sales materials in a prior chapter, but the primary materials you’ll need for your pitch are your sales deck and your demo script (which you already memorized, in broad strokes!). Make sure you have an offline proof version of your demo—pre-populate your browser (assuming that’s where the demo takes place) with the key screens that would allow you to give a good demo, even if something happened to your internet connectivity.

Pitch Format

​important​I find that the best pitches follow a consistent format. Specifically, they start with quick pleasantries, move into discovery, feature a slide-based presentation followed by a live demo, touch on success proof points, and conclude with pricing and commercial discussion. This format allows you to build the best case for your solution. You start with pleasantries to build rapport and set the tone for the prospect to share information with you and be receptive to your arguments. Discovery gives you the information you need to make an ROI argument to the prospect. (Or, if it turns out that she doesn’t have the pain point that your organization solves, you can end the call and save both of you time!) Next, you use slides and visuals to make sure the prospect has the proper mental model for understanding the sales narrative you’re delivering, and to prepare her to understand the features you demo—all of which builds up to a compelling argument for spending money on the solution.

One of the biggest things you’ll converge on as you start selling is whether you’ll be able to do discovery and presentation together or have to separate them. As you increase your volume of demos, one way to be more efficient with your time is to split your full presentation and demo from initial discovery by having a dedicated discovery call, often known as a “disco call” (what a delightful abbreviation!). The benefit of this approach is that it is often easier to get someone to agree to an initial 15-minute phone call than a 30-, 45-, or even 60-minute presentation and demo. In this mode, your discovery call helps you get better information about the prospect, but also lets you sell the full demo, as appropriate. Further, if your discovery questions reveal that the prospect is unqualified, you can conclude the call quickly. There isn’t an onus to make it worth their time because you had them block 30 or 60 minutes.

The necessity of splitting your pitch often depends on how long your demo needs to be to characterize the solution’s important functionality. If your solution is straight to the point, and can be demo’d in ten minutes, then the coordination costs of a ten-minute discovery call at one point in time and another ten-minute demo aren’t worth it. You’ll be adding fragility to your appointment setting, as there’s about a 10–20% chance that each meeting will be missed and thus rescheduled. So do them together. Moreover, as discussed in Early Prospecting, if the signifiers of a qualified customer are readily discoverable ahead of time via online research, you dramatically reduce the amount of time needed for discovery, as you can be more sure that the prospect is qualified.

As you start, even if your solution is complex, it’s probably best not to separate your pitch into two meetings. At least for your first few dozen demos, having more time to have a richer conversation is better, plus you’re ideally on-site anyway.

Who Are You Talking To?

When you’re approaching your pitch, you need to be mindful of who you’re talking to and, as such, what you will be emphasizing. We talked about this a bit regarding the stated goal of pre-call planning—different types of people are going to be more receptive to different messages.

A friend of mine, Skip Miller, author of a number of sales books, crystallized this in three distinct personas set out for his sales reps. He even gave them national names to help differentiate them and to remind reps to speak the right language when engaging. Each persona—individual users, first-line managers, and second-line/CXO managers—will speak quite differently. Your job is to learn, and develop messages in, all three languages.

First up are end users. They are going to care about making their jobs easier, pleasing their internal customers, making themselves look good to their managers, and setting themselves up for career progress. These contacts will be less concerned about ROI arguments, because it’s not really their money. Some may care, but they’ll be more focused on how your solution impacts them. Maybe your product helps them get a promotion or a better job somewhere else, for example. So when it comes to an email-automation solution for sales, sales development reps are going to care about how it removes annoying repetitive email activity for them, helps them set more demos (because that makes them more money!), and maybe gives them a shiny new toy that they can brag about to their friends. They’ll probably care less about how it accelerates top-line revenue for the organization.

Next you have first-line managers. They’re going to be more interested in the ROI arguments you bring to the table. They’ll be mindful of the impact your solution has on their commitments to internal customers. They’ll probably also be responsible for a budget, including payroll for their team, so they’ll be more attuned to arguments about making staff more efficient, producing more value for their internal customers, and facilitating staff adoption. While they’re likely former individual contributors, and thus will probably enjoy understanding how various features work, they’re going to care more about the business impact of your solution.

Lastly, there’s the second-level managers or CXOs. They’re going to be responsive to arguments that drive top-line business value for the entire organization. If your solution speeds onboarding of new salespeople, so they can become fully productive quickly, the CEO will care because more salespeople adding more revenue literally raises the value of the company. And that’s the CEO’s job. The CFO, who’s concerned about cash flow, will care that this reduces the salary expense new sales hires consume before they become productive, thereby helping the cash position of the company. These are not things a line recruiter or sales rep or data scientist will likely care about; they’re not even things a first-line manager will frequently consider. But they’re definitely things that a CXO/VP thinks about.

This isn’t to say that a single argument will be sufficient. You will very likely have multiple meetings with each of these different types of folks, so make sure you’re speaking the right language each time. Even more fun is when you have people who speak different value languages in the same meeting. That’s some serious advanced action right there. But as long as you understand what each person cares about, and have that in mind when explaining features and benefits, you’ll do well.