The Art of Pitching

Whether you're a founder, product or business leader, you need to pitch your product/solutions multiple times internally and externally. And usually whatever efforts we put, the conversion rate doesn’t match our expectations.

Generally, one needs to pitch their co-founders, cross-functional teams, stakeholders, investors, prospects and clients etc.

In today’s digital era we knows multiple way to pitch someone via email, phone, social media, in addition to in-person interaction. The effectiveness of pitching depend upon your ability to understand the behaviour of your target audience, market intelligence and the industrial ecosystem.

Being a technical co-founder, I have learn the pitching on field by directly interacting with clients and prospects, building strong relationship, while analysing customer behaviour and market insight.

With this approach, I'm able to attract and forge strong relationship with senior executives from fortune-500 companies like Microsoft, Deloitte, Coca-cola etc. by pitching them effectively on LinkedIn.

I did this by creating data-driven customer funnel framework that have following core components:-

1. Market intelligence

Try to find the answers of following questions :-

• Who are my direct and indirect customers?
• What are their pain-points and motivation?
• How the market and industrial ecosystem is evolving?

(Market research and analysis, Competitor landscape, Customer research and development, Patterns and insights)

2. Relationship building

Try to find the answers of following questions :-

• How and what they are doing now?
• How their competitors are solving this problem? What is their success metrics?
• Where to find? How to reach? What to do at first interactions? Leading followups?

(Mechanism, Empathic understanding of their pain-points and motivation, Act as people advocate)

3. Customer experience

Try to find the answers of following questions :-

• What are the possible ways to enhance their present experience?
• What are the key decision points and hurdles in these approaches?

Creating a plan to direct their transformation, from current stage to future desirable stage. Do effort, resources, complexity analysis and plan diagnose strategies, backed by a clear RoI projection.

4. The perfect pitch

Pitch the plan prepared in earlier steps with all known pros and cons. Evaluate it by taking client feedback and get prepared to face criticism. Discuss plan execution and operation in details. Talk about possible hurdle and their diagnose. Make them believe that you’re the expert for their transitions stage and could be a great advisory resource for achieving their targets/goals.

Repeat steps, 1 to 4 for every client visit. Higher iteration cycles will empower you to put your points pragmatically and driving higher conversation rate.