“What does your product do, and why do I need it?”
This is the question that a sales pitch needs to address. Sales reps can’t just craft a one-size-fits-all speech — according to cloud communications provider Vonage, 59 percent of customers become irritated at a generic sales pitch. To really get people excited about your product, you need to know what appeals to them, including what pain points need addressing and what solutions you can provide.
One way to do that is by knowing both your product and your audience.
“Understand that walking in you don’t have all the answers or a one-size-fits-all solution — rather, ask how you can understand what they are trying to solve for,” advised digital mortgage lending platform Cloudvirga’s sales director, Jason Smith.
Smith, along with sales leaders from Screencloud, MasonHub, TigerConnect, HG Insights, Edify and Emotive all know the value of an informed, personalized pitch. Built In LA sat down with these employees to learn what makes their product worth pitching, and the skills that reps need to do so successfully.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
ScreenCloud’s product is fun to pitch because of the versatility of screens — there’s so much you can do with an existing screen that would otherwise be blank.
We sell a tool that pushes messaging to screens. We’re a conduit for communication — the impact of the tool is as powerful as the impact of the messaging on the screen. That means we can help sales teams sell, engineering teams build and small businesses grow.
We can help keep essential workers safe and help companies retain workers — we can make workplaces better. When you can send any message or any metric to any screen, you can solve almost any communication problem that a business has.
You can’t solve a prospect’s problems without feeling their pain.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
In no particular order, there are four skills I would consider to be most important when selling ScreenCloud.
The first is genuine curiosity. You’re going to encounter a lot of projects that seem incredibly simple and surface-level — it’s rarely that easy. Digging deeper into the “why” behind everything is going to help.
The second skill is empathy. You can’t solve a prospect’s problems without feeling their pain. Make their problem your problem, and you’ll be motivated to solve it — and they’ll be motivated to pay you.
The third skill is deliberate learning. Selling ScreenCloud means having literacy in domains like design, app development, hardware, communication and psychology. You’ll need to have a breadth of knowledge but also a depth of knowledge — and to cultivate both, you’ll have to set aside time to deliberately practice, understand and apply.
Last, it is important to master presentation and storytelling. Treat the screen like your canvas and the prospect as your audience. We sell an immensely visual product — you’ll have to be able to put on a show. Tell a story in which they’re the hero and they solve their problem using the power of screens.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
MasonHub’s product is built by retailers who have first-hand experience with the pain points of antiquated fulfillment technology. Our roadmap was created based off of things we wished we had — things like a pre-built Shopify integration, dynamic kitting and bundling and backorder and pre-sale management. For so long, fulfillment providers have been the bottleneck that restricts a brand’s marketing team from delivering on unique and customizable unboxing experiences. Our marketing rules engine empowers that creativity, and in turn delivers a specialized and high-touch customer experience. In addition, our clients get 24/7 real-time data and visibility through our client portal in order to keep a pulse on everything happening with their inventory.
Our fulfillment service prioritizes the best client and customer experience possible. We don’t white-label other companies’ warehouses or operations — the facilities are MasonHub-dedicated locations and the staff within them are hired and trained by MasonHub leadership, with a career path to full-time employment. This allows us to better control our SLA performance and provide more consistency in staff working on each brand.
The sales team needs to be empathetic to customer challenges and seek to understand the true problem before pitching a solution.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
MasonHub’s end-to-end solution is very tailored towards beauty and wellness brands. Because of this, it is important that our sales team is made up of individuals that are uniquely passionate about this industry. As avid consumers in this space, they have a true understanding of how the fulfillment, delivery and unboxing experience of a brand can influence customer satisfaction and repeat purchase.
Secondly, they need to be consultative problem solvers. All brands have unique requirements and are often struggling with certain areas of fulfillment — the sales team needs to be empathetic to these challenges and seek to understand the true problem before pitching a solution. They need to have the desire to help every brand they interact with, even if MasonHub is not the right fit.
Lastly, something important for any successful salesperson is product knowledge. In order to be consultative, the sales team needs to understand how MasonHub’s products and services can help solve a brand’s paint points. Because of this, each member of our sales team trains on the warehouse floor. They pick, pack and fulfill orders and get first-hand experience on how the technology works in all use cases.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
Communication is one of the most essential life skills. With TigerConnect, we are enhancing the healthcare industry’s communication channels through the most used form of communication to date: texting. The cross-functionality of using the product on any device — computer, tablet or mobile phone — gives prospects the assurance they can reach any member of their team and provide efficient patient care.
Prospects and clients both need to trust that what you are providing will benefit their workday.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
Reps need the curiosity to learn about each clinic. No one clinic is the same — not even in the same sector — and they could be in home health, independent practices, hospitals or another sector entirely.
They must also be able to explain the solution and value simply. A medical professional’s day is already hectic — adding more complexity to their day is not beneficial to them or their patients.
Finally, they need to prioritize relationship building. Prospects and clients both need to trust that what you are providing will benefit their workday and patients.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
I think HG Insights is the premier vendor for technology-based intelligence and third-party intent.
Our intelligence is the most accurate, granular and global in coverage. We believe we are the best at what we do, so being able to have confidence in any interaction is a true luxury. We also have a world-class, data-as-a-service team that can help organizations struggling with bandwidth to operationalize the intelligence.
Ultimately salespeople are providing C-suite decision makers — such as chief revenue officers or chief marketing officers —with a data-driven approach to resolve some of their highest priority objectives, and ultimately build out your network with potential future mentors or coworkers.
Be ambitious, curious, coachable and resilient when it comes to building a pipeline.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
To have great success at HG Insights as a sales rep, it helps to have a background in SaaS, to be capable of following standard sales processes and methodologies, and to be ambitious, curious, coachable and resilient when it comes to building a pipeline.
HG Insights is growing very quickly. The individuals that achieve the most success have the desire to double their quota rather than simply achieve it and have a solution-based personality — if something is broken, they’re willing to be a part of solving it.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
At Edify we do just about everything differently, in the best way possible: We offer a full suite of contact center, unified communications and API, all in a single pane of glass. The product is unlike anything our industry has ever seen, and is a realization of our belief that interactions with brands should be as organic as interactions with each other — voice, text, chat, video and email in one place, on one screen.
And we don’t stop there. Edify also combines interactive voice response (IVR), intelligent virtual agents (IVA) and robotic process automation (RPA) functionality with custom drag-and-drop workflows that empower agents to customize the application. No longer are agents forced to wait on someone from the IT department to assist them — the power is in their hands. Even someone with no background in building call flows can build and deploy within minutes. Trust me, I did it!
We also approach our customers with a pricing model that is as flexible as our platform. Pay for what you use — nothing more, nothing less.
Lastly, our people. It is easy to be so passionate about a product when the folks building and supporting it are some of the best out there.
It is crazy that the one true thing that sets you apart today is how authentic you are, and it really pays off.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
We live in a world where people often aren’t living or working authentically. Especially when doing anything in sales or B2B, many folks don’t live up to their core values and succumb to doing whatever it takes to get the deal done — that’s why the sales industry so often has a bad reputation. It is crazy that the one true thing that sets you apart today is how authentic you are, and it really pays off.
We sell a product that eases the pain that has haunted the way contact centers and businesses have been forced to interact internally — from an employee to employee perspective — and externally — from a customer service agent to customer perspective — for way too long. If we can transition from voice to video to text when talking to our best friends and parents, why can’t we do this with our peers or customers? Now we can. So, selling our product isn’t actually very hard at all. After all, we all want — and need — a smarter, easier, customizable and reliable way to connect. That’s what Edify offers.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
To put it simply, I think Cloudvirga is the industry’s most comprehensive digital mortgage platform that addresses the needs of both the borrower and the originator (lender) at the fairest price in the market — and supported by the best people around, who truly believe in the collective product vision and providing the best experience possible. I joined Cloudvirga because of this. I believe we have the best product, the best price and the best people — you can’t lose with that combination.
You need to learn what their existing gaps or pain points are, what they are trying to accomplish near- and long-term.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
Communication is the first thing you need. Listening is crucial — you need to learn what their existing gaps or pain points are, what they are trying to accomplish near- and long-term and how they see this technology fitting into their existing processes. Be honest about how you can help and open to think beyond just where you have been. Prospects and clients are our best source for ideas, enhancements and future function.
You also need empathy. Are you helping with growing the business or helping borrowers feel more confident and secure in the transaction and company? Confidence and knowledge get you in the door — realizing you are there to learn as much as them is what separates trying from success.
Finally, you need to believe in what you are selling. Not at a surface level — truly believe that you are doing right by others and that they will benefit from you. Believe in the team you are working with and their support. And finally, believe in yourself and why you are here. Be yourself, be excited about what you are doing and be proud of where you are.
What about your company’s product or service makes it great for pitching to prospects?
We are transforming the way brands are able to communicate with their customers through two-way text messaging. This provides a five-times return on investment (ROI) guarantee for e-commerce brands utilizing our platform and allows their consumers to have the in-person experience via text message. Brands are able to keep customers engaged based on previous shopping history with tools such as abandoned cart SMS broadcasts, and consumers can communicate and ask questions before making a purchase.
Understanding the challenges of building a successful e-commerce brand is key.”
What are the most important skills required for selling your company’s product or service?
Understanding the challenges of building a successful e-commerce brand is key. From there, explaining why Emotive is the best way to provide a truly human and enjoyable customer experience via SMS for online customers, and how that addresses the challenges these brands face and affects the bottom line.
