Every company or business must ‘sell’ its products or services to survive. As long as there is competition, there is a need for sales. It used to be that salespeople would lob fast balls of information about a product or service at a customer to make a sale. Hence the term sales ‘pitch.’ The problem with pitching information is that the customer’s response is to either swing to bat it away or duck to avoid it. Perhaps that is why the old-fashioned ‘sales pitch’ is being replaced with a better approach.
Whether face-to-face, on the phone or via some form of messaging or social networking, the method of selling in which information is spewed at a customer like a fire hose is largely ineffective in part because the pitch approach is a monologue, not a dialogue. Those still using that approach might consider ditching the “pitch” and instead treating the sales process as a collaborative conversation…. a dialogue in which the salesperson asks thoughtful questions, listens carefully to the customer’s answers, seeks to understand the customer’s needs, and offers a valuable solution to a problem. Here are the qualities of a great collaborative sales conversation.
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