The Goal of Pitching

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.

Your pitch is arguably the most critical aspect of all your sales efforts. Pitching is the process of persuasion, ideally ending in a sale. Up to this point, you were persuading the individual prospect that your solution could potentially help with her business pains. With pitching, you’re moving on to organizational persuasion. Pitching is about persuading your prospect, and other stakeholders in her organization, not only that they have this business pain but that it is of large enough magnitude that it must be solved, that your solution will indeed solve it, and that they get a return on investment by implementing your solution. To that end, pitching isn’t delivering a canned, pre-established speech—it’s a two-way conversation in which you’re discovering the organization’s needs, and customizing a persuasive case that you can meet those needs.

Moreover, pitching is about persuading the prospect that she needs to deal with this now rather than later, that the opportunity cost of holding off is too high to bear, and that notwithstanding the various pains facing her organization—and there are always many things that can be fixed—it’s worth the money and time to implement your solution ahead of all those other things.

This isn’t to say that it’ll be a one-shot deal, known as a one-call close. You might see those occasionally, but it’s pretty unlikely at the beginning of your process. And the more complicated your solution, the less likely they will happen. This exercise in organizational persuasion may take a number of steps, a number of meetings, likely involving multiple people within the target organization. But the goal is still the same: to get the ball, now in play, across the line. And there’s another related goal: if it is clear that the deal is not going to close, at least not this time around, you want to acknowledge that and stop spending time on something that won’t yield a return.

Like the topics we’ve covered before, it’s best to think of the process of selling as having distinct substages, each of which you’ll want to step through. Boil your sale down into those individual motions, and it won’t feel as monolithic and insurmountable. Rather, it’s just a case of going down a checklist, diligently checking things off as you go, and landing, at the end, in a big pile of revenue!