The secrets to closing more deals with a professional pitch structure

We walk through a practical, three‑step strategy for building sales pitches that close by qualifying hard, reconfirming needs with micro‑yeses, and narrowing choices to make decisions easy. We focus on outcomes over features, price anchoring, and how to prevent objections before they arise.

• outcome‑focused value over product features
• rigorous qualification to exclude non‑buyers
• must‑haves, nice‑to‑haves, and not‑needed mapping
• reconfirmation via soft closes and micro‑yeses
• visualising desired outcomes to build commitment
• narrowing choices to two or three options
• price anchoring to shape perceived value
• simple, direct closes that avoid yes‑no traps
• resources available at salescraft.training

Please give me a like, a subscribe if you feel I’ve earned it
There is more information on the website, so www.salescraft.training
If you find those useful, please invest in the course

Welcome to the podcast!

Chapters

• 0:13 Why Templates Fall Short
• 0:29 The Case for Outcome‑Focused Selling
• 1:32 Step One: Qualify Hard
• 4:08 Must‑Haves vs Nice‑to‑Haves
• 6:23 Reconfirm Needs with Soft Closes
• 8:32 Visualising Outcomes to Build Yes Momentum
• 9:13 Narrow Choices to Close the Deal
• 11:25 Price Anchoring and Perceived Value
• 14:25 Strategy Over Script, Resources, and Next Steps

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:07

Hello again and welcome to another podcast. I'm Graeme Elliott, and uh what we're going to do in this podcast is to look at some sales pitch templates to help you um present what you are selling. So the reason for doing this is that recently I did a poll on what people would like from the podcast, and one of the things that came up was a professional sales pitch template. Now, how I'm going to approach this is possibly not quite what you're expecting because I'm not a big one for templates. However, there are techniques you can use that will help you close. So that's what we're going to work through today. And the things that I'm going to go through are things that I've already spoken about in other podcasts. And if you want more details, I go through them in a lot more detail and give you a lot more options in the sales training course I offer, which is called consultative selling. So that's what the uh plan is today. So please stick with me and we'll go through it. So I'm just going to break it down to three steps. And obviously, I don't know what you're selling, I don't know what it is you do. So as you work through this, as you listen to this, hopefully you can make notes and start to construct a sequence that works for your business. So the very first thing you need to be on top of is to qualify. So this is before you get to the actual sales pitch. Uh, but you need to be making sure that you're talking to people who are likely to buy from you. So this is where having a good qualification process at the front end, and really that's everything at the front end from initial marketing through to qualifying inquiries through to setting up meetings, demonstrations, evaluations, whatever it is you do. You really need to make sure that you have excluded out the people who will never buy from you. And this is something that I've seen a lot of salespeople do who struggle. They try to uh qualify everybody in when in fact that which means basically that they're talking to people they shouldn't be talking to, they're just wasting their time. Um, you all have a limited amount of time, so it's really important that when the people that you do spend your time with are people who are likely to buy from you. So, how do you qualify? Well, first of all, with whatever it is that you're offering, you will have an offer. So, what I mean by that is that for every product, uh every service that you offer, each individual one, you will have a value proposition. There'll be a specific offer around that, and that offer is about what that product or solution gives the end user. So we're not interested here in the nuts and bolts of what it is that you sell. It's not about your product, it's about what your product delivers to the person who buys it because that's what they're buying. So, an example I give is if I need to get a plumber in, I don't get a plumber into my house because I want to get a plumber into my house, you know, for conversation, learn about plumbing. I actually want a plumber in my house to stop the water leak or to fix the problem. And that's what people are buying from you when they buy from you. So it's not about your product, it's about what that product or service gives to them. So it's really important to be clear on that, first off, because if you don't understand that, you are gonna struggle because you're I talk about traffic light uh approaches and other and other podcasting in the course, and you're gonna be constantly hitting red lights if you don't understand that important uh distinction. So when you're qualifying, you need to make sure that the people that you're speaking to are the right end users for what it is that you're offering, and then as you start to break that down, and this can this comes in part in uh any meetings that you have, face-to-face meetings, sales meetings, this is where you start to deep dive into what they're looking for. And from your perspective, the things you need to understand are what are the critical things that they are looking for, what are the must-haves in your solution or product, whatever it's delivering for them, there are certain must-haves. So, for example, if I'm selling a car and somebody is looking for a family car, then presumably the must-haves, and this is where you re-qualify with the client, are that it will seat four or five people, it might need to take child seats, uh, it might need to have additional luggage space. So you need to be really clear on that. And that means that you're not pitching a two-seater sports car, you are pitching something that is appropriate for what they need. So you really need to understand what the must-haves are for that particular client. And remember, you are there to serve your client. This is not about you, the sale is about them. The next level down is to look at the nice to haves. So, in the case of a car, it might be certain colours they kind of like, but they're not they're not going to stop the sale if they're not available. So, this is the the difference between the criticals, uh, the critical things and the nice to have's. That they'll get away, they can buy something that doesn't deliver all of the nice to haves, but they probably want some of those. And then the other thing to go down to, so the lowest level are the things that are not necessary. And this is where you may have certain features on whatever it is you're selling, whether it's a product or a service, that they don't want at all. And the reason that it's good to identify those is that they may see that those things actually detract from the value that you're offering. They're they're having to buy things they don't want. So that can be seen as a negative. So you need to understand what those are as well. And once you've under once you've worked through all three of those, you can then build up a value proposition. So you can put together an offer that meets their needs and meets their budget and is appropriate for what they're doing. So this is where we move on to step two. So this is I've kind of lumped this as the qualification process. So the next thing is to reconfirm their needs with them and do I'll call it a soft close on each of those. But basically, what you're doing is as you go through each stage of the offer, having had that discussion and got really clear about what it is they they want, being clear in your own mind that you can offer all of that without a lot of extra things that might detract from the sale because they may be seen as driving the uh price up. You then go through each one and just reconfirm with them. So, for example, if it's a car, uh you might say something along the lines of okay, this the vehicle I'm thinking of has uh five seats and there are anchor points for two child restraints. Um that does what you need, doesn't it? Um, so you're here. I'm throwing in um just a little phrase at the end of the sentence. You don't need to do that, but it encourages a yes. What you're trying to do here is to ask a series of small questions, which are not big commitments to buy, but just confirming that this particular aspect of the sale will meet their requirements. And what you're looking for is to get them to say yes, because subconsciously, once we start saying yes to things, our brain starts to work in a way that is going to take you to the sale. Our brain doesn't like to do a lot of work, so it looks for consistency, and this is why we spend a lot of focus on getting people to say yes to small aspects of what it is we're offering. Because once you start working through the smaller aspects and you get yeses, then it's much, much easier to close the overall deal. What you're also doing, because you might be offering them something else. I mean, it might be a weight training program or a fitness program, and what you're then getting them to say yes to is what that program will deliver in their mind. So this might be feeling more energized, maybe losing a bit of weight, whatever it is. But you want them to see themselves in that picture. So how you would put that, those statements together, if you're in that kind of scenario, is to try and work in, without being too obvious about it, but to try and at least in some of these questions get them to see themselves in that picture, whether it's feeling more energized, whether it's um in a you know, a an apartment overlooking the ocean or whatever it is. But you want to put them in there so they begin to see themselves in that picture. That means they're subconsciously saying yes to it, they're taking on board that change. And all of these things help to uh get a yes at the end of the whole process. So once you've gone through all of those things, and I to I like to do this in a notepad, writing things down, and then I can tick them off as I go through. So I'll be making notes as I'm discussing with them, and I always ask permission to make notes, but I think most people are happy to do that because it shows that you are genuinely interested in what's important to them. So they feel uh that you are looking out for them in their best interests. So make that get that list in the first part of the qualification process or the re-qualification. You work through that list when you do the second stage, that's reconfirming the needs and getting a soft close, so getting those yeses. And then at the end of that, I always ask is there anything else? Is there anything else that you that perhaps we haven't covered so far that is important to you and this uh situation, whatever it is? So that's a final opportunity to get rid of anything that might possibly crop up as an objection at the very end of the process. Having done all of that, what you then want to do is to there are different ways of doing this. I've spoken about soft closes, I've got a video free webinar on my website, which will take you through soft closes and how you can do assumptive closes, that kind of thing. So that these are easy ways to get the order because most salespeople don't like asking for the order, which you really have to do. So, one thing, if it is very clear, let's say it's a gym membership, and you've gone through everything, you've identified exactly what they want, what so that might be how many times a week they need to go, the kind of membership level they need, do they need a personal trainer or a dietary um advisor, something like that? And a very easy way to close that is to ask if they would like to pay monthly or yearly. In doing that, you give them a choice of two, and this is the key thing. When you are closing the deal, when you get it down to that kind of a close, you need a choice of two things. Absolute maximum is three. And the reason is that if you just give them one thing, and that one option would be, well, shall we go ahead or not? You've just given them a yes-no and they can say no to the sale. Okay, so you're setting yourself up a little bit there. Hopefully, with the work you've done already, you would get the yes, but there is always that chance that they will see the opportunity for no and jump on it. If you do more than three options, it starts to get really confusing. So you might be selling something where there's a lot of options. So one of the things you would be doing is perhaps having gone through, let's go back to the car again, as an as an example, the sort of critical things on the car. Uh, so these would be the must-haves that I spoke about earlier. Some of the nice to haves might be a particular style of alloy wheel, it might be tinted windows, that kind of thing. And what you're doing as you're working through that is you're you're putting together the final offer or the final choice of options. So it might be a five-seater car in blue with particular alloy wheels and with or without tinted glass. That might be the option, and you can show the price difference. But keep it simple, and if you do have something that has a lot of options, you really want to narrow that down so that when it comes to doing the close, you are only dealing with two maximum three alternatives. And obviously, the reason we do that is that it's then easier to make a choice of whether it's, for example, you're paying yearly or monthly, and both of those result in the sale. So that's what you're going for. Or would you like that in blue or red, or you know, however it is, option one, option two. Uh, if there's a price advantage, um, it's it can be advantageous to present the higher price first and then a lower price second. And the reason you do that is that you're setting a bar with the higher price. You may or may not get some resistance to that price, depending on how you qualified and what the budgets are, but you're going in higher first. If you then go with the second one, that will be perceived as being cheaper and perhaps better value for money. So this this also is important, and this is a technique that you can use if you're selling clothing, for example. If you're spending uh if you're selling a suit that's$500 and you have a shirt that's$50, that might seem like a lot. But if you've got a suit that's$2,000 and you've got a shirt that's$50, suddenly that shirt doesn't seem like a lot. Whereas if you just sold the shirt for$50, that might feel like a lot of money. So this is about the how the costs are perceived by the client. So this is worth giving it a little bit of thought because if you go in low and then go up high, excuse me, if you're going low and go up high, you can create a bit of buyer resistance just by doing it in that order. So these are the kind of things to work through. This is I I it's not really a template to me, it's a strategy rather than an actual template, because to me a pitching template is basically here's a bunch of words to say, I don't want you to do that because we sell from or we buy from people that we feel understand what we're trying to do. We feel that they're on our side, and we feel that they are giving us the best possible option. You only get that if you spend the time to have these kinds of conversations with people. There are other benefits to this as well, which I won't go through in this podcast covered in the course. But it's much more about you having your questioning process, understanding your product offerings and how you can construct them so that when it comes to finally closing the deal, you have a small number of options so that it's much, much easier for the client to say yes to you rather than start to question and maybe come up with objections. And um objections are fine. I've covered that in other podcasts, uh, but obviously it's much easier if you don't get them, if you just go straight down to the close. Okay, so that is it for this podcast. Um, I hope you found that useful. If you have, please give me um a like, a subscribe um if you feel I've earned it. There is more information on the website, so www.salescraft.training. If you have a look there, there are um free assessments you can do, there's free downloads, uh, and as I said, there's a webinar as well. So there's a lot of resources there that you can make use of. And if you find those useful, please invest in the course because I find that the people who are most successful are the people who are prepared to back themselves, start investing in their own professional development. And that's the idea of the courses. Okay, so that's it for this podcast. Thanks for your time. I will speak to you in the next one. Bye for now.