Guest post by Moyofade Ipadeola.
There are several B2B sales and marketing strategies you could adopt to expand your B2B market this year. Optimizing your sales pitch deck is one you may want near the top of your list. The more prospects you can successfully pitch to and convert to clients, the higher the return on your marketing and sales spend.
Image credit: Jason Goodman on Unsplash
Implementing innovative pitching tips can set your offering apart from the pack and help you expand your B2B market share.
Eight Pitching Tips to Expand Your B2B Market
The eight creative pitching tips in this post will help you create pitch decks that stand out from your competition.
Up the professionalism of your pitch decks
There’s nothing as off-putting to a potential client, investor, partner or collaborator as a plain or thoughtlessly designed pitch deck. The effort you put into the appearance of presentation shows the effort you are willing to put into creating a great experience for your prospect.
A carefully crafted and professionally designed presentation can make all the difference in conversion. If you need help with your presentations, you can go through Pitch’s pitch decks for options. Beyond the array of eye-catching professional templates you can pick from, you also have access to a presentation workflow system for your team.
Personalize your pitch
When pitching your business or product, make sure you tailor it to your audience. Though this should be obvious, a mistake many B2B sales or presales people make is using generic pitches for all their presentations. This is a great way to lose promising prospects. To avoid this kind, research on the organization or business you’re presenting to and incorporate those insights into your presentation.
Uncover their specific problems and look for unique ways to solve them. Demonstrate how your products or services will solve their problems specifically instead of generalized messaging. Talk about the business model of the company, their people, and recent developments. This will show them that you take them seriously and have done your homework.
If you could use the same deck for another company for another prospect by changing only the names and date, then it’s not really personalized.
Keep your pitch deck short
People are busy and need to be able to make decisions quickly. Skip your company history, mission, and values statement (unless this will be meaningful to a specific prospect). Use statistics and graphs sparingly, and only to help make an important point. You don’t want to bore your prospect or overwhelm them with information. Keep your brief and to the point, and ask questions to keep prospects engaged.
Use simple language
Truth
Confused prospects don’t buy. To convince your audience to buy your product or engage your services, use clear, simple language and terms that the prospect will understand. Unfamiliar terms, acronyms, jargon, and buzzwords will make your audience tune out. Break your messages down in a simple manner.
Focus on delivering your information clearly and systematically. For your prospect to consider buying from you, they need to understand how your product will work in their world, how difficult (or easy) it will be to implement, and what specific benefits it will provide to them.
Focus on benefits, not features
When working on a pitch deck for prospects, focus more on benefits than features. This is particularly a temptation for founders and technical product experts who know the product inside and out, are passionate about it, and want to explain all the amazing things it can do.
Image credit: Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Your prospect doesn’t care about that laundry list of features. Instead, they want to know, as specifically as possible, how your product or service will benefit them. Make your value proposition clear, apply it to their world, and you will stand a better chance of converting your prospect.
Know the difference between features and benefits. Will your product or service help them increase their revenue? Will it reduce their operational costs? Will it help them get more customers? Will it give them more visibility? These are the questions your prospective clients want answers to—not how interactive your website is.
Tell a story with your pitch
Facts and figures are often important when pitching an idea, but they must tell a story. Prospects don’t want a list of data points; they want to see the big picture and how they fit into it. That’s where your story comes in.
Image credit: Product School on Unsplash
Craft a story around your product or services to bring the message home to your audience in a more captivating way. The story should be about how your prospect has a problem, how you proceed to solve it together, and the impact of your solution on your prospect’s business.
Keep in mind though that you and your company are not the heroes. Your prospect is the hero. You are there to support and enable them. They are Batman. You are their Alfred.
Show social proof
Prospects expect you to “blow your own horn.” They will be suitably skeptical about your claims in expertise, capabilities, and deliverables. However, when you provide real data of what you have achieved or delivered, in the words of actual customers, you become more believable.
Image credit: Karsten Winegeart on Unsplash
Your prospects are more likely to consider your offering when they see you have a track record of success. When you exhibit social proof best practices, you prove you have experience and are capable of delivering what you are promising.
Close with a clear and compelling CTA
Ask for the business. Prospects will look to you for guidance on the next step. If you’ve answered all of their questions at the end of your presentation, create a clear and definite path for the prospect to buy from you.
If there are still outstanding questions or steps remaining (e.g., financing details or a proof of concept), your call to action (CTA) might not be an outright call to buy. But there should be a next step for the prospect to take that will lead to an eventual sale. If the CTA is absent or unclear, the pitch deck is a waste.
Wrapping up
Apart from monitoring marketing trends and mastering digital marketing tips, optimizing your pitch deck and presentation skills are additional ways of expanding your B2B market in 2022.
Preparing professionally designed decks, personalizing pitches, and making them easy to understand are some of the ways to make your pitches stand out. Making your prospect the hero of a business success story creates a compelling reason to buy.
Moyofade Ipadeola is a Content Strategist, UX Writer and Editor. Witty, she loves personal development and helping people grow. Mo, as she’s fondly called, is fascinated by all things tech. She can be reached at moyofadeipadeola@gmail.com and on LinkedIn.