marketing speech for selling a product example

To fill the need, they developed the idea of a software solution for encoding data into inaudible tones. On a three-day, SXSW-bound, Cincinnati StartupBus, LISNR® was born, pitched, and moved to a seed round. Over the past 7 years, LISNR has raised over $35M and pioneered many advancements in ultrasonic technology, ultimately driving its usage in payments today.”

• It uses the company’s origin story as a storytelling device.
• I like that it communicates the company’s values.
• It differentiates its product from others on the market.
• It shows how much the company has grown over time.

9. Follow-Up Pitch

So, what do you do if your prospect doesn’t respond to your first pitch? You follow-up with them. A follow-up pitch gives you the opportunity to reignite the conversation, reinforce your value proposition, and address any questions or concerns your prospect might have.

Follow-up pitches can be delivered through a number of channels, but phone calls and email are the most common. Ultimately, the goal of a follow-up is to continue nurturing your relationship with the prospect and convert them into a customer.

Here’s a great example of a follow-up after connecting with a prospect on social media:

UpSend, a former customer service software, has a great sales pitch presentation here. I like how they focus on setting up the problem they are solving for — and then clearly illustrating how their product adds value.

3. Surfe (Previously leadjet)

The revenue workspace Surfe illustrates another strong sales pitch. They quickly tell the story of their prospective customers’ pain points, and communicate a lot of understanding. Then, I like how clearly they illustrate how their product solves those pain points.

Why A Short Sales Pitch is A Good Pitch

An important note to make about these sales pitches is that they are all amazingly optimized for a short conversation. (Notice how short the three pitch examples above are?) I can't stress enough how much brevity matters for a sales pitch. Talking too much, using filler words, and talking about your company for more than two minutes can easily kill a conversation. So, keep your sales pitch short, clean, and simple! Your customers will thank you.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in June 2019 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

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The Perfect Sales Pitch: Examples, Templates, and Best Practices

Overfamiliar, aggressive, awkward — we’ve all been on the receiving end of a terrible sales pitch from a pushy seller.

But sales pitches are so much more than an uncomfortable phone call or an unwarranted email. In fact, a great pitch should make a buyer’s life better by connecting them with products and solutions that solve their most urgent problems.

How can you maximize the potential of your sales pitch? In this guide, we’ll reveal the secrets to ensuring your outreach is pitch-perfect by answering common questions like:

• What is a sales pitch?
• How do you make a sales pitch?
• What needs to be included in a sales pitch?
• What makes a sales pitch bad?
• How to deliver a sales pitch
• Templates for sales pitches that capture attention

Let’s dive in.

WHAT IS A SALES PITCH ?

A sales pitch is a well-crafted sales presentation that connects salespeople with potential buyers. The goal of a sales pitch is to catch a potential customer’s attention and convince them to learn more. Pitches can happen anywhere — via email, social media, or in person. A great sales pitch should pique the buyer’s curiosity and convey clear value.

For more on how to craft the best sales pitch, see what our team of sales experts has to say in the video below

HOW DO YOU MAKE A SUCCESSFUL SALES PITCH?

Creating an effective sales pitch is simple — just follow these five steps.

1. Research, research, and research some more

Great research will help build a foundation of value for your pitch, increasing the likelihood that your buyer will respond. Try to understand to whom you are pitching. What does their company do? What goals might that company have? What buyer persona are they most likely to fit in? Additionally, don’t forget to explore the customer’s story and profile — find out who they are, what their role is, and if you have any shared interests that might help you set the tone for the rest of the customer relationship.

2. Frame it around the customer’s needs , not yours

Talking about your product is the fastest way to get buyers to tune out. A winning sales pitch is about the customer, not you. Think about the functionality of your product and the value it provides for your potential clients. Are you reducing costs? Improving efficiency? Eliminating manual tasks? Buyers will respond more to the benefits of your product pitch than anything else.

3. Choose the right channel

There are many venues through which a sales pitch can be delivered — email, social media, or a phone call. Think about both the customer’s needs and their industry. Think about both the buyer and their industry. Mature, more established industries may respond better to more traditional forms of outreach, like a sales call. On the other hand, a highly innovative or startup company may prefer modern approaches, like a direct message through social media. That said, don’t stress over this stage too much; if you don’t get a response from one channel, it’s totally acceptable to try again via another one.

4. Make it personal

Next, think about personalization. Most reps use automation tools or work off a base pitch template, but that template should change based on how you are delivering your pitch and who it’s going to. For instance, you’d use different language based on whether you’re pitching a prospect via social media than you would through a sales email. You’ll also want to tailor your pitch so that the value and benefits you’re describing map to actual buyer pain points — after all, someone in healthcare will have very different needs than someone in manufacturing.

5. Tell the buyer what you want them to do

Finally, always end with a call to action. What do you want the buyer to do? Call you back or respond with times to meet? It’s critical that you close with a clear next step, so stay away from vague phrases like “What do you think?” Go for strong, timely, actionable phrases instead — check out the examples in the next section for more inspiration.

WHAT NEEDS TO BE INCLUDED IN A SALES PITCH ?

Now that you know how to make a sales pitch, let’s take a closer look at what the pitch itself should say. Regardless of channel, there are three main components to every successful pitch.

Whether it’s the opening line of your cold call or the subject line of your cold email, your hook should capture your buyer’s attention. Great ideas for openings include:

• Asking a question (“How would you like to increase revenue…”)
• Share a data point (“Did you know that 60% of CEOs…”)
• Reference a shared connection (“Saw that you were also a fan of…”)
• Cut to the chase (“I won’t waste your time — just wanted to share…”)
• Mention a recent interaction (“It was great connecting with you at…”)

After your hook, you should quickly explain why you are contacting your buyer and what your product can do for them. Keep this value prop short but enticing. Some key points to hit on include:

• What your product is in plain English — now is not the time for marketing jargon.
• Why the buyer should continue to engage with you using data, case studies, testimonials, or market research.
• How will the buyer personally benefit should they respond? Do this by typing the benefits from the previous bullet to the buyer’s goals or objectives.

Call to Action

Finally, close your call, social, or email pitch out with a call to action, or CTA. Push to include a clear next step your buyer can take, like calling you back or responding with availability. Take a look at these examples:

• When is a good time to chat about this more?
• Would you be open to a call to hear more?
• What is the best way to connect on this?
• Do you have any availability next Tuesday for a quick call?
• How would 15 minutes next week sound?
• Does it make sense to connect for 10 minutes this week?

WHAT MAKES A SALES PITCH BAD?

There are some sales pitch techniques you should avoid at all costs. Before you send your pitch or dial your customer, skim your pitch for any of these red flags:

• “I” statements: Your sales pitch has limited real estate. Don’t waste it on talking about yourself.
• Long pitches: The term “elevator pitch” should be taken literally. You shouldn’t take an hour to deliver your value proposition. A good sales pitch should be delivered in the time it takes a person to go from the lobby to the second floor.
• Product pricing: Getting a buyer to speak about their wallets, or money in general, on the first interaction is a fast way to have them ignore you because you don’t sound interested in them or their journey.
• Complicated explanations of product features or capabilities: During the prospecting stage, buyers aren’t ready to discuss solution details or look through an entire pitch deck.
• Overfamiliar greetings like “How was your weekend?”: Unless you’ve met the prospect before, this will come off as creepy.
• Generic pitches: If this pitch could work for any prospect, then it’s probably not tailored enough to capture a prospect’s attention.
• Promises you can’t keep: It may be tempting to promise buyers the moon, but this approach will ultimately set them up for disappointment; be realistic and let the strength of your product speak for itself.

HOW TO DELIVER A SALES PITCH

Any inside sales rep will tell you that pitching is hard. No matter which channel you work through, engaging with customers is a nerve-wracking experience. But it’s not impossible.

The key to delivering a flawless pitch is to stay confident. And the way to build confidence is through preparation. Here’s how:

• Practice your pitch live before you deliver it . While it may seem silly to recite a pitch to your roommate (or your pet), live practice is one of the most effective ways to work out the kinks in your delivery so you’re fully comfortable speaking in front of prospective clients, even if you’re pitching through a digital channel. — so it’s best to start honing your live pitch delivery skills sooner rather than later.
• Keep buyer profiles on hand. In general, most pitches will be done remotely via phone calls, social media outreach, or email. Take advantage of the fact that your buyer isn’t in the room by keeping your account reach on hand during interactions. Think of these notes as a security blanket. Sure, you could deliver the pitch without them, but in the event that your nerves get the best of you, you can recover quickly and discreetly.
• Know what your next step is. Don’t get caught flat-footed when a customer says “yes” to your pitch. Especially for live interactions, it’s important to know what your next step looks like. In some cases, this may be as simple as asking a buyer for time to set up a demo. But buyers may want to talk shop while they have you — so be prepared to dive deeper. It can help to keep a sales play or discovery call deck on hand to guide you through a more in-depth conversation, should the need arise.

TEMPLATES FOR SALES PITCHES THAT CAPTURE CUSTOMER ATTENTION

There’s no one right away to craft a sales pitch. That said, these sales pitch examples can help your sales team get started — just don’t forget to personalize using the strategies we discussed earlier for the best conversion rates.

1. The Shared Connection

This approach is useful when you and your buyer have something in common outside of work, like a shared hobby or alma mater.

Hi <<>>,

Reaching out as we’re connected on LinkedIn, I found your recent post about the best restaurants in Seattle super handy. Your suggestion to “eat outside our comfort zones” was a great reminder to be more adventurous in my dinner choices.

And in the spirit of trying new things, I wanted to share our latest research with you. I would love to connect to walk you through the report and get a sense of your near-term goals.

Would you be open to this?

2. The Data Dump

Data is a great way to catch buyer attention, especially if it can help them make the case to their team for your product.

The bad news: marketing burn is all too real these days. The good news? Help is on the way. New research shows that our platform can deliver:

• 72% increase in buyer engagement
• 50% in open-rates
• 20% decrease in attrition

How does 15 minutes next week sound to walk through how our customers achieved these numbers with our platform?

3. The Celebratory Moment

Eventually, one of your pitches will coincide with a big moment in a buyer’s life. As long as it’s appropriate, leverage that moment to build a connection.

Congrats on the recent promotion to Senior Program Manager! As you settle into your new role, curious to see how you’re approaching project management?

Did you know that a simple reduction of two manual tasks can win you back five hours a week?

Our platform makes it easier than ever for you to focus on the work that matters. If it makes sense, I would love to connect more on what we could do for you to make your day more efficient.

Do you have time next week?

4. The Incentive Follow-Up

Finally, this is a great template to use when leads are tepid or unresponsive — especially when paired with a personalized message.

With the weather cooling down, wanted to see if you’d be interested in a virtual coffee? Again, I would love to connect on our solution and fill you in on the use cases your peers are currently using our platform to solve. If not, enjoy a coffee on me!

PITCH-PERFECT CUSTOMER OUTREACH

Sales pitches don’t have to be an awkward experience. With these sales pitch ideas and techniques, you should be able to craft a sales pitch that strikes all the right chords with your target audience, ensuring your outreach is pitch-perfect and gets your buyers to the next step of the sales process every time.

Ready to put your pitching skills into action? Explore how Highspot makes engaging customers easier and more effective than ever .

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10 Sales Pitch Examples to Boost Your Close Rate

How you approach your sales pitch could be the difference between a hard no from your prospect or a high-value deal. As the saying goes, first impressions last, which is why we’ve compiled this list of sales pitch examples to help you get the conversation started on the right foot.

But what does a good sales pitch look like, and how can you design a winning sales pitch of your own? We’ll answer these burning questions and more below—so keep reading.

In this post, we’ll look at 10 sales pitch ideas that will help you create your own. We’ll also outline some good and bad examples for each.

Table of Contents

What is a sales pitch, the different types of sales pitches, how to structure your sales pitch, 1. lead with a question, 2. create a dichotomy, 3. tell a good story.

• 4. Use Flattery (If It’s Genuine)

5. Follow the Rule of Three

6. create a sense of urgency, 7. let the product speak.

• 8. Acknowledge the Prospect’s Emotions

9. Show Supporting Data

10. remember the customer, additional tips to dazzle your prospect.

A sales pitch is a concise, persuasive speech that explains what your product is, communicates its value, and encourages the customer to make a purchase. 

It’s your chance to turn a prospect’s interest into action. But it can also make or break a deal. If your buyer isn’t hooked by what you have to say, they likely won’t purchase your product.

You may develop a winning sales pitch structure based on your most common sales scenario. But there are different ways to engage with your prospects, so adapting your pitch to the situation at hand is crucial. 

The primary sales pitch categories you will likely encounter include the following:

• Elevator pitch: This is a fast-paced pitch , typically used in situations where you have a limited time to grab your prospect’s attention and get your point across as quickly as possible. A no-frills pitch that gets right to the point in the simplest terms is the best approach here.
• Email pitch: Executing your sales pitch over email can be challenging, especially when you consider that getting your prospect to open the email is half the battle. A punchy subject line stipulating your value proposition and a concise email with a clear CTA can go a long way.
• Phone pitch: Pitching over the phone is one of the most common sales pitch types and comes with its own challenges. Consider the best time of the day to call your prospect, earn their trust by being honest, and talk and connect with them for the best results.
• Social media pitch: A modern sales pitch approach, the social media pitch can lead to lucrative deals, but there are a few obstacles to navigate. To ensure you don’t look like a spammer, engage with your prospect on something specific and relevant you found in their profile and build on that while keeping things professional.
• Video pitch: The video pitch method combines the advantages of in-person, call-based, and text-based pitches, which you can place strategically in messaging.

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Building a solid pitch requires some thought. With careful consideration, you can create a pitch roadmap to guide you through the conversation. When planning your pitch, try to stick to the following proven framework. 

Identify the issue

Step one is to highlight or pose a question related to the problem your product or service will solve. You could open with a real-life example or impactful statistic that illustrates the gravity of the issue and the need to resolve it.

Communicate your value proposition

Let your prospect know what your company offers and what sets you apart from the competition. Focus on the problem identified and what your product or service does to solve the issue. Highlight the benefits they can look forward to when working with you.

Explain the process

Next, you’ll provide the prospect with more details on how you and your team will help their business. What steps will you take, how will you approach them, and what makes your method unique? Provide as much detail as possible, but keep your explanation concise and engaging.

Establish trust

Building a relationship with your prospect begins with trust. And you can establish trust in several ways, including:

• Case studies: Include an example of a company with a similar problem you’ve successfully helped with your product or service. Break down the nature of the problem and the steps your business took to resolve it.
• Client testimonials: Incorporate statements from happy clients who have benefited from your product or service. Ask the client for permission to include their full name and company name as part of the pitch, as this will help you establish credibility.
• Industry accolades: Has your company achieved any awards or reached a significant milestone? If so, mentioning these achievements will go a long way to developing trust.

Initiate a conversation

In closing, ask your prospect an open-ended question to spark a conversation. In other words, ask a question your prospect cannot answer with a simple “yes” or “no.”

Some examples include the following:

• What risks could your business face if this problem isn’t resolved?
• What are your company’s top priorities for the coming fiscal year?
• What are some of the challenges you’ve experienced in delivering your product or service?

10 best sales pitch examples to increase sales

Now that we’ve pinned down the basic structure let’s dig into some of the best sales pitch examples to boost your close rate.

Preferably a question that compels them to see their problem from a different perspective. If the question promises valuable information, they’ll want to know the answer and will stay engaged through the next part of the pitch. 

Good Example: A digital marketing sales rep might start a pitch with, “Did you know Instagram is currently working against you?” This question hints at important information that they’re missing and makes them reconsider their current social media strategy. The sales rep can then provide an answer that aligns with the value of buying their social media services.

Bad Example : If your question isn’t compelling enough, your customer might not stick around for more of your pitch. “Are you looking for a way to _____?” is a commonly used (but very ineffective) question that PhoneBurner warns against since it’s worded in a way that’s likely to elicit a “no” response. Your opening question should have your target dying to know more.

This pitch follows a three-step process. Start by stating a truth. Then, introduce another truth that contradicts the first truth. Finally, bring in your product and show how it can resolve the problem. 

Good Example : In an episode of Shark Tank, the creators of DARTdrones used the dichotomy technique effectively in their pitch . They started by explaining that drones are a beneficial piece of technology. Then, they contradicted this truth by stating that drones are prone to crashing. Their solution was their training course for drone pilots. 

Bad Example : If your product doesn’t offer a realistic solution for the problem, the dichotomy won’t be effective . Make sure you draw a clear line between your product and the problem introduced in your pitch. 

As Ryan Dohrn says , “People remember stories 75% of the time. People remember facts and stats less than 1% of the time.”

Stories are engaging. Once a buyer is emotionally invested in your story, they will be more likely to care about your product. But avoid introducing your product at the beginning of the story. It’s best to weave in your product during the middle or end once the listener is fully engaged in what you have to say.

Good Example:  During his pitches, Backroads CEO Tom Hale likes to tell the origin story of founding his travel company. Hale has always disliked mass tourism, and one night while working in Las Vegas he woke up in a cold sweat with a brilliant idea. He got to work and by 8 AM had a completed plan for Backroads, a slow-tourism outdoor-focused travel company. This story works with his prospects because it shows that there is authentic passion behind the product .  

Bad Example : If your story is confusing or boring , your customers won’t be interested. If that happens, they likely won’t feel the emotional attachment you were counting on. Remember, your company’s story doesn’t need to be a verbatim account of everything that happened—keep the good parts and skip over the filler.

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4. Use Flattery (If It’s Genuine)

Like they say, flattery will get you everywhere. People like being complimented, so use this to your advantage during your sales pitch. Sure, the customer might realize what you are doing, but deep down, they’ll be pleased and will have a positive impression of your pitch.

“They only made this specific model of laptop in a limited run to test the market.”

Good Example : This suggestion from  Investopedia  is a perfect example of a sales pitch with the  right amount of flattery . As you can see, it doesn’t explicitly complement the prospective client. Instead, the sales rep  subtly  compliments the client. By mentioning this was a “limited run” product, the sales rep shows that the client is important or special enough for this exclusive product.

Bad   Example : If a sales rep over-compliments the potential customer, particularly on personal attributes (“gee, that’s the sharpest tie I’ve ever seen!”), it can feel  inauthentic or creepy . Make sure to present your flattery so that it comes across as genuine and helps build a positive rapport with the customer.

Instead of overwhelming your prospects with endless facts, choose three key elements that you want them to retain in their minds. This will help your buyer remember your product while helping you keep the pitch concise.

Good Example:  Of course, your product has more than three exciting aspects, but you need to  narrow down the key points  to make this pitch effective. If you pitch a food delivery app, the three points could be: 1) ease of using the app, 2) how quickly the food is delivered, and 3) customer satisfaction reviews. If you’re pitching a complex SaaS product with tons of bells and whistles, do as much research as you can upfront to present the prospect with the three benefits most relevant to their specific business.

Bad Example:  While simplicity is usually the best policy, it can also get you in trouble here.  Speaking from experience , we know that almost every CRM tool on the market claims to be easy to use, powerful, and affordable.  In a crowded market, you need to get specific.  So, what are three selling points  you  can make that your competitors can’t?

Have you ever thought you were about to close a deal only to have the customer drag their feet? It’s frustrating to put in the work only for a customer to delay the deal. During your pitch, it helps to create a sense of urgency so the customer will feel compelled to close the deal before they float away.

Good Example :  Play off of FOMO  (fear of missing out) during your sales pitch. Imagine a sales rep for an advertising agency pitching their services to a potential client. During the pitch, the sales rep should mention that they only have the bandwidth to accept a “few additional clients” at the moment. This shows the potential client that they need to decide immediately to avoid missing out on the opportunity to work with the agency. 

Bad Example :  Telling the client to “take their time”  or to “reach out when they are ready” doesn’t create a sense of urgency. Instead, this lets the client off the hook and encourages them to drag their feet. 

Words can only go so far. Instead of overexplaining the product, let the customers try it out for themselves. When a customer has the chance to see the product in action, they’ll understand how it works and why they need it. 

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‍ Good Examples:  In this video, you’ll see the salesman Joe Ades demonstrating his product in New York City’s Union Square. Yes, he’s still talking about the product. But as he speaks, he peels the carrots. With a product like a vegetable peeler, showing how it works is more effective than just talking about it. United Building Maintenance uses an effective tactic to differentiate its commercial cleaning company. When their sales reps arrive at a prospective client’s building, they walk the halls and speak with the cleaning staff. They point out their inefficient cleaning tools and explain how UBM’s commercial products will make the cleaning job easier. This pitch works because UBM describes how its products are more efficient than the competition.

Even if you’re selling a complicated product, a simple demonstration of the tool can be very persuasive in showing a prospect that what you’re selling is easy to use and genuinely helpful.

Bad Example:  The biggest mistake when using a demo in your sales pitch is  not making sure your product works smoothly ahead of time . Run the demo a few times before doing it in front of your customers. Nothing ends a sale faster than a demonstration showing your product  doesn’t  work.

8. Acknowledge the Prospect’s Emotions

Emotions are a powerful tool. Play on these during your pitch. Of course, you should avoid coming across as manipulative , as this will turn off your customer.

Good Example: Your prospective customer might feel stressed about “ breaking up ” with their current supplier. Play off this emotion during your pitch by coaching the client through the “break-up” process. Your potential customer will feel relieved that they have a strategy for ending their current business relationship.

Bad Example: Playing off emotions just to get a reaction won’t be effective. Customers can easily tell when they are being emotionally manipulated, which won’t make them interested in your product. As a salesperson, your presence should relieve the prospect’s tension—because you’re a helpful, trusted advisor—not add to their tension.

While you don’t want your pitch to seem dry, feel free to toss in a few hard facts to back up your pitch. You need your customers to trust you—and for some people, objective data sets their minds at ease. As long as you can provide legitimate sources for any numbers you throw out, a few well-placed stats will make you seem more credible.

Good Example : Use  easy-to-interpret charts and graphs  to explain your supporting data. Introduce the statistics in digestible chunks instead of throwing them all out at once.

Bad Example: The phrase, “What if I said …” does not instill confidence in your sales pitch. Avoid this or similar sentiments when you are discussing facts. This phrase makes it seem like you can’t prove your claim .

At the end of the day, your pitch is all about convincing the customer to buy your product. Tailor your pitch to each customer instead of using a one-size-fits-all pitch every time.

Good Example : Imagine you are tasked with selling Chromebooks. When you pitch the product to a school, you would highlight how the Chromebook can boost test scores and help students learn 21st century skills. But if you pitch the Chromebooks to a hospital, you would explain how this product can help streamline the patient check-in process and make it easier to store valuable patient information. The same pitch won’t be effective for both groups. Remember to  adjust your pitch so it relates to each customer . 

Bad Example : Using the exact same pitch every time makes it evident that you  didn’t consider the customer . All you have to do is tweak a few phrases or swap out some data points to keep your pitch relevant for each prospect.

While the above basic pitch framework and examples offer comprehensive sales pitch guidance, you could include a few extras to take your delivery up a notch.

Address common objections

Knowing what your prospect might oppose regarding your offering will help you tackle potential objections. But you’ll need to have done a fair amount of research or have some experience with client engagement to pull this off.

Therefore, try to anticipate common objections that might arise based on past experience, and ensure you cover those with sound solutions before the prospect has the chance to object.

Offer a personalized solution

Is your product or service customizable? Offering a tailored solution is a great way to set your service apart from the competition. It lets your prospect know that you are sensitive to their particular needs and that you’re willing to adapt things to ensure those needs are met.

Demonstrate ROI

If you have the data, run the numbers to show your prospect what they can expect in terms of ROI. 

Perhaps your product or service helps businesses save on expenses, in which case you should provide a basic breakdown to show the average savings percentage.

If your product or service positively influences productivity, offer a quantitative example of how much your solution could impact the business’s revenue and growth.

Craft a compelling sales pitch and close more deals

As you work on your own sales pitch, remember to keep it concise. Regardless of which techniques you use, it should be a short speech that immediately hooks your customer. An effective sales pitch is short, convincing, and leaves the customer wanting more. 

Nutshell is flexible enough to fit every sales model.

Choose the model that best fits your business and see how we help teams like yours close more deals.

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10 perfect sales pitch examples and how to write your own

The quality of a sales pitch can be the difference between meeting or missing a monthly quota. Poor pitches, if not modified and improved, can sink a whole company, in fact. Sales pitches are the backbone of a company’s outward-facing activities, so making sure you have a solid one should be a top-line priority. 

Key takeaways:

• Sales pitches shape leads’ first impressions. To make it effective, prioritize clarity over lengthy narratives, adjust strategy to the target audience (use personalized language), address problems, offer practical solutions, and stress benefits.
• Build credibility with facts and data, overcoming skepticism. Conclude with a clear Call to Action (CTA), directly inviting prospects to take the next step in the selling process.
• Examine effective marketing strategies employed by Lay’s, Apple, and Oatly to assess their narrative strength, ability to identify customer needs, and alignment with values.
• Apple confidently associates products with premium experiences; Wondery Podcast Network uses awards and a compelling slogan, “feel the story,” for a consistent brand tone. Learn from the best!

15+ psychological principles to improve sales

What is a sales pitch?   

Sales pitches are, simply, presentations that sales representatives give when trying to convince a prospect to do business with their company. 

Sales pitches are usually formulaic in nature, designed to capture the attention of their audience. They can be given verbally over the phone, or with accompanying visual materials in person. 

Pitches can be directed at a variety of audiences, too. Investors, potential customers and budding business partners are just a few examples of people or entities one could call a prospect. 

A sales pitch is usually the first exposure a prospect has to your company and its mission, so be sure to take the necessary time to develop a pitch that works for your agents and their prospects. 

Read on for some tips about designing a professional, effective sales pitch. 

How to make a great sales pitch 

#1 be clear and concise.

Sales pitches should be delivered confidently by a salesperson who’s fully convinced of the efficacy of your product. 

Their presentation should be right to the point — there’s nothing worse as a prospect than being dragged along a winding narrative road towards a weakly-made point. Salespeople that drone on and on bore their audience and risk losing business. 

In short, don’t beat around the bush: time is money, and your prospects are better served by succinct sales pitches that use clear language to explain why your product is right for them. 

#2 Identify and address your target audience 

Identifying your target audience in the body of your sales pitch can help make your message feel personal. 

For example, if you’re selling ready-made meals from a food delivery service, you could call out your target audience by saying something like, “Tired of having to figure out what to cook each and every night? With [company name], all the ingredients for a week of delicious dinners are delivered right to your door.” 

If you choose to speak directly to your target audience, make sure to use broad, generic language so as not to alienate any potential customers. 

Be sure to carefully tailor your sales pitches to each individual prospect. Never assume that a model that worked well for one presentation will work well for the next. 

#3 Identify a problem they face, and explain how your product can help solve it

It’s often said that a salesperson’s secret sauce is presenting their product as the solution to a common problem. The first opportunity that they have to do this is through the sales pitch. 

When coming up with the thrust of your pitch, you’ll want to identify and define a common problem that your target audience faces. Once that’s been introduced, you can present your product as the key to finally solving that problem. 

#4 Give a practical example of your solution

The key here is to help them envision a reality where they’re actively using your product to address and finally solve a nagging problem. 

Say, for example, you’re trying to sell fertilizer for people’s lawns in the dead of winter. As a sales representative in this scenario, you could talk about getting ready for springtime, and how lush and green the prospect’s lawn will look thanks to your fertilizer product. Assuming you’ve identified this prospect as someone who’s dissatisfied with their current lawn fertilizer, you could contrast last spring’s subpar lawn to the promise of this spring’s lawn. 

The idea is to paint a picture for the prospect – one in which your product is the answer to all of their problems. 

#5 Root your pitch in facts and data, and don’t forget the CTA! 

Sales pitches work best when they’re anchored in plenty of facts and data. People are sometimes wary of salespeople and their tricks of the trade. Leaning on unfalsifiable facts and figures can disarm and eventually persuade even the most skeptical of prospects. 

Finally, when you reach the end of your sales pitch presentation, don’t forget to include some sort of CTA (call to action). It can be something direct and explicit, like handing a prospect your business card and attempting to schedule a follow-up discussion; or something more subtle like mentioning that your email line is open should anyone have any lingering questions about your presentation. 

The choice is yours; just ensure that you communicate in the right way, either by using the correct scripts or SaaS proposal templates . This will help you create a sales pitch presentation that leaves your prospects feeling excited about your product.

10 sales pitch examples

#1 pitch from a lay’s salesperson to investors about new marketing campaign.

“Hi, my name is Jacob and I’m a representative from Lay’s potato chips. So nice to be with all of you today. 

We’ve all been there, right? You come home from a long day at the office, wanting nothing more than to plop down in front of the TV with a good salty snack. You open your pantry and let out an exasperated sigh: nothing but plain potato chips. Nothing interesting, nothing unique, nothing that makes your mouth water. 

It’s an all-too-familiar conundrum, and one that we here at Lay’s are determined to do something about. 

That’s why we’ve recently begun a campaign that asks you, the consumer, to help us select a series of new potato chip flavors. We’ll engage with you across a range of platforms, crowdsourcing the insights necessary to keep all Lay’s snackers satisfied. Before you know it, we’ll all be living in a world full of flavor. 

If you’ve got any questions about this new initiative or about our brand in general, my line is always open. We’re very much looking forward to seeing what we can build together.”  

Notice how the presenter of this sales pitch uses a narrative to capture his audience’s attention. By placing the members of his audience in the shoes of someone dealing with a common problem — not having interesting enough snack foods at home — he is making his product relevant to the consumer. 

By soliciting his consumer’s input, he is guaranteeing that they’ll be satisfied with the results of the campaign. 

Lastly, we can appreciate how the salesperson’s playfulness with his language surrounding the product has the effect of putting his audience at ease, thus making them open to hearing new ideas.

#2 Booking Steve Wozniak as a Keynote Speaker 

This sales pitch, directed at people looking for a high-profile keynote speaker for their event, gets right to the point by telling you who the speaker is and how they gained notoriety. 

It continues by playing up Steve Wozniak’s many accomplishments, thus framing him as eminently qualified to speak at whatever event you may be holding. 

The pitch then speaks to Wozniak’s oratory skills, describing his presentations as “unforgettable” and “full of expert insight” on a range of topics. 

It even speaks directly to a likely academic target audience by mentioning Wozniak’s potential to inspire students in the STEM fields. 

#3 Oat-ly Drink Barista Edition

Oat-ly as a brand is well known for its unique voice and style. Conversational in tone, this sales pitch for Oat-ly’s Barista-Edition Oat Drink seeks to make a connection with its audience right off the bat, confidently assuming the reader is indeed a barista. 

While one may think this is a risky move in sales copy — one that might alienate a large portion of their audience — it’s actually an effective way to naturally boast about the product’s merits as a foamable oat drink. 

Overall, Oat-ly’s sales pitch for their Barista-Edition oat drink is an excellent example of how confident copy can win over your audience. 

#4: Habitat for Humanity “Who we are”

Habitat for Humanity partners with people in your community, and all over the world, to help them build or improve a place they can call home. Habitat homeowners help build their own homes alongside volunteers and pay an affordable mortgage. With your support, Habitat homeowners achieve the strength, stability and independence they need to build a better life for themselves and for their families. Through our 2020 Strategic Plan, Habitat for Humanity will serve more people than ever before through decent and affordable housing.

Habitat for Humanity is a charity organization that helps to build homes for disadvantaged people all around the world. The “Who we are” section of their website’s About page serves as a sales pitch for prospective philanthropists. 

The pitch begins by positioning Habitat for Humanity as a wide-reaching force for good. By emphasizing their experience in charitable home building, they’re assuring their audience that they know what they’re doing, and that their donation would be put to good use. 

A key part of this sales pitch is the use of the phrase, “with your support”. It quite directly highlights the integral role that charitable donations play in the work that Habitat for Humanity is able to do. Furthermore, by addressing the reader directly — “with  your  support” — an element of urgency is added into the mix. The use of this sort of language places this “Who we are” paragraph squarely in solicitous, sales pitch territory.

#5 “Sell me this pen” scene, The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)

This scene from the 2013 blockbuster movie The Wolf of Wall Street speaks directly to one of the core tenets underlying any and every sales pitch: the identification and fulfillment of a need. 

Unless your sales pitch clearly identifies the gap in the market that your product is attempting to fill, it will likely fall flat with your audience. In the case of the The Wolf of Wall Street scene, the final and best sales pitch comes from the salesman who makes his prospect’s need for his product painfully obvious. He’s able to do this by handing his prospect a piece of paper and asking him to sign his name. His prospect quickly realizes that in order to accomplish this task he needs a pen — exactly the product the salesman is trying to sell. 

Of course, not all businesses sell pens and identifying an effective way to highlight the need your product fills may prove difficult. It’s well worth the effort, though, we assure you. As we can see in the “Sell me this pen” scene, the most effective sales pitches are those that demonstrate the usefulness of their products through the quick and clear identification of need. 

#6 Alsace, France Tourism Brochure 

This rather whimsical sales pitch from an Alsace, France tourism brochure cleverly positions the region and its many attractions as the subject of some sort of collective fantasy. 

It’s a bold pitch, and one we’d argue is quite effective. Part of the attraction of travel is the chance to discover new and magical places. This sales pitch plays up the “magic” of Alsace and invites its audience to live out their dreams there. 

There’s an important takeaway here for salespeople, and it’s this: try as best you can to associate your product with a widely-recognized ideal. 

Say you’re selling sponges. Is it more effective to develop a sales pitch that highlights the quality of the material from which your sponges or made? Or would you be better off describing and showing images of spotless dishes and silverware that were cleaned using your sponges? 

We’d argue that the spotless kitchenware pitch — the ideal that your product will help customers achieve — is the more effective sales strategy. 

So whether you’re selling a dream-like holiday destination or a set of sponges, make sure your audience knows what your product can help them achieve. 

#7 FlixBus Holidays Email 

This email campaign from FlixBus demonstrates the utility of timeliness and urgency in sales. The lead text in the email is, “December is just around the corner… Time to plan your holidays!”. This kind of marketing message is effective because it takes advantage of the season, and has the added benefit of being extremely easy for a marketing team to organize. All your team would need to do is draft the email message and schedule it to be send one month before the holidays.   

#8 Citi Bike membership 

This sales pitch for NYC-based Citi Bike bicycle sharing program is jam-packed with useful information for potential customers. First, it breaks down the price of a membership to per-day cost. This is effective because it makes the membership seem supremely affordable. Next, it speaks to the health benefits of staying fit, something one can easily achieve by riding a bicycle regularly. The pitch continues by noting how more people riding bikes means less people driving cars, which is a net benefit for the environment. Finally, the audience is made aware that riding a bicycle in a traffic-jammed city like New York is often a quicker, more efficient way of getting around. Taken as a whole, this sales pitch demonstrates the effectiveness of giving your potential customers as much information as possible. People appreciate it, and feel secure knowing they have all they need to make an informed decision about using your product or service. 

#9 Apple product pitch 

This simple, straightforward pitch begins with a two-sentence, eye-catching headline: “The best experiences. Only on Apple.”. The first sentence is confident, and sets the tone for the whole pitch. The product, Apple, should be associated with the best experiences, ful stop. Furthermore, these “best experiences” can only be had with Apple. Pretty compelling message, huh? The pitch continues by describing the many benefits of using Apple products, with a focus on high-quality entertainment. Overall, the pitch makes clear the benefit of being confident in your sales pitch copy. 

#10 Wondery Podcast Network

The Wondery podcast studio produces a wide-range of narrative podcasts, mostly focused on the historical drama genre. This pitch, on their website’s “about” page, starts off with a definition of the product. Notice how they use the phrase “binge-worthy”. Though it has become a sort of buzzword in audiovisual content production, it does speak strongly to the quality of content Wondery produces. The pitch goes on by highlighting several awards that the studio has won for its podcasts. A key takeaway from the pitch is its natural incorporation of the company’s slogan, “feel the story”. As a general rule, slogans are an effective means of ensuring your company’s messaging maintains a consistent tone throughout all of your various communications channels. 

The Bottom Line

We hope our breakdown of how to craft effective sales pitches and the examples we analyzed will help you to more easily come up with your own. 

After you’ve drawn up a clear, concise sales pitch, the next step will be to disseminate the pitch to your target audience. For this, you’ll need an easy-to-use, all-in-one communications platform. Lucky for you, we’ve got just the thing. 

CloudTalk  empowers salespeople all over the world to connect with prospects on crystal clear, jitter-free calls. It also helps marketers more efficiently schedule and execute campaigns with its bevy of useful automation tools and integrations to today’s most popular CRMs.  Want to see CloudTalk’s powerful features and integrations for yourself? Try a  14-day free trial  today, absolutely free.

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6 sales pitch examples (and tips to make them better) | RingCentral

We often think of sales pitches as schlocky one-liners from a man in a cheap suit. You know the one: he approaches you and speaks in a way that makes you wonder if you’ve known him for years. 

He talks quickly, making his way through a list of points. You’re confused, but find yourself reluctantly agreeing with what he’s telling you. 

He turns it up a bit, coming on stronger. You’re still trying to place where you might know this person from. 

Was it high school? Is that so-and-so’s friend? 

Before you know it, you’re holding a pen, about to sign on the dotted line for something that, mere moments ago, you didn’t even know existed—nevermind wanted. 

So what just happened?

You were sold to. And no one likes being sold to.

But here’s the thing. Sales pitches don’t have to be sleazy. In this post, we’re going to explore what that looks like. You’ll learn:

• What a sales pitch is
• 5 key elements of a successful pitch
• 6 sales pitch examples

6 tips to improve your pitches

🚀  Start closing more deals with this  free outbound sales playbook .

What is a sales pitch?

Basically, a sales pitch is someone’s attempt to persuade you to buy something. Unlike the above example, it’s not about trickery or half-truths—or at least it shouldn’t be. 

A good sales pitch identifies a problem or challenge the prospect has, acknowledges the issue, and offers a solution through the product it’s selling, and supports it with proof. The pitch should make the value of the product easy to see. 

It’s that—and not the wheeling-and-dealing smooth-talker—that makes someone willing to buy. 

5 key elements of a successful sales pitch

Sales pitches can take on many different forms and use different approaches. But when you break them down, they almost always have these five key elements (and it always helps to have good sales apps or cold calling software and a Bluetooth headset if you’re going to be spending hours on calls):

1. The open

The open is the introduction. It’s as simple as saying hello, introducing yourself, and asking the prospect how they are. It’s also your first opportunity to start building rapport. We recommend these conversation starters to break the ice before moving onto the next part.  

Thank you for your interest in RingCentral.

2. Identification of the problem, pain point, and/or goal

By asking a few different probing questions about their work, you’ll start getting a better understanding of what the prospect’s challenges and goals are. Using active listening (and other empathy exercises ), you’ll begin to understand how your product can help address the prospect’s issues in order to reach their goals. 

3. Demonstration of value

Once you’ve established rapport and begun to understand the scope of their needs, you can begin to address each one using your product as the solution. You should be able to speak to one or more of their pain points with how your product can solve the problem. Here are a few sales demo best practices .

4. Supporting facts

If you want to build trust, you should be prepared to support your pitch with facts and figures. Consider using social proof, like positive results that show how you beat customer expectations or prove that your other customers got something out of using your product or service.

For example:

• “Our customers save an average of 37% a year on their annual maintenance bills.”
• “Similarly sized businesses have seen a full return on their investment in only three months.”

5. The close

By now, you should’ve clearly shown your prospect the value of your product and how it’s going to make their job or life easier. The close is essentially the point where they say yes and the transaction occurs. 

6 examples of sales pitches types

There are countless ways you can pitch to a prospect. But you want to use the right kind of pitch, at the right time, and for the right customer. Below are six different ways to pitch, including an example for each, why it works, and for some, when not to use them. 

1. The phone pitch

Believe it or not, the phone call is still the most popular and effective selling channel. With good reason: It’s fast, easy, happens in real-time—and is much harder for your prospect to ignore. 

Mark Cuban purchased the Dallas Mavericks in the early 2000s. Probably at a discount because, frankly, they stank. They were rated the worst professional sports franchise of the ‘90s. Naturally, this led to low ticket sales. 

So Mark got on the phone and started calling past season ticket holders. And guess what? It worked. 

Watch Mark Cuban tell the story about his best phone sales pitch in his own words.

Why did it work? 

• He was friendly and built rapport with his prospects.
• He demonstrated value. (A game is less expensive than a meal at McDonald’s. Wowza.)
• He understood that he wasn’t selling a bad team—he was selling a memorable experience.

“But wait, what if I’m on a call with a prospect, but then I want to show them something on my screen?”

Not a problem! There are tools that let you flip between a phone call and video call so that you can do screen sharing if that’s where the conversation takes you. For example, you can do this easily in the RingCentral app (which actually has messaging, video conferencing, and a phone service all in one):

2. The email pitch

Email works. Done well, a good email sales pitch can achieve open rates of 35% or higher . It’s a great way to introduce yourself and your company while demonstrating the value in what you’re selling. But it’s also easy to do poorly. For example, here is the wrong way to pitch via email: 

Why this doesn’t work

• The email starts with a hyper-specific question that feels like it’s providing a solution to a problem no one has. 
• The value proposition is poorly expressed. What is an “optimized content distribution channel?” What “end-user experiences?” 
• The mention of other customers feels more like name-dropping than a good use of social proof. (There’s a better way to do this—see example below.) 
• There’s no clear value demonstrated, so it’s very unlikely that Chloe will respond. 

A better example from the same person at the same fictional company: 

Why this works: 

• The pitch starts with a shared experience. In this case, a conference—but it can be any commonality. 
• Value is demonstrated clearly and immediately. There’s no ambiguity about what they’re selling and how it helps. 
• Social proof is added tactfully. 
• Benefits are supported by data. 
• The salesperson doesn’t come on too strong. 

3. The voicemail pitch

If you work in sales, you’re going to hit a lot of voicemail inboxes. And that’s okay, because successful deals often start with up to eight attempts to actually speak with your prospect . So while hitting an inbox can feel like a miss, don’t be discouraged. It’s actually an opportunity to make an impression and plant a seed before your next attempt.  

Hi [their name]

This is [your name] calling from XYZ company. Sorry I missed you. 

I was hoping to speak to you about [reason you’re calling]. We’ve helped other companies [insert benefit] and I think may be able to help you get similar results.

You can reach me at [insert phone number] if you’d like to learn more. But I’ll follow up soon. 

• It’s personalized and friendly.
• It doesn’t beat around the bush—the value prop is upfront and center.
• It supports the value prop with previous results.
• It’s short, which is important because otherwise there’s a very good chance the prospect won’t listen to the whole thing. 
• It promises to follow up, which will make them expect and be more receptive to another contact. 

Oh yeah, and if you say you’re going to follow up within a certain time frame, do it!

The vast majority of deals don’t close in one go, and you have to be both persistent and organized in how you plan your follow-ups. If you know you have a lot of prospects to follow up with, create tasks for yourself (and your team). For example, RingCentral’s desktop and mobile app allows you to not only create team chats for different projects or departments, you can also assign tasks with due dates, relevant files, and even color-coding for easy organization:

4. The deck pitch

If you’re making a pitch in person, congratulations. It means you’ve got a foot in the door, you’re in front of a receptive audience, and half the work is already done. (Although there’s a good chance you did that work. So good job there, too.)

A pitch deck is basically a sales pitch in a presentation format—PowerPoint, Google Slides, or whichever presentation platform you use. They make it easy to tell a story and highlight key points using visual aids that can be very persuasive. 

For example, check out this 13-page pitch deck from Castle :

Why it works: 

• It states a clear problem that there really should be a solution for.
• It demonstrates how the product solves the problems using key metrics like benefit to customers, growth, and trajectory.
• The messaging is clear and simple.
• The graphics help tell the story, sell the vision, and build brand awareness . 

5. The elevator pitch

This type of pitch gets its name from the idea that you should be able to say it in the span of an elevator ride. A good elevator pitch explains what your product does in an extremely concise and effective way. 

Take this often-cited example from G2 Crowd

• Instead of repeating the product’s value proposition verbatim, the rep explains what the product does and why it’s useful in words that everyone can understand. 
• It’s 21 seconds long—about half an elevator ride in New York City.

6. The follow-up pitch

It’s hard to close a customer on first contact. (Remember, it takes up to eight tries just to get a meeting.) So, focus on getting a shot at a second or third meeting where you’ll have a better understanding of each other and a better chance at closing the deal. The key to a good follow-up pitch is to make it timely and relevant without being a bother. 

A good way to do this is to mention a past point of contact or conversation (if you’ve had one).

“Hi [their name]. 

It’s [your name] from [your company]. Last time we spoke, you mentioned [problem that the prospect experienced]. I’ve given it some thought and I think I know how I might be able to help you [insert the benefit of your product, as it relates to their problem].”   

From there, you can move the conversation forward. Or in the case of an email or voicemail, mention that you’ll follow up again and suggest a time to chat. 

• The pitch refreshes their memory and provides context for the conversation. 
• It highlights the problem they experienced and how you can solve it. 
• It’s appropriate in any scenario—phone call, email, voicemail, or social message. 

1. Have the right tools for the job

A phone system can’t pitch for you. But it can make pitching easier. Even better would be an outbound contact center platform that integrates with your customer relationship management (CRM) tool. For example, this is what RingCentral’s looks like:

This will let you make sales calls from your computer, log scripts, see your past conversations with all your accounts, and keep track of conversations you’re having with both prospects and customers. Bottom line: you need some kind of communications tool .

Shameless plug: RingCentral has a whole range of integrations with different CRMs including Agile CRM and Salesforce :

🕹️ Get a hands-on look at how top-performing sales teams are using RingCentral by booking a product tour:

Choose a time

2. Use data to support your claims

Any salesperson can make a big, impressive claim. But the most persuasive salespeople are the ones who can back their claims up with real numbers and customer stories. Where possible, use data to support the benefits of your product. Proof is the most powerful tool in your sales arsenal. 

3. Do your research

Gone are the days of picking up a phonebook and dialing prospects without knowing anything about them. Today, to even get a chance to pitch, you need to do your research first. Use LinkedIn to learn more about your prospect. Know their company. Understand what they do. Look at the kind of content they’re posting. It can provide you with enough information to start a conversation worth having. 

4. Use a conversation starter

Jumping right into a pitch probably won’t get you very far. Be friendly and build rapport with your prospect first. These sales conversation starters can show you how to move from a “hello” efficiently into your pitch—without sounding too sales-y or coming on too strong. 

5. Practice

You have to know your pitch to nail it. So put aside some time to really practice it. Try it out on coworkers. Run through it at home with your spouse. Sit in front of a mirror and pitch to yourself. Have a rebuttal for every objection. Knowing your product and your pitch inside and out is the key to being able to sell with confidence. 

6. Talk about benefits, not features

This is the first rule in the book. Your product may have the best features in the world. But they don’t amount to much if they don’t solve your prospect’s problem. Focus on how the benefits of those features address the problems or pain points—and how they can help your customers reach their goals. 

What a great sales pitch comes down to…

No one likes feeling like they’re being pressured or hoodwinked in a sales scenario. So we should end the cliche about the smooth-talking salesperson right now. 

Instead of approaching a prospect as a target, think of them as someone you can help solve a real problem for. 

While there are many ways to pitch a prospect, the most important thing you can do is demonstrate value. Learn what the prospect is struggling with, empathize with their challenges, and find a way to help them overcome the problem that stands in their way. 

If you can do that, your prospects will see you as a valued and trusted partner rather than a vendor. And that’s going to make it easier for you to pitch—and close more deals.

Originally published Mar 02, 2020, updated Nov 20, 2023

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7 Successful Sales Pitch Examples and Why They Work

• April 7, 2023

Studying sales pitch examples from the best of the best should be mandatory for anybody crafting their own pitch.

Why? Creating a winning sales pitch has never been more challenging. In a recent report, sales expert Marc Wayshak found that only 24.3% of 400 surveyed sales reps exceeded quotas last year.

And 61% consider selling harder than it was five years ago.

Prospects expect sales pitches to be highly personalized, too. But with the rise of automation tools , sales is more of a “numbers game” than ever, so personalizing a pitch can seem like an impossible task. And of course, every sales leader has a set of sales best practices they believe makes a sales pitch successful.

But best practices often conflict.

I’ll dive into some of the principles that make for an ultra-effective sales pitch, and explore examples that illustrate them perfectly.

Here are the tips and tactics behind these 7 winning sales pitch examples:

• Reference past conversations
• Start your elevator pitch with a question
• Keep it short
• Highlight benefits, not features
• Anchor your pitch in data
• Tell a story
• Keep it conversational, not formal

What is a sales pitch?

A sales pitch is  a well-crafted, then packaged sales presentation . Typically, a salesperson gets less than two minutes to explain how their business will benefit the prospect. In some contexts, it is also known as an elevator pitch since, with tight time constraints, you are presented with an opportunity to persuade a prospect to engage in business with you.

A good sales pitch needs to convey the intended message concisely in a compelling manner. If the sales pitch is on point, you are on the right path to making profitable sales. The first few minutes of a conversation determine the direction your interactions will take. Be sure to use your sales pitch as your attempt to convince the prospect about the superiority of the service you are offering.

If you are selling a product , a sales pitch is your chance to dispel a prospect’s belief about the product. This is when you reassure them of the benefits they will enjoy if they buy the product you are selling.

7 sales pitch examples and tips

Sales pitch example #1 – reference past conversations.

If you’ve spoken with your prospect before, don’t start a pitch by talking about yourself, your product, or your business. You’ve already built some rapport, so use it!

Refer back to the conversations you’ve had previously to show the prospect you remember them, and remind them that you understand their problem. It helps if your last conversation included solid discovery questions like these:

• What’s the problem you’re trying to solve?
• How are you addressing that problem today?
• How are you measuring your goals?

| Related: How to Really Run an Effective Sales Discovery Call

At DocSend , we always start our pitch with a review of the most important things we’ve already learned about the prospect and their pain points.

Here’s an example slide:

You can also use this technique if you’re pitching over the phone, email or LinkedIn.

Here’s an email pitch example that refers back to a previous conversation:

Thank you for taking some time to speak with me over coffee at Dreamforce on Tuesday. Loved your booth design!

When you mentioned that you sometimes feel like you’re sending your proposals into a black hole, it struck a chord with me. I had that problem at my previous company, too.

Now at DocSend, I help other media companies – like Mic, for example – solve that problem, by giving them insight into who engages with the document and when.

I think I can help you prioritize deals that show more engagement. Can we talk about it next week sometime?

Sales pitch example #2 – Start your elevator pitch with a question

When asked for an elevator pitch, most unpracticed reps will say something like this:

“I’m Greg and I work for ACME Corporation. We design, build, and distribute elaborate and dangerous devices to coyotes who want to eat roadrunners.”

Those facts may be true, but stating facts does not make a good sales pitch! How would Greg’s prospect respond to that statement other than saying, “Oh, that’s interesting”?

A successful sales pitch begins a dialogue. Rather than starting with an opening line that’s all about you, try posing a question.

Check out this example from Chris Westfall, Author of The New Elevator Pitch: The Definitive Guide to Persuasive Communication in the Digital Age:

Here are a few questions that a qualified prospect might say “yes” to:

• Have you ever noticed…
• You know how…
• I’ll never forget when…
• Doesn’t it seem like…

You can also reverse this. If your prospect knows you will try to sell them, they may have their guard up, and they’ll be wary of being pushed towards a “yes.” So instead of asking them to admit they have a problem, you could assumptively say they don’t have the problem.

For example, you could reverse Chris’ pitch from the video and say something like:

“You’re probably paying below 19% in taxes each year, right?”

If they are, they’re not a great prospect! If they aren’t, they’ll tell you all about it—and you can tell them how you’ve helped others like them.

Sales Pitch example #3 – Keep it short

You don’t need to tell your prospect everything you can do for them all in your first pitch. In fact, a perfect sales pitch should leave the prospect wanting more.

If you’ve done a good job identifying your prospect’s pain points , and you really understand how your product or service helps alleviate it, you should be able to pitch with one short sentence.

Check out this example from Shultz Photo School’s website:

“We help parents take better pics.”

Notice they don’t talk about lenses, lighting, angles, or composition. They don’t even mention how they help parents take better pictures! They’ve simply identified a specific audience—parents—and stated that they solve a problem they know that audience has.

It’s an extreme example, and a pitch this short might not work in every context, but it illustrates an important point: short pitches are simple. Simple pitches are easy to understand. And when your prospect understands you quickly, it’s easier to have a conversation with them.

Sales pitch example #4 – Highlight benefits, not features

This is one you probably hear a lot, but how do you actually put it into action? Here’s one example, from G2Crowd:

“G2Crowd is the user-voice platform for people to be able to say how they actually think about software, and not be told by the analysts, or people who don’t use it, or the reference from your best customers. You’re actually hearing directly from the user and engaging with people who actually use the product.”

I like this pitch because it’s short, but still makes it crystal clear why G2Crowd benefits users.

The rep could have pointed out that G2Crowd collects star-ratings, written, and video reviews, and can confirm whether reviewers are current users. He could have told us that G2Crowd categorizes the reviews in a way that makes it really easy to compare competing software products.

But even if he said all that, the benefit is still that we’re getting the information from real users! Focusing on the benefit helps make the information more relevant to the prospect or customer.

Sales pitch example #5 – Anchor your pitch in data

Your prospects hear a lot of claims from your competitors. After a while, and especially if your prospect has made purchases that didn’t pay off, those claims start to sound dubious.

So use clear data from reputable sources as an anchor for your pitch. For example, here’s a slide from Tien Tzuo’s pitch of Zoura , a leading force behind the subscription economy.

Tzuo didn’t simply claim that the subscription economy is the future in his pitch—instead, he introduced concrete, reputable data points that allowed his audience to draw that conclusion for themselves.

Here’s another example. Which is more compelling?

“Optimizing sales content for desktop is a clear and worthwhile priority for today’s sales leaders.”

“Nearly 85% of visits to sales collateral are on desktop, not mobile.”

When it comes to data, relevant specificity is king. (By the way, that stat is true, and is part of DocSend’s Sales Benchmarks Report !)

Boiling down exposition and concentrating on driving home quantitative evidence is a great way to showcase the prevalence and significance of the problem your product addresses. This is key in perking up the ears of your prospect and setting the scene for a memorable sales pitch.

Sales pitch example #6 – Tell a story

If you have a little more time for your pitch, or if you’re preparing for a product demo , create a story that illustrates how your product benefits your customers.

Note: this isn’t the “About Us” slide some people still include in their sales decks . Your prospect does not care about your founding story, or where your offices are located. Conversely, this story makes your prospect or customer the hero—their problem is the dragon they need to slay, you are their trusted advisor, and your product is the magic sword.

This example already got a lot of attention, but we have to highlight it because it’s become the prototype for storytelling in a pitch deck:

[slideshare id=81510414&doc=greatestsalespitchallyear-171102144504]

Andy Raskin, a storytelling pro, wrote up a quick analysis of what makes this an effective sales presentation . Here’s the TL;DR version:

• It begins by stating a big change has taken place that affects the audience.
• It names an enemy.
• It teases the “promised land” – what the world will look like for the people who deal with the new change the right way.
• It highlights a few features as ingredients in a sort of magic potion that can bring people to the promised land.
• It brings the point home with some proof that the whole story is true.

Sales pitch example #7 – Keep it conversational, not formal

Your elevator pitch should be practiced , but it shouldn’t be a monologue. Just because somebody has asked what you do doesn’t mean they want to hear every little detail.

So, start by giving them just a quick snippet of what you do that will pique their interest. If they verbally (or non-verbally) indicate that they’re interested, that’s your cue to continue.

Brian Walter calls this the WOW, HOW, NOW framework , and it goes like this:

• WOW – Offer up some short, interesting statement that will make the other person think to themselves, “wow!”. This statement might even be slightly confusing, as long as it’s not just industry lingo.
• HOW – If you’ve done the first part right, you got an eyebrow raise, a tilt of the head, or a “huh?” in response. Now’s your chance to clarify and expand just a little bit.
• NOW – End by giving a specific example of how you do what you do.

Here’s an example:

Prospect: “So, what do you do?”

Me: “I help salespeople become the fly on the wall.”

Prospect: “Huh? What does that mean?”

Me: “I sell a platform that lets salespeople see how their prospects interact with their proposals after they send them out. Now, for example, I’m working with one customer to change how they prioritize deals based on how engaged prospects are with the proposals.”

Use data to ensure your pitch is effective

There are a number of subtle yet undeniable buying signals that can help you identify just how proactively interested your prospect is in your pitch.

For instance, if a prospect asks about pricing, next steps, delivery dates or service level, they’re showing indications that they’re considering moving forward. Other buying signals include statements like, “This would help us accomplish X” or “If/when we use your product, we’d/we’ll be much more Y”.

The drawback to relying on verbal buying signals like these is that they can sometimes be vague, or subjective. Luckily, there are some tools that make it easy to measure how effective your sales pitch is.

And I’m biased, but I also think DocSend is helpful. For example, I can see which of my prospects engage with which pages of a document I send them, and prioritize those topics in later conversations.

However you do it—even if you’re just tracking results of your pitches in a spreadsheet —keep track of the flops and wins! Every modern sales team should be using data to inform their pitch, not just going on gut instinct.

Lisa Matthews

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7 Amazing Sales Presentation Examples (And How to Make Them Your Own)

7 Types of Slides to Include In Your Sales Presentation

Inside the mind of your prospect: change is hard, before-after-bridge: the only formula you need to create a persuasive sales presentation, facebook — how smiles and simplicity make you more memorable, contently — how to build a strong bridge, brick by brick, yesware — how to go above and beyond with your benefits, uber — how to cater your content for readers quick to scan, dealtap — how to use leading questions to your advantage, zuora — how to win over your prospects by feeding them dots, linkedin sales navigator — how to create excitement with color, how to make a sales pitch in 4 straightforward steps, 7 embarrassing pitfalls to avoid in your presentation, over to you.

A brilliant sales presentation has a number of things going for it.

Being product-centered isn’t one of them. Or simply focusing on your sales pitch won’t do the trick.

So what can you do to make your offer compelling?

From different types of slides to persuasive techniques and visuals, we’ve got you covered.

Below, we look at data-backed strategies, examples, and easy steps to build your own sales presentations in minutes.

• Title slide: Company name, topic, tagline
• The “Before” picture: No more than three slides with relevant statistics and graphics.
• The “After” picture: How life looks with your product. Use happy faces.
• Company introduction: Who you are and what you do (as it applies to them).
• The “Bridge” slide: Short outcome statements with icons in circles.
• Social proof slides: Customer logos with the mission statement on one slide. Pull quote on another.
• “We’re here for you” slide: Include a call-to-action and contact information.

Many sales presentations fall flat because they ignore this universal psychological bias: People overvalue the benefits of what they have over what they’re missing.

Harvard Business School professor John T. Gourville calls this the “ 9x Effect .” Left unchecked, it can be disastrous for your business.

According to Gourville, “It’s not enough for a new product simply to be better. Unless the gains far outweigh the losses, customers will not adopt it.”

The good news: You can influence how prospects perceive these gains and losses. One of the best ways to prove value is to contrast life before and after your product.

Luckily, there’s a three-step formula for that.

• Before → Here’s your world…
• After → Imagine what it would be like if…
• Bridge → Here’s how to get there.

Start with a vivid description of the pain, present an enviable world where that problem doesn’t exist, then explain how to get there using your tool.

It’s super simple, and it works for cold emails , drip campaigns , and sales discovery decks. Basically anywhere you need to get people excited about what you have to say.

In fact, a lot of companies are already using this formula to great success. The methods used in the sales presentation examples below will help you do the same.

We’re all drawn to happiness. A study at Harvard tells us that emotion is contagious .

You’ll notice that the “Before” (pre-Digital Age) pictures in Facebook’s slides all display neutral faces. But the cover slide that introduces Facebook and the “After” slides have smiling faces on them.

This is important. The placement of those graphics is an intentional persuasion technique.

Studies by psychologists show that we register smiles faster than any other expression. All it takes is 500 milliseconds (1/20th of a second). And when participants in a study were asked to recall expressions, they consistently remembered happy faces over neutral ones.

What to do about it : Add a happy stock photo to your intro and “After” slides, and keep people in “Before” slides to neutral expressions.

Here are some further techniques used during the sales presentation:

Tactic #1: Use Simple Graphics

Use simple graphics to convey meaning without text.

Example: Slide 2 is a picture of a consumer’s hand holding an iPhone — something we can all relate to.

Why It Works: Pictures are more effective than words — it’s called  Picture Superiority . In presentations, pictures help you create connections with your audience. Instead of spoon-feeding them everything word for word, you let them interpret. This builds trust.

Tactic #2: Use Icons

Use icons to show statistics you’re comparing instead of listing them out.

Example: Slide 18 uses people icons to emphasize how small 38 out of 100 people is compared to 89 out of 100.

Why It Works:  We process visuals 60,000 times faster than text.

Tactic #3: Include Statistics

Include statistics that tie real success to the benefits you mention.

Example: “71% lift driving visits to retailer title pages” (Slide 26).

Why It Works:  Precise details prove that you are telling the truth.

Just like how you can’t drive from Marin County to San Francisco without the Golden Gate, you can’t connect a “Before” to an “After” without a bridge.

Add the mission statement of your company — something Contently does from Slide 1 of their deck. Having a logo-filled Customers slide isn’t unusual for sales presentations, but Contently goes one step further by showing you exactly what they do for these companies.

They then drive home the Before-After-Bridge Formula further with case studies:

Before : Customer’s needs when they came on

After: What your company accomplished for them

Bridge : How they got there (specific actions and outcomes)

Here are some other tactics we pulled from the sales presentation:

Tactic #1: Use Graphics/Diagrams

Use graphics, Venn diagrams, and/or equations to drive home your “Before” picture.

Why It Works:  According to a Cornell study , graphs and equations have persuasive power. They “signal a scientific basis for claims, which grants them greater credibility.”

Tactic #2: Keep Slides That Have Bullets to a Minimum

Keep slides that have bullets to a minimum. No more than one in every five slides.

Why It Works:  According to an experiment by the International Journal of Business Communication , “Subjects exposed to a graphic representation paid significantly more attention to , agreed more with, and better recalled the strategy than did subjects who saw a (textually identical) bulleted list.”

Tactic #3: Use Visual Examples

Follow up your descriptions with visual examples.

Example: After stating “15000+ vetted, ready to work journalists searchable by location, topical experience, and social media influence” on Slide 8, Contently shows what this looks like firsthand on slides 9 and 10.

Why It Works:  The same reason why prospects clamor for demos and car buyers ask for test drives. You’re never truly convinced until you see something for yourself.

Which is more effective for you?

This statement — “On average, Yesware customers save ten hours per week” — or this image:

The graphic shows you what that 10 hours looks like for prospects vs. customers. It also calls out a pain that the product removes: data entry.

Visuals are more effective every time. They fuel retention of a presentation from 10% to 65% .

But it’s not as easy as just including a graphic. You need to keep the design clean.

Can you feel it?

Clutter provokes anxiety and stress because it bombards our minds with excessive visual stimuli, causing our senses to work overtime on stimuli that aren’t important.

Here’s a tip from Yesware’s Graphic Designer, Ginelle DeAntonis:

“Customer logos won’t all necessarily have the same dimensions, but keep them the same size visually so that they all have the same importance. You should also disperse colors throughout, so that you don’t for example end up with a bunch of blue logos next to each other. Organize them in a way that’s easy for the eye, because in the end it’s a lot of information at once.”

Here are more tactics to inspire sales presentation ideas:

Tactic #1: Personalize Your Final Slide

Personalize your final slide with your contact information and a headline that drives emotion.

Example: Our Mid-Market Team Lead Kyle includes his phone number and email address with “We’re Here For You”

Why It Works: These small details show your audience that:

• This is about giving them the end picture, not making a sale
• The end of the presentation doesn’t mean the end of the conversation
• Questions are welcomed

Tactic #2: Pair Outcome Statements With Icons in Circles

Example: Slide 4 does this with seven different “After” outcomes.

Why It Works:  We already know why pictures work, but circles have power , too. They imply completeness, infiniteness, and harmony.

Tactic #3: Include Specific Success Metrics

Don’t just list who you work with; include specific success metrics that hit home what you’ve done for them.

Example: 35% New Business Growth for Boomtrain; 30% Higher Reply Rates for Dyn.

Why It Works:  Social proof drives action. It’s why we wait in lines at restaurants and put ourselves on waitlists for sold-out items.

People can only focus for eight seconds at a time. (Sadly, goldfish have one second on us.)

This means you need to cut to the chase fast.

Uber’s headlines in Slides 2-9 tailor the “After” picture to specific pain points. As a result, there’s no need to explicitly state a “Before.”

Slides 11-13 then continue touching on “Before” problems tangentially with customer quotes:

So instead of self-touting benefits, the brand steps aside to let consumers hear from their peers — something that sways 92% of consumers .

Leading questions may be banned from the courtroom, but they aren’t in the boardroom.

DealTap’s slides ask viewers to choose between two scenarios over and over. Each has an obvious winner:

Ever heard of the Focusing Effect?

It’s part of what makes us tick as humans and what makes this design move effective. We focus on one thing and then ignore the rest. Here, DealTap puts the magnifying glass on paperwork vs. automated transactions.

Easy choice.

Sure, DealTap’s platform might have complexities that rival paperwork, but we don’t think about that. We’re looking at the pile of work one the left and the simpler, single interface on the right.

Here are some other tactics to use in your own sales presentation:

Tactic #1: Tell a Story

Tell a story that flows from one slide to the next.

Example: Here’s the story DealTap tells from slides 4 to 8: “Transactions are complicated” → “Expectations on all sides” → “Too many disconnected tools” → “Slow and error prone process” → “However, there’s an opportunity.

Why It Works:   Storytelling in sales with a clear beginning and end (or in this case, a “Before” and “After”) trigger a trust hormone called Oxytocin.

Tactic #2: This vs. That

If it’s hard to separate out one “Before” and “After” vision with your product or service because you offer many dissimilar benefits, consider a “This vs. That” theme for each.

Why It Works:  It breaks up your points into simple decisions and sets you up to win emotional reactions from your audience with stock photos.

Remember how satisfying it was to play connect the dots? Forming a bigger picture out of disconnected circles.

That’s what you need to make your audience do.

Zuora tells a story by:

• Laying out the reality (the “Before” part of the Before-After-Bridge formula).
• Asking you a question that you want to answer (the “After”)
• Giving you hints to help you connect the dots
• Showing you the common thread (the “Bridge”)

You can achieve this by founding your sales presentation on your audience’s intuitions. Set them up with the closely-set “dots,” then let them make the connection.

Here are more tactical sales presentation ideas to steal for your own use:

Tactic #1: Use Logos and Testimonials

Use logos and  testimonial pull-quotes for your highest-profile customers to strengthen your sales presentation.

Example: Slides 21 to 23 include customer quotes from Schneider Electric, Financial Times, and Box.

Why It Works: It’s called  social proof . Prospects value other people’s opinions and trust reputable sources more than you.

Tactic #2: Include White Space

Pad your images with white space.

Example: Slide 17 includes two simple graphics on a white background to drive home an important concept.

Why It Works:  White space creates separation, balance, and attracts the audience’s eyes to the main focus: your image.

Tactic #3: Incorporate Hard Data

Incorporate hard data with a memorable background to make your data stand out.

Example: Slide 5 includes statistics with a backdrop that stands out. The number and exciting title (‘A Global Phenomenon’) are the main focuses of the slide.

Why It Works:  Vivid backdrops are proven to be memorable and help your audience take away important numbers or data.

Psychology tells us that seeing colors can set our mood .

The color red is proven to increase the pulse and heart rate. Beyond that, it’s associated with being active, aggressive, and outspoken. LinkedIn Sales Navigator uses red on slides to draw attention to main points:

You can use hues in your own slides to guide your audience’s emotions. Green gives peace; grey adds a sense of calm; blue breeds trust. See more here .

Tip: You can grab free photos from Creative Commons and then set them to black & white and add a colored filter on top using a (also free) tool like Canva . Here’s the sizing for your image:

Caveat: Check with your marketing team first to see if you have a specific color palette or brand guidelines to follow.

Here are some other takeaways from LinkedIn’s sales presentation:

Tactic #1: Include a CTA on Final Slide

Include one clear call-to-action on your final slide.

Example: Slide 9 has a “Learn More” CTA button.

Why It Works:  According to the Paradox of Choice , the more options you give, the less likely they are to act.

Step One : Ask marketing for your company’s style guide (color, logo, and font style).

Step Two: Answer these questions to outline the “Before → After → Bridge” formula for your sales pitch :

• What are your ICP’s pain points?
• What end picture resonates with them?
• How does your company come into play?

Step Three: Ask account management/marketing which customers you can mention in your slides (plus where to access any case studies for pull quotes).

Step Four:  Download photos from Creative Commons . Remember: Graphics > Text. Use Canva to edit on your own — free and fast.

What are the sales presentation strategies that work best for your industry and customers? Tweet us:  @Yesware .

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10 Amazing Sales Pitch Examples (and Why They Are So Effective)

Micah Lally | August 23, 2019 | Sales Strategy | 8 min read

Quick Links

• 1.   What It Is
• 2.   Pitch Ideas
• 3.   How to Write One
• 4.   Best Examples

Anyone in sales will tell you that the job requires a lot of skills . You have to be empathetic and capable of building relationships with prospects and clients. You also need to be a strong communicator, listener, and presenter.

But first and foremost – you need to be confident.

Confidence helps in every aspect of the job, especially when it comes to delivering a sales pitch.

What Is a Sales Pitch?

Also known as an elevator pitch, a sales pitch is the idea of conveying a message in a short amount of time. As if you’re riding in an elevator with a prospect, for example.

You couldn’t define an hour long slideshow presentation as a sales pitch. Time is of the essence when it comes to sales, so it’s necessary to be concise while being informative.

Sales Pitch Ideas

The best place to start in crafting your sales pitch is identifying exactly what it is that you want to include. Even though you should never come across as scripted , pitching shouldn’t be freestyled. Otherwise, you risk appearing as if you don’t know what you’re talking about.

Here are a few ideas to keep in mind:

Tell an Engaging Story.

Storytelling has been a tool for passing on information since communities began. That hasn’t changed. Shape what you have to share in engaging ways so that you can capture the attention of your audience. Make sure to keep it short though. Boring your customers shouldn’t be part of the strategy.

Personalize Your Messaging.

A callback to being empathetic and personal, you should make your pitch relevant to whoever is listening in. Giving a generic script to a customer will work against you if they feel like just another sale. Make it feel like a personalized conversation catered directly toward their interests.

Stick to Less Than Three Points.

Again, keeping it short is critical. If someone is interested in buying a product or service from you, they typically want you to get to the point and tell them why they should purchase from you.

Pick three main ideas that they’ll be able to remember when they get to their decision stage. A lot of extraneous details will likely be forgotten or dismissed seconds after the interaction is over. Save your breath by giving them the meat of their meal effectively.

Practice, Practice, Practice.

As natural as you want your sales pitch to feel, there’s no denying that practicing beforehand has benefits. Actually, having run through the pitch a few times will give you more confidence in your presentation, which will translate into a more organic speech.

Emphasize Your Value Proposition.

Don’t forget the whole point of your sales pitch: you're showing what value you can provide for your prospect. Let them know the benefits of working with you while keeping the pitch as concise as possible.

How to Write a Sales Pitch

While you’ll want to keep these ideas in mind when you’re crafting your sales pitches, you’ll also need to decide what type of sales pitch you’ll deliver. These are a few styles that you can build off of:

The Pixar Sales Pitch

At its core, no matter who the hero is, every Pixar film follows the same basic storyline: “Once upon a time _____. Every day, _____. One day _____. Because of that, _____. Because of that, _____. Until finally, _____.”

You don’t have to follow the template word for word, but organizing your pitch in this manner will make it feel inherently like a story. It’ll have the desired effect of keeping your prospect’s attention while simultaneously building them into the narrative of working with your brand.

The Subject Line Sales Pitch

There’s an understanding that a strong email subject line follows one of three different principles: specificity, utility, and curiosity. You can craft your pitches the same way, having a pitch for each principle. This way, you have an effective pitch to penetrate wherever a customer may be in their buyer’s journey.

The One Word Sales Pitch

Everyone remembers a great tagline or catchphrase. If you can boil your ideas sales pitch down to one word that your audience will associate with you, you’ll leave a lasting impression on them. And when it comes to sales, you want to be remembered for the long game.

The Rhyming Sales Pitch

It may feel silly at first, but studies have shown that rhyming sentences are perceived as more factual than non-rhyming ones. Building in a fun cadence to your speech makes you appear more dynamic and confident. That confidence translates into expertise and then onto buy-in.

The Twitter Sales Pitch

Challenge yourself by keeping your pitch within the same constraints of a tweet. It’s a great practice of clarity and creativity, and it forces you to prioritize those three main points we discussed earlier. Not only will it be brief enough to keep your audience’s attention, but it’ll also be easier for you to remember.

The Question Pitch

A much more inclusive method, rephrasing your sales statement as a question invites your customer to be a part of the unfolding of the pitch. It encourages them to engage with you and truly consider your offer. Be careful though. If your customer doesn’t understand or believe in the value of what you’re offering, they can become skeptical and lose interest.

“Short” may not be enough to structure a sales pitch with, so here are some elements that you should include:

• Character : Who are your customers and what is it that they do?
• Problem : What problems may they be facing right now? What are their pain points?
• Plan : What can your product or service do to help alleviate those pain points?
• Success : What value will your customer receive by buying from you? How will they succeed from the purchase?

Here’s a general framework that you can expand on as well:

• Problem : Open with a statement or question about the problem you are looking to solve for them and offer some statistics or research on the issue.
• Value statement : Share the benefits of your services, avoiding jargon and flash. Be as straightforward about selling yourself as possible.
• Uniqueness : Explain what you do and how you do it differently from others.
• Evidence : Share references, positive experiences, and any relevant awards that imply industry validation.
• Customer successes : Provide testimonials from pleased customers, highlighting exceptionally personalized experiences and stories.
• Questions : Create a window for a natural conversation to follow by ending with an open-ended question.

Best Sales Pitch Examples

Now that you get the gist of how to build one, here are a few sales pitch examples to help provide a bit of inspiration. These have stood out amongst others as innovative and effective.

The Carrot Slicer

There’s only so much you can say with words about a product, and when the well runs dry, you can move on to the next best thing — showing the product in action.

Titled as “ Best Salesman in the World ”, Joe Ades barely discusses the peeler he’s using. He relies on the fact that you can see the results and will recognize the tool’s value for yourself.

Vidyard tackles the obstacle of effectively addressing their market from the start by speaking directly to the B2B companies that can benefit from their services. Also, word choice is everything. They aren’t trying to just sell you a product. They’re looking to “change the way organizations communicate”.

It’s short, sweet, and to the point. A true elevator pitch.

Mark Cuban’s Mavs Tickets Pitch

When the Mavs were the worst team in the league, Mark Cuban was selling tickets successfully . It’s all about addressing your audience’s perspective.

He pulled on emotional cues by pitching the experience of seeing the game with your family as a memorable one, regardless of who won or lost.

G2 Crowd used an interesting tactic of playing on their customers’ annoyances.

It may initially sound like a counterproductive move, but when you frame your competitors as the source of those grievances and explain how your company can resolve those issues, it’s actually ingenious.

Don Draper: Slide Projector

Don Draper used the power of storytelling to pitch a slide projector wheel.

Not an easy feat, considering how unengaging the product seems, but he successfully conveyed how the machine works and what sort of emotional value it could provide as a sort of “time machine.”

Of course, a business office has no contextual need for nostalgia, but the pitch relayed that it had that potential to it.

charity: water’s Educational Video

Remember when we mentioned specificity as a pitching idea? Charity: water's  video on donating wisely hits the nail on the head.

They give you clear facts about what global issues they are working to relieve and how your donation money will be used. That level of directness makes them appear confident while also bestowing confidence in anyone who may be wary of donating inappropriately.

Dragon’s Den

This example backs the idea that confidence is key. Even though these men brought along a slideshow to aid in their pitch to the Dragons on the show, it’s not the slides that engage the Dragons.

It’s how dynamic, cool, and well-versed the contestants are. They know their product well enough to not have to read off the information, line by line. They throw out the idea that a presentation has to be boring.

Big Willie G

Big Willie G’s Startupfest pitch garnered attention purely from just how engaging he was.

Not every client is going to want that level of enthusiasm, but the ones who are down would be thrilled to have someone fun to engage with. Willie G showed that you can and should read your audience and bring the energy that you see they’re comfortable with.

Wolf of Wall Street: Sell Me This Pen

No matter what you think of the film, Wolf of Wall Street had plenty of valid ideas on sales and what works and what doesn’t.

The “ Sell me this pen ” moment brings to light the idea that you can’t sell any product without having a need recognized first. Identify your customer’s pain points and then hone in with a sense of urgency. Mind you, we said urgency and not pressure. There is a difference.

Another example on storytelling , Amy Cuddy takes a different spin on the technique. Whereas Don Draper focuses on spinning his words and painting a picture, Amy uses body language to sell her story.

Prepare Your Pitch Now 

After brushing up on sales pitch ideas and seeing some incredible examples, you should be ready to nail your next one. Go ahead and get your face in the mirror to practice and refine what you’ve got. We won’t judge.

Micah Lally

I’m a Content Writer at Bluleadz. I’m a big fan of books, movies, music, video games, and the ocean. It sounds impossible to do all of those at the same time, but you’d be surprised by the things I can accomplish.

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15 Persuasive Sales Presentation Examples From Expert Sellers

Related articles, lead vs prospect vs opportunity: what's the difference, 52 lead generation statistics to consider in 2024, top 14 email nurture campaign best practices.

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A sales presentation is a long-form explanation of your business’s value. Because they can take up to 30 minutes to deliver, they’re reserved for highly qualified prospects in the lead nurturing phase of a sale. The best presentations describe a customer problem, explain a solution, name the benefits of solving the issue, and make a call-to-action. To help you master presentations, we’ve compiled the best sales presentation examples and articulated why they work so well. 

Online Blogging Course Sales Presentation Example

In this sales presentation, Ricky is selling an online blogging course called Project 24. He starts by naming the troubles people run into when starting a blog and then giving the prospect a glimpse of what the course will help them achieve — a full-time income from blogging. Then, he stands up from his chair and goes over to a map covered with hundreds of yellow pins, and he reveals that each pin represents a student earning over $1,000 per month with their blog. 

Right off the bat he has established credibility and intrigue. He’s proven that he delivers his promise to his customers time and time again. An act of showmanship like this to begin a presentation is perfect for hooking your prospects. After showing them the promised land and the people who’ve gotten there, Ricky then gives them a four-minute tour of the best features of the course. Finally, he goes over how to sign up for the course and asks his prospects to do it.

The major takeaway from this example is the power of props and showmanship to illustrate a point. As Ricky did with the yellow pins, find ways to support your claims with some sort of visual element. Your presentation hit the audience with more force. 

Online Coding Course Sales Presentation Example 

Here’s another online course presentation — it's shorter than the last one and the presenter takes a slightly different approach. He first demonstrates his expertise by showing the many books he’s written on the subject. After gaining the lead’s trust, he explains how this coding course is different from the others out there. In this course, students won’t have to learn computer science and can start building things almost immediately. 

Next, the sales rep reviews the benefits of taking the course, which in this case manifest as the coding tasks that students will learn to do. About three-quarters the way in, he drops the biggest value proposition: he'll teach them how to write programs that automate their busy work and increase their productivity. In case anyone isn’t interested in that, he also adds that coding is fun and will improve critical thinking skills. To finish, he asks leads to sign up for his course.

Note how this presenter first establishes how this coding course is different from and better than the others out there. In your presentations, consider bringing up complaints customers have with your competition and then showing them why that won’t happen with your business. 

B2B SaaS Sales Presentation Example  

In this presentation, Neil Patel presents Keap, an email marketing tool. The presentation is technically a customer testimonial since he’s a user and not the company’s salesperson, but it still comes off as a well-constructed sales presentation for nurturing qualified leads . Neil begins in the classic manner — describing some major pain points for marketers — before introducing the product as the solution to those issues. 

Next, he explains some ways that he uses the software and the benefits he receives. For example, one use case he gives is the ability to set up automated text messages to follow up with prospects to increase the closing rates and give salespeople more time to focus on other prospects. Because it’s a testimonial video, it’s missing a call-to-action, but besides that piece, it’s a presentation worthy of emulation.

Something you should definitely consider emulating from this presentation is the structure — problem, solution, benefits — that he employs to hook and convince the reader to buy the tool. It works for every industry and type of sale. 

Proptech Sales Presentation Example

The presenters begin by stating their goal — to show property managers why mobile inspection technology makes resident move-ins and move-outs painless. Next, the two salespeople introduce themselves as experts in the field and the product, HappyCo, as a useful tool for powering property operations. Then they lay out the agenda for the presentation, before embarking on a respectful critique of a current way of doing business, paper inspections. 

To bolster their case, they show quotes from customers explaining how paper inspections hurt their business. One complained that their maintenance staff used to fix resident-caused damage without documenting it, thereby making it impossible to charge the resident. After proving the problems with paper methods, the presenter dives into the product and its benefits and another team member even gives a live software demo. It ends with questions and answers.

Including product demos in your presentations is a powerful tactic. And it doesn’t necessarily have to be a live demo either. For example, you could record videos of people using your product or software and then show those to help your audience make sense of how it works. 

Marketing Software Sales Presentation Examples

The presenter begins by introducing the tool, Mention, and tells her audience how it works in plain language. Next she uses a slide titled “What can I do with Mention?” and explains the three major use-cases of the tool and the resulting benefits. She then uses her next slides to give a deeper explanation of each of the three major use-cases she introduced in that first slide. 

She then switches out of her slide deck and into a live demo. This is typical of software sales presentations. She spends the next 15 minutes showing her leads how to set up competitor tracking and how to analyze the data collected to discover insights that help them get a competitive advantage in their industry. After the demo, she switches back to slides and reviews the key takeaways, and asks interested viewers to schedule a personalized demo.

Although the presenter doesn’t begin with a problem, she does mention how each feature solves specific pain points when she’s presenting their benefits. Something she did that you could apply to your presentations is summarizing your presentation before making the call-to-action. This gets your audience thinking about how valuable your solution is, so they’re more likely to agree to the next steps when you make your ask.

CRM Sales Presentation Example

This presenter, a HubSpot certified partner, starts by introducing a problem for many marketers — they have too many tools in their tech stack and things are messy. After spending some time with that problem, he introduces HubSpot, saying that “the antidote to complexity is organization.” The salesperson then describes HubSpot as a centralized communication platform, meaning that every app and software connects through it. It’s, in essence, a hub. 

He then tells his viewers that this means data that used to be siloed off in different platforms all becomes available in HubSpot, and explains the awesome things that this allows users to do, like gain lead intelligence, automate tasks, run analyses, and handle ad attribution. Throughout the presentation, he uses screenshots of the software to add clarity to his feature explanations. It ends with him going over pricing plans and asking leads to call him to learn more.

This presenter does a great job of presenting a problem and analyzing it in a way that makes him sound like an expert and evokes feelings of hatred for the problem in his audience. In your presentations, elaborate on the negative consequences of the problem you choose to mention. This aggravates the pain and makes prospects more eager to eliminate it. 

Legal Tech Sales Presentation Example 

In this sales presentation, Cory from LawYaw, a legal tech company, presents their document automation software and explains why it will help lawyers save time and improve productivity. After a short introduction, he sets an agenda, and a slide gives us the outline, which is worth zooming in on because it’s a great example of a persuasive structure. To begin, he discusses some new trends in the legal space and shares some opportunities to profit from these trends. 

After establishing himself as knowledgeable in the industry, he analyzes a big problem for his buyers — document rejection — and lists its costs. After establishing the magnitude of the key issue, he positions document automation as a solution, explains how it works, and names its biggest benefits. To boost credibility, he also uses a customer success story. Next, he changes from a sales deck to a live demo, before rounding out the presentation with a Q&A session.

The agenda portion of his presentation is something you should consider incorporating into your own presentations. By providing an outline of what you’ll cover, you’re telling them what to expect, and giving them a pleasing sense of control over the experience. 

B2C Tech Product Sales Presentation Example

This next sales presentation example portrays Melody, an Apple salesperson, introducing the new iPad (the second half of the video is a presentation for the iPad Pro). During the first two minutes, Melody goes over the new design, showing images of the phone. She discusses the new features and their benefits, including a new front camera placement, which is better for video calls (something her leads are likely using their iPads for).

At the two and half minute mark, she hands the reins to her partner, Mish, who explains another improvement to the hardware: a new keyboard called Magic Keyboard Folio. He then names some features and benefits, like “full-size keys, one millimeter of travel, and a responsive feel.” To finish, Melody lists the price and reviews why this product is so unique and valuable.

Note that whenever the second presenter names a feature, he almost always follows it with a benefit. The result almost always impresses a prospect more than how it was achieved. To really drive home the importance of your features, immediately state how they will positively impact the person’s business, job, or life. 

B2C SaaS Sales Presentation Example

Although this is a pitch to investors, the Brand Yourself owners use a sales deck and stay close to the ideal structure of a sales presentation. They start with a strong hook in the form of a story about their typical user. They tell the story of a young man fresh out of college who is highly qualified but still struggling to get a job because of his major issue, namely, that employers are researching him online and finding unflattering photos of him partying, of “gap year Steve.”

The sales duo uses their sales deck responsibly throughout the presentation, especially above, where they show a picture to get some laughs and get their buyers in a good mood. After sharing this story, they explain the major problem afflicting applicants today — bad online reputations, and then introduce their tool and how it works, using slide deck images to show the buyers. In the end, they state its value proportion: protects and improves how you look online.

If you copy one thing from this presentation, it should be their use of humor to set the mood. Provided that the setting isn’t too professional, consider introducing a few jokes at the beginning. Jokes not only lighten the mood, but they also make your audience more likely to pay attention closely, because you’ve primed them to think that they might get another laugh. 

Freelance Photographer Sales Presentation Example

This is a short yet persuasive presentation in which a freelance real estate photographer shares reasons why leads should hire him as their photographer. He begins by introducing himself and his business and then previews for his prospects what they’ll learn in this presentation. Then he starts listing the reasons for hiring him. Most of them are valuable differentiators that set him apart from the competition. For example, his customers receive free property websites. 

They can use these website links to easily promote their listing across social media and other channels. Near the end of the presentation, he starts to show his prospects some great photographs he’s taken for past clients, all the while explaining why people who use professional photographers are more likely to sell their houses than people who don’t. To close out, he asks his audience members to call him, and puts his phone number up on the screen.

Differentiators help your business stand out from the crowd. They can be the reason a prospect chooses you over a competitor. So, when you can, follow this presenter’s lead and list valuable services or features that you provide but other companies don’t. 

Freelance Writer Sales Presentation Example

Here’s another great example for freelancers. The structure of this sales presentation is pretty simple. The presenter goes over ten reasons to hire him. They range from his being recognized by Microsoft as a valuable service provider to his transparency about pricing and process. Each reason gets anywhere from 20-30 seconds of elaboration and an image or two to emphasize his points. For instance, he displays his Microsoft certificate on the screen when talking about it.

After sufficiently proving that he has expertise, credibility, reliability, and other qualities potential clients are looking for in a writer, he closes the presentation with a clear call-to-action. He tells his leads to head over to the Contact page on his website and fill out the Contact form to get in touch.

Although it’s a setup without much flair, the salesperson’s main points, along with the easygoing and confident attitude with which he delivers them, should entice potential buyers to reach out. One thing he nails is establishing himself as an expert in the field. Sprinkle in credibility indicators like education, credentials, and awards throughout your presentations to give your words and claims a bit more weight.  

Real Estate Agent Listing Sales Presentation Example

The mock sales presentation starts at the 2:20 minute mark when the listing agent begins his mission to convince a pretend homeowner to hire him as their agent. He first hints at his company’s successful track record and then explains their home selling process, which, among other methods, consists of taking magazine-grade photography and marketing the home on YouTube, email, and print marketing. He always explains the benefits of each strategy. 

Then he drops what is probably the biggest value-add for his prospects — the fact that 33,000 people in Colorado subscribe to the magazine Colorado Homes, where he will advertise the house and it will get tremendous exposure. He continues to go over other strategies he’ll use to attract people to the house before executing a persuasive closing minute and asking the customer if they want to talk more about marketing their home.

The best part of this sales presentation is his close. His voice drips with confidence, and he previews the call-to-action with a reminder of what separates him from other listing agents. Then he says, “So shall I pack my things up and leave or do you want to talk more about the marketing of your home?” Try to match his assertive style when making your CTAs.  

Car Sales Presentation Example 

In this sales presentation, a Subaru sales rep presents the new Impreza model to a large audience. He begins by appealing to the greatness of the Impreza tradition, stating that “value, safety, and longevity, are the calling cards for Impreza.” He explains that this car will stay true to the tradition, and then explores what makes this one distinct, and better than, former Imprezas — the fact that it's sportier and more fun to drive. 

He then anticipates an objection about switching from sedan to hatchback, and deals with it by promising that this allows for a sportier design package and a roomier interior. Next, he goes over some other new features, and gets the audience to imagine all the places the car can take them (ski trips, camp, etc.) before invoking a metaphor and calling it “a modern-day swiss army knife.” Overall, this presentation is a great example of how to evoke desire with words.

Anticipating concerns and hesitations your prospect might have and then proving why they’re unsound, as this presenter does brilliantly, is a great technique to use in your sales presentations. Consider picking the three sales objections you hear most often and rebutting them where it makes the most sense in the presentation. For instance, if people always question a feature’s functionality, deal with that objection right after presenting the feature. 

Wholesale Sales Presentation Example

In this filmed mock sales presentation, Mary, a wholesaler for a golf products company, presents to an owner of a golf retail store. She begins with small talk about golf and local clubs, which is a surefire avenue for connection seeing that her lead owns a golf store. After about a minute, she stops the chit-chat and sets the agenda, making sure to ask him if he agrees to it. Then, to set the stage and show she knows his situation, she reviews his last meeting with her company. 

Next, she asks some questions. At this point, the presentation veers a little from traditional sales presentations. Typically, the seller would’ve already interviewed the lead on a previous meeting or discovery call . Despite that variation, the rest follows a more typical structure. She introduces the services and their value to him as a retailer. Then she reviews promotions like a military discount, the margin (32%). And, lastly, they negotiate the deal and come to an agreement.

Small talk is a great way to get your prospect into a good and trusting mood before you start presenting. The best way to kickstart it is with open-ended questions. Consider doing some research about your prospect beforehand and coming up with 1-2 personalized questions based on their hobbies, job responsibilities, etc., For example, you might say “I noticed you used to work in finance — what made you switch to marketing?” 

Consumer Product Sales Presentation Example

This sales presentation example from Shark Tank’s archives displays a consumer product entrepreneur pitching a high-tech sponge called Scrub Daddy. While it’s not a presentation in a traditional sense, and instead a pitch to investors, there’s still a lot to learn from it, primarily, the art of showmanship. To begin, Aaron briefly introduces his product, holding one in each hand, as “the cutest but most high-tech scrubbing tool in the world.” This piques the viewers’ interest.

Next, he shares the unique selling proposition — that the sponge changes texture according to the water temperature. To illustrate, he immerses one sponge in hot water and the other in cold water for a few seconds. After taking them out, he pounds on each with a 10-pound weight. The hot one is like a rock, while the soft one squeezes under the weight.

For salespeople, the main takeaway here is to find interesting ways to quickly demo your product mid-presentation. You can demo it on your slides or in person. If you’re selling an unbreakable water bottle, displaying a video of it being run over by a car and keeping its form will impress and entertain your audience and also convince them that your claims are true. 

Bottom Line: Sales Presentation Examples

Persuasive sales presentations are hyper-focused on proving two things: that the problem is serious, and that their solution is well equipped to solve it. Further, the best presentations precede this discussion with introductions and an agenda, follow it with a strong call-to-action, and make use of helpful slides throughout. Studying examples is a great exercise to learn how to present. For more education, check out how to create and deliver a sales presentation . 

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Create Killer Marketing Presentations (Examples & Templates)

Learn from the best marketing presentation examples how to engage your audience, persuade & reach marketing strategy goals for your business or product.

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Short answer

What does a marketing presentation include.

The key elements that every marketing presentation should include are:

• Introduction
• Market overview
• Product/service overview
• Marketing strategy
• Competitor analysis
• Performance metrics
• Action plan
• Projections
• Conclusion and next steps

Why most marketing presentations don't work

No one has patience for marketing presentations . And what’s the point of making a marketing presentation if no one will listen or bother to read it?

Whatever marketing presentation you’re making at the moment it’s likely full of attention-killing legacy “best practices”. Even worse, it’s drowning in a sea of noise by other presentations competing for your audience's attention.

Let me show you some marketing presentation examples that manage to avoid common presentation mistakes, and manage to stand out, grab attention, and make a persuasive case.

How to create an effective marketing presentation

Each presentation has its unique recipe for success. Whether it's a strategy, a plan, a branding project, a product pitch, or a performance analysis, they all have little details to look out for.

STRATEGY & PLAN

BRANDING & PRODUCT

PERFORMANCE ANALYSIS

Strategy & plan marketing presentation

To breathe life into your strategy and plan presentation, paint a vision of the future.

Start with a robust situational analysis, highlighting key findings about your market, competition, and audience.

Define SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound) marketing objectives that directly link to your strategies.

Present clear and concise strategies, directly aligned with the objectives.

Wrap up with detailed tactics and action plans, using compelling visuals to engage your audience and simplify complex information.

Branding & product presentation

When presenting on branding and product, you're essentially telling a story.

Showcase the personality, values, and unique selling proposition (USP) of your brand.

Introduce your product or service, making it tangible and valuable to your audience.

Utilize customer testimonials, case studies, or live demos to demonstrate the benefits and solve problems.

Make your audience fall in love with your brand and product to create strong brand ambassadors.

Performance analysis presentation

Performance analysis presentations are all about the numbers — but don't let that intimidate you.

Begin with an overview of campaign objectives and strategies used.

Dive into the data, highlighting key metrics and KPIs to analyze performance.

Use clean and clear charts and graphs to visually present the story of the campaign.

Showcase wins and successes, but also discuss areas for improvement as valuable learning opportunities.

Conclude with key takeaways and next steps, demonstrating transparency and setting the stage for ongoing success.

Marketing presentation examples that work

It’s time to see some examples of how marketing presentations are made in practice.

All the examples I bring you here are 100% customizable and you can use them as templates to create your own content.

These examples are modeled after engaging presentations based on our extensive data. They apply content structure and best practices we’ve seen work for high-stakes presentations.

Marketing plan & strategy

This example of a marketing plan presentation gives you a lean and effective structure to present the essence of your plan to your team members and higher-ups.

It cover everything from challenges, target audience, goals, KPIs, game plan, and budget, to milestones.

As Head of Marketing at Storydoc I use this format to launch our activity every new quarter and get everyone onboard.

Marketing plan one-pager

This example is a shorter version of the marketing plan example above. It can be used as a useful recap after presenting the plan in full face-to-face.

It can also be very effective to give decision-makers (internal or external) a quick overview of your plan without overloading them with details.

Marketing agency pitch deck

This marketing presentation example is the go-to for any creative agency or marketing services provider.

It’s a kind of company intro with the essential information about the services you provide, your strategic approach to marketing, and what makes you different.

What makes this marketing presentation so effective is the attention grabing video cover, its commitment to measured results, the case studies it presents to back up the claims, and the clear pricing offer that enables buyers to make an easy educated decision.

Marketing one-pager

We’ve seen this marketing one-pager format work well for agencies and marketing service providers. It’s the minimalistic version of the agency pitch deck I showed earlier.

It works because it gives context fast and communicates value very simply.

It tells your prospect who you are, outlines a major problem they need to address, and explains briefly how you can solve it for them and what the process is going to look like.

It finishes with the benefit the prospect can expect to gain and ends with a strong CTA last slide with a calendar app that lets prospects easily book a meeting.

Early stage marketing proposal

This marketing proposal presentation is used by many of our clients instead of the marketing agency pitch decks. It’s a more baked version, more serious if you like.

This approach works better for big clients that need a more personalized, and detailed pitch.

This example includes concrete data about the prospect’s market, and addresses specifics like the goals you propose, your marketing strategy, tracking and measurement, timeline, and budget.

Late stage marketing proposal

This marketing proposal presentation is used by many of our clients in the later stages of their sales cascade.

Notice that it is personalized to a specific prospect, and addresses them by name.

This example uses dynamic variables from your CRM to pull contact info directly into your presentation, such as the contact’s name, job title, brand colors, personal message, pricing offer, and more.

It includes all the talking items you’ve covered with your prospect which are critical for them to make their buying decision.

And most importantly, the presentation includes an e-signature box that lets the prospect seal the deal then and there.

If you want to have a cozy relationship with media and news outlets then having an attractive and well-organized media kit is pretty important.

It’s used by our clients to take control of how their company is presented in the media.

It’s a basic marketing tool that comes in handy whenever you’re working with other publishers from from newspapers, magazines, or TV, to social media or blogging influencers.

Marketing case study

This marketing case study presentation is a great addition to your prospecting and sales process.

It follows the Challenge-Solution-Results framework that proved to be the most engaging content structure based on our data.

The interactive format grabs the attention of prospects and helps keep them engaged throughout.

Storydoc lets you easily generate an animated GIF you can drop in your prospecting email to catch prospects’ eye and compel them to click the case study link.

Marketing presentation templates

Now that you’ve seen examples of great marketing presentations it’s time to dive a bit into the theory behind the reasons they work. That’s what the rest of this post will be about…

But if you’re too busy managing your marketing team or writing your marketing plan, you’re welcome to skip the theory, just grab a template, and get to work.

Trust that all the marketing presentation templates here apply every insight and tactic I cover in this guide

These templates were built based on what we’ve seen work for our clients again and again, and based on our analysis of over 100,000 reading sessions.

You don’t have to know why they work. They just do. Grab one!

Types of marketing presentations

PRODUCT MARKETING

MARKETING STRATEGY

MARKETING PLAN

MARKETING PITCH DECK

MARKETING PROPOSAL

MARKET ANALYSIS

MARKETING CAMPAIGN

Product marketing presentation

This is your stage to spotlight your product or service. Dive into unique features, benefits, and the problem it solves for your customers. Remember, it's not just about what your product is, but why it matters.

Marketing strategy presentation

The beating heart of your brand's direction, this presentation outlines your game plan to reach your audience. It covers your unique selling proposition, target market, distribution channels, and more. Think of it as your strategic compass guiding you to your business goals.

Marketing plan presentation

Detailing your tactical roadmap, this presentation is where strategy meets execution. It includes your specific marketing activities, timeline, budget, and key performance indicators. Your plan is your strategy's vehicle - fasten your seatbelts and let it drive you to success!

Marketing pitch deck

The marketing deck is a presentation used by marketing agencies, consultants, and service providers for prospecting new clients. It touches on a known problem faced by the prospects and features their services as the solution.

You can grab a customizable marketing pitch deck template here .

Marketing proposal

The marketing proposal is a presentation used at the later stage of the sales process by marketing agencies, consultants, and service providers. It includes the specifics of the services on offer, their cost, deliverables, measurement, milestones, and timelines.

Market analysis presentation

In this presentation, you dissect your market to unearth valuable insights. Understand your customer demographics, identify trends, and evaluate market size. It's your secret weapon to stay one step ahead of the competition.

Marketing campaign presentation

This presentation highlights your creative initiatives aimed at promoting your product or service. It showcases your campaign theme, messaging, promotional channels, and projected outcomes. It's your marketing storybook – captivate your audience with every page.

Marketing presentation best practices

A winning marketing presentation can make all the difference between a yawn and a standing ovation. But, how do you actually do it?

Craft that perfect blend of content, storytelling, brand message, personalization, and relevancy.. Let’s break it down.

The first 3 slides determine whether people will bounce or read on - make them count.

• Think deeply about your hook
• Use the person's name and company logo in the title
• Prioritize the information that matters most to your audience
• Be very short and to the point

Our data shows that 32% of people bounce from your deck in the first 15 seconds. But more importantly 80% of readers who cross the 3rd slide threshold will read the deck in full.

Imagine you were giving a speech and after 3 minutes a 3rd of the audience just stood up and left the hall. That would feel horrible, wouldn’t it? So why do this to your decks?

What you can do is write a relevant, personalized, and intriguing hook, and place it on slides 1-3 of your deck.

• Make the audience understand that you’re writing FOR THEM , about THEIR NEEDS, but also that you have something amazing up your sleeve.
• A little known trick to get attention is to tell them how long reading your deck will take. Time is their currency, you wouldn’t ask a client for “money” without tellig them how much, would you?
• You should also have a strong visual hook . Use a video, animate d, or interactive cover slide. Make it so they can’t look away.

Here's an example of a video cover that acts as a visual hook:

2. Storytelling

Every great marketing presentation is a story with a beginning, middle, and end.

Hook your audience with a compelling introduction, then build intrigue as you progress, and finish with a memorable conclusion. Ensure your story has a human element — this emotional connection can turn listeners into advocates.

Here’s our recommended storyline structure:

3. Brand messaging

Consistency is key in brand messaging. Your presentation should reflect your brand's voice, values, and visual identity at every turn.

This not only enhances recognition but also builds trust. Remember, a strong brand doesn't just sell a product or service, it sells an experience.

You can do this by pulling your brand colors from the brandbook:

4. Personalization

Make your audience feel special with personalization. Address them by name, incorporate their company logo, or include a heartfelt personal message. Tailor your call-to-action to resonate with them on a personal level.

Our data shows that presentations with personalized notes are 68% more likely to be read in full compared to general presentations.

More impressively, personalized content led to a 41% increase in average reading time , and presentations customized for a specific prospect were shared internally 2.3x more often.

So, sprinkle in that personal touch, and watch engagement explode!

5. Relevancy

Address your target audience's pain points in your value proposition and content. Show them you understand their challenges and you have the solution they've been looking for.

When your audience sees themselves in your presentation, they're more likely to see the value in what you're offering.

6. Interactivity

Including interactive slides in your presentation increases engagement.

Our data shows that presentations with tabs to click through, live data calculators, sliders with case studies, or customer testimonials were scrolled to the bottom 41% more often, leading to a 21% longer average reading time.

• Integrate interactive features like videos, tabs, live graphs and charts, calculators, or sliders
• Use video and animations to illustrate complex ideas
• Avoid text-heavy slides
• Test user interactivity to ensure all the features work

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Sales - 8 min READ

6 sales pitch examples (and why they work)

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Copper Staff

Contributors from members of the Copper team

Not only do you have to actively sell your product or service to the person you're talking to within minutes, but you'll also need to connect with them. Y'know, on a human level.

• Elevator pitch example

But closing a deal isn’t as easy as just building rapport (with both prospects and existing customers ). You’ll need to use powerful action words, yet be cautious about how you come across.

Too salesy? It’ll put off your audience.

Too informal? Your prospects won’t feel the urgency to buy.

There’s a fine balance between being overly promotional and being too friendly with your prospects. Either could banish any chance of your prospects thinking, “Wow! I need to buy this today.”

Take a look at these six effective sales pitch examples for some tips on how to walk that line:

• Phone call sales pitch example
• Email sales pitch example
• Voicemail sales pitch example
• Presentation sales pitch example
• Follow-up sales pitch example

1. Phone call sales pitch example

Selling products or services over the phone is one of the most popular forms of pitching to a potential client, but don't let that fool you into thinking it's the easiest.

This sales pitch is typically delivered when cold-calling your prospects. Since these people haven’t heard of your brand before, it can be tricky to grab their attention and build trust over the phone.

The success of your phone call sales pitch depends on your sales script . If you’re boring your potential customer with a long intro about your company, there’s a high chance they’ll simply hang up.

(Plus, with eight attempts to reach a cold call now considered average , you’ll want to keep prospects on the phone if they answer it.)

Lucky for you, this phone call sales pitch example can help grab your prospect’s attention instantly— and pique their interest about what you’re selling:

Salesperson : Hey Naomi. It’s Ian from Acme Company. How are you?

Prospect : I’m okay. What can I do for you Ian?

Salesperson: I noticed a number of your ads on Facebook and Twitter promoting X product, and felt you could really boost your conversions by making just a few small changes.

Prospect : Sorry, what do you guys do?

Salesperson : We work with eCommerce companies like Harry’s to manage their social media ad campaigns. In fact, after only one month of working with Harry’s, for every $1,000 they spend now, they get a 30% increase in conversions.

Prospect : [thinking]

Salesperson : I’d love to learn more about your ad campaigns, Naomi, and share ideas that've worked really well for us. Can we find a 15-minute window next week for a brief call?”

But what makes it so good?

Let’s look at the opening line.

Instead of opening with a generic “Have you got a few minutes to chat about our product?” the salesperson begins with a conversation to make sure the prospect is in the right frame of mind by asking how they are.

Not only does this avoid sounding too salesy, it also sets the tone for the entire conversation.

Then the salesperson explains how they met the person they’re calling: through their social media ads.

(Privacy concerns are big. Anticipating this and getting it out in the open can clear any “Sorry, how did you get my contact details?” questions that could restrict your flow of conversation.)

Once the salesperson has explained this, they have a quick back-and-forth about basic product details and how the service they’re selling could be beneficial.

Instead of waffling on (and potentially boring the prospect), they close the conversation by requesting a follow-up call within the next week. This works because:

• The prospect has time to set aside mental space to chat about the service being sold, rather than being caught off-guard.
• The salesperson can prepare for their call and do some research to further personalize the pitch.
• When they’ve had time to prepare, the prospect can digest information properly rather than listening to the salesperson talk.

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2. email sales pitch example.

Email sales pitches are delivered similarly to cold calls. The only difference? It’s sent via email rather than over the phone.

Although email pitches eliminate common problems that phone call pitches have, they still don’t guarantee results.

Why? The average person receives around 121 emails per day .

With so many messages hitting inboxes, you need to do something special to stand out and engage your prospect.

This email from Demandwell is an excellent sales pitch email example.

But why does it work so well?

Simply put, it’s digestible. Instead of sending a 1,000-word essay about the service she’s selling, Summer describes it in two short lines (the first two lines).

She gets right to the point, clearly explaining what her product does and the value it offers.

Summer also uses visuals in her cold pitch. The screenshot gives the recipient a glimpse into the product and its UI.

But our favorite part is the offer of lunch or coffee, on her. Who said that free coffee wasn’t an effective way for sales teams to make more sales?

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3. Voicemail sales pitch example

Unfortunately, many sales reps spend the majority of their cold call time leaving voicemails.

(That could happen if you’re attempting to contact prospects at inconvenient times.)

But whether you’re calling at the wrong time or being ignored because you’re hiding your caller ID, you need an awesome voicemail sales pitch if you want to hear back from your prospective client.

Here's a voicemail sales pitch example from Sales Hacker :

Notice how their sales representative opens with a quick introduction. Don't make someone listen to a five-minute voicemail, only to find out who’s talking in the last 15 seconds. They probably won't make it all the way to the end of the voicemail anyway.

Their sales team also uses social proof to back up their work. Sharing specific success metrics helps build credibility and show value.

After you leave this type of voicemail, we recommend having your sales team send a follow-up email to encourage people to contact you that way. This can help phone-shy prospects learn more about the products you’re selling in a way that they're comfortable with.

Pro-tip: Become a sales email master with this 6-day sales email boot camp.

4. Presentation sales pitch deck example

Delivered on a slideshow and presented by a sales representative at your company, presentations are one of the most traditional forms of selling.

But it comes with its own challenges, and it’s not just technical problems you’ll have to prepare for when delivering a sales presentation. Whether it’s a private pitch to a single company or a presentation for an industry event, you need to grab your audience’s attention.

Take this sales deck example from GoSquared :

The cover slide not only shares their value proposition but also showcases valuable social proof with badges and reviews from credible tech review sites.

Bonus: visuals improve your sales presentations because they are processed 60,000 times faster than text . Also, storytelling is always a good way to improve your sales pitch.

In your sales pitch deck, include considering images of the founders. Allowing the audience to relate to the brand through names and faces lets the speaker explain the brand’s history in a fun way — oh, and in case you ever want to overload a presentation with numbers, 63% of event attendees remember stories , while only 5% remember statistics.

5. Elevator pitch example

Think about the last time you were asked, “What do you do?” Chances are you were caught off-guard and struggled to string together a concise pitch that explains who you are, what you do, and your unique selling proposition .

The elevator pitch is a two-minute speech that should be up your sleeve—and ready to be delivered to anyone who asks.

Here's an example of a great elevator pitch from G2 Crowd .

And the kicker? It's only 21 seconds long.

Pretty impressive.

What we like most about this sales pitch example is the tone of voice. No jargon, plain English.

That’s key to perfecting your elevator pitch: not over-selling your product or sounding like the stereotypical sleazy salesperson.

6. Follow-up sales pitch example

Speaking of follow-ups, our final sales pitch example covers just that: the art of following up with a prospect who hasn’t returned your previous messages.

Did you know that it takes on average five attempts to close a sale ? That’s a shocking statistic—especially when only 30% of salespeople push for more communication attempts after just one email.

Make it a top priority to follow up with prospective customers. Whether you spoke to them at an event, over the phone, or via email, you could get a head-start on your competition—just by being persistent.

This follow-up sales pitch example from Zendesk is a winner:

This smooths the path for the sender to prove they were interested in the previous conversation by briefly touching on a specific pain point, rather than of firing off a generic email.

This follow-up sales pitch is short and to-the-point, offering to answer questions without putting too much pressure.

Because it ends with a call to action that prompts a phone call, this follow-up email template gives you a much better shot at converting lukewarm leads into red-hot contacts.

Use these sales pitch examples to close more deals.

As a sales rep, your pitch is your bread and butter—no matter what you’re selling (or who you’re pitching to)—which means you should definitely put some time and effort into perfecting your own.

The next time you’re writing a cold call script or perfecting your email template, try using a few elements in these sales script examples and see how you can improve the flow of your own sales pitch.

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A Great Sales Pitch Hinges on the Right Story

• Esther Choy

Listen to your customers, make an emotional connection, and think from their point of view.

When you’re working in sales, you need to master the art of persuasion and that involves being able to tell a compelling story that explains why your product or service will meet someone’s needs. It involves listening, making an emotional connection, and thinking from the customer’s point of view. The earlier you can learn how to communicate in this way, the faster you will likely grow in your role. But too often we tell the customer a story we believe sets our product or service apart without addressing, or considering, the concerns of the customer. A better approach is to step out of your own head and get curious about how the world looks, sounds, and feels to your clients.

When you work in sales, you need to be a great storyteller. This is true whether you’re talking to a potential client, a partner, or a distributor of your product. In a grocery store, for example, where shelf space is limited, you must convince the retailer that placing your product in a visible spot will result in greater profits for everyone. Similarly, at a sales convention, you need to assure prospective clients that what you’re selling is worth their investment. Both situations require a level of persuasion , and that often involves telling a compelling story.

As a professor at Northwestern University Kellogg School of Management and a consumer anthropologist who discovers and shares customers’ stories to help clients create relevant products and experiences (Gina) and the founder of Leadership Story Lab that coaches business leaders on the art of storytelling for business success (Esther), we use storytelling as the cornerstone of our work.

Through our experience, we’ve learned that “a compelling story” is a narrative that explains why your product or service will meet someone’s needs, especially in sales. It involves listening, making an emotional connection, and thinking from the customer’s point of view. The earlier you can learn how to communicate in this way, the faster you will likely grow in your role. The first step is avoiding a common mistake we often see those new to the industry make.

What Not to Do

A food and beverage company we worked with wanted to convince a supermarket chain to place its beverage on a more visible shelf. Their sales team told a story about what they considered their product’s biggest selling point: a state-of-the-art production process. They explained that having their beverage in a highly visible spot would increase their sales, allow them to scale distribution, and eventually, lower the price for customers, making their premium product more accessible.

This story was their first mistake, and it’s one we see often.

The story the sales team told focused entirely on why a better shelf space would benefit the company and their customers. It focused on what they believed set their product apart, but did little to address, or even consider, the concerns of the retailer.

Unsurprisingly, the supermarket chain wouldn’t budge, citing the low sales of the beverage, which cost 50% more than similar offerings.

When the food and beverage company met with us to discuss how to break this impasse, their sales team complained: “The retailer just doesn’t get it.”

This was their second mistake.

Rather than passively-aggressively accusing a client of “not getting it,” the sales team needed to take a pause, listen more closely, and reframe their narrative to meet the retailer’s needs.

As you begin your own career in sales, don’t make these same mistakes. Do this instead.

How to Craft Stories that Connect with Your Customers

In sales, the key to persuasive storytelling is to suspend your own judgments about why other people should buy, sell, or highlight your product or service. This is not to say that your knowledge doesn’t matter — you likely know the product or service better than anyone. But focusing too much on your own opinions can push you into that passive-aggressive mindset of others “not getting it.”

A better approach is to use your knowledge to highlight what it is about your product or service that will meet the customer’s needs. To do that, you need to step out of your own head and get curious about how the world looks, sounds, and feels to your clients.

By following these three steps — identifying their obstacles, fostering a shared sense of understanding, and creating and curating a meaningful narrative — you’ll be better equipped to get buy-in from anyone you want.

Step 1: Look for and listen to blocks and obstacles.

Let’s say you work at a car dealership and are trying to sell a newly released vehicle. You’ve told your story with compelling facts and figures, spotlighting all its high-tech bells and whistles. But, to your disappointment, the customer isn’t convinced that this car is worth the cost.

You’re frustrated — and we get it. Just like the food and beverage company, you’re struggling to understand why the potential buyer doesn’t appreciate the state-of-the-art features associated with your product.

Rather than leaning into that frustration, now is the time to step back and show some humility. Remember that, for you, the value proposition is clear: You view your product as superior because of its special attributes and functionality — and your instinct is to talk about those selling points. But technical lingo often appeals only to a few who speak that language. Jargon will never be as effective as the emotional connection you create when you listen to and relate to someone else’s pain point.

So, instead, get curious about your customer. Sticking with our original example, you might start by asking: “Why are you looking to buy a new vehicle today?” Then listen. Tap into your empathy by placing yourself in their shoes and try to identify what obstacles this sale could help them overcome. In this case, you may learn that the customer’s current vehicle is not fit for their growing family. With that information, you can begin to tell a different story — one that is responsive to the customer’s pain points.

In our conversations with the food and beverage company representatives, we identified two obstacles that were preventing the supermarket from featuring their product on a more visible shelf: the beverage’s high price point and its low sales. The food and beverage company’s sales team was not going to make any headway unless they addressed those two points specifically. In other words, they needed a different story.

Step 2: Tap into emotions — not just logic.

Emotions play an important role in decision making. Psychologists have f ound that our feelings influence what we believe to be true. This means, to persuade someone, you need to not only appeal to them rationally, but emotionally.

Consider the example of the car dealership. Now that you know the customer is growing their family, you can aim to understand them on an emotional level by asking yourself: Why would a new parent want to buy this vehicle? What would a parent care about most when driving their family members?

In the same way, the food and beverage company’s sales team needed to shift its tactics away from the purely logical to the emotional. That could only happen, however, if they understood the mix of emotions their consumers experienced before making a decision — particularly parents (their ideal customers) who often make price-driven decisions in the grocery store, as we’ve seen in through our work.

Instead of focusing on how the product was made, the sales team began to ask themselves: What would drive a parent to spend more money on our product? Ultimately, this helped them step more fully into the customer’s point of view.

Step 3: Tell a different story.  

Once you understand your customer emotionally, your story shifts — and, along with it, your sales pitch. In the example of the car dealership, you might choose to focus your pitch on the vehicle’s spacious backseat or family-friendly entertainment system. You can even focus on the fancy bells and whistles you highlighted in your original pitch, but tell a more intentional story about them, one that is crafted specifically for your customer. Explain why those new technologies make the car safer and more reliable — two points that will likely appeal to a parent.

As for the food and beverage company, its sales team began contemplating how to frame a new story as part of a better pitch to distributors and retailers. As it turned out, they had a chance encounter that changed everything. The sales team, all wearing company shirts, stopped at a diner for lunch. A waitress noticed the logo and approached their table. “I love your product,” she said. “I buy it all the time.”

Here was their ideal customer in person: someone who willingly paid a premium price for their product and, in her case, on a modest salary. With curiosity and empathy, they asked her why.

“My son has health issues,” she explained. “Your product has helped him so much.”

Her decision wasn’t based on the company’s production processes and filtration. It was because she saw the difference in her son’s health. This was the story they needed to tell — to distributors, to retailers, and to consumers.

The sales team sought out testimonials and feedback from other customers about why they bought the beverage, despite its higher price point. The feedback was consistent: Consumers believed the product saved them money in the long run by avoiding other costs, from nutritional supplements to medical care.

In the next meeting with the retailer, the sales team shared the waitress’s story and other customer testimonials. It was a pitch centered on their product’s value proposition and this time it landed. The retailer made a small commitment to give the beverage premium shelf space, concurrent with new marketing based on consumer stories. Sales increased and, over time, so did the store’s shelf space commitment.  

As a sales professional, you have a story to tell — a narrative you believe will differentiate what you’re selling from everything else in the market. The effectiveness of that story, however, rests not with what you want to say, but with how meaningful it is to your customers. When your story clears obstacles, creates emotional connections, and fosters a shared understanding, that’s when your narrative will rise above the rest. That’s the moment when everyone will truly “get it.”

• Gina Fong  is a consumer anthropologist at Fong Insight and a Clinical Assistant Professor of Marketing at The Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, where she teaches ethnographic research. She received the school’s highest teaching honor, the L.G. Lavengood Outstanding Professor of the Year, in 2023.
• Esther Choy  has been training and coaching executives to become more persuasive through the use of classical storytelling elements since 2010. She is the author of “Let the Story Do the Work” published by HarperCollins in 2017. Her thought leadership on storytelling and first-generation wealth creators has appeared in leading US media outlets such as Forbes, Entrepreneur and the New York Times.

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Using a Speech to Promote a Product or Service-Use Public Speaking as Marketing

This is part three of our posts on  How to Use Public Speaking in Your Career . In this session, we are going to show you a few simple ways to use public speaking to promote or market your new product or service. In fact, using a speech to promote a product or service is one of the most effective ways to conduct marketing campaigns for both large and small businesses alike.

Using a Speech to Promote a Product or Service

There are a number of different ways to use a presentation or speech to promote a product or service. We will cover each of these briefly in this post.

Promoting a Product or Service in Personal Meetings and Sales Calls.

• In-Person Marketing Meetings and Seminars.

Webinars to Both Educate the Public and Promote Your Product or Service.

• Paid or Guest Spots on Webinars or Podcasts.
• Use Videos to Promote Your Product or Service.

Below are a few ideas for each of these categories.

The most common type of speech to market a product or service is a sales call or sales presentation. Although this one has been around since commerce began, it is quickly becoming a lost art. As a result,  those who can do this well, are now, highly sought-after in the business world .

Salespeople get a bad rap. Movies typically depict salespeople as dishonest and immoral. However, if a salesperson is dishonest, he or she may survive for a little while, but bad behavior will quickly catch up with the person.  Good salespeople, though, are trusted confidants. They are problem-solvers and educators.  So, if you are giving presentations to individuals or small groups as a way to promote your product, the goal is to educate your audience. Help them solve a problem, and they will buy the solution. Your speech shouldn’t be about you or your product. It should be about the problem(s) your potential buyers are experiencing and how to solve these problems.

In decades past, if you needed a new suit, you went down to the local department store. The salesperson in the store was an expert on suits. The salesperson would be able to educate potential clients on the qualities of each style of suit, what was currently in fashion, and how to care and accessorize each suit.

That leaves a tremendous opportunity for people and companies who understand this need.  For instance, although we have a popular podcast, a YouTube channel, and a ton of social media pages, we still get most of our business from people who have a question, and who can’t get that question answered anywhere else. When someone calls our 800 number (800-975-6151) they are connected with an instructor who actually teaches our classes. We don’t have a room full of telemarketers who are reading off a script. We have professional educators who can answer any question that a potential customer might have. As a result, we are filling a need that almost all of our competitors have neglected.

Sales presentations whether one-on-one or one-to-a-group are becoming a lost art, but they’re a great business model. If you get really good at doing them, you will help your customers make better decisions. And the best results will increase your income.

If you are looking for a  step-by-step process to create a good sales presentation along with examples , visit this post. You may also be intrested in our post about how to design  Bid Presentations . It also has a  Great Sales Presentation Outline .

In-Person Seminars and Conferences

Prior to the video streaming era, in-person seminars were one of the easiest ways to maximize your promotional time. Instead of setting up a series of individual one-on-one sales meetings, you could invite prospective customers to a live seminar. These seminars were often either free or for a nominal fee to encourage audience members to come.

Back when I first started teaching leadership seminars, we promoted a 12-week series of training sessions. Since the class was both a significant investment of both time and income, we typically offered an “introduction” session a week before the series started. We would allow people who were interested in the class, but who hadn’t yet registered, to come and preview the course.

It worked really well. The preview session reduced the risk of making a bad buying decision because the prospective customer could actually see and experience part of the class in advance.

If you are over the age of 35, you may remember the financial planners offering the “free how to retire” seminar at the local Holiday Inn. This was a way for the financial planner to show a group of people how skilled he/she was at helping couples plan for their retirement. By offering part of his/her expertise for free to the public, the financial planner was often able to convert some of those attendees to customers. The sales managers from many companies, big and small, used to invest a tremendous amount of money on TV and radio ads to promote these seminars with the same end goal.

Today, though, getting a group of people to a seminar is much simpler.  With websites like  MeetUp  and  EventBrite , a company can create a seminar or conference with little or no investment.

Here is an example:

A local dentist can create a seminar called, “ How to Whiten Your Teeth Three Shades in Less than Six Weeks. ” (I just made that up. I’m not sure if that is actually possible, but you see how that might get someone’s attention.) The dentist promotes this seminar to every patient who comes in for a month. The dentist might tell his patients that the seminar is $29 per person, but if they bring a friend that is not already a patient, both of them can get in for free. Or, perhaps we could tell attendees that if they post the event to their Facebook page, they could get free admission. Regardless, we make the fee nominal but give attendees ways to come to the event for a discount or for free.

The goal is to  get a room full of potential new customers from your target market  and win them over with your skill as a dentist. The topic of your speech must also be something that captures your audience’s attention, of course. With a room full of your target audience, all you have to do is give a persuasive speech by expertly delivering your key points and providing valuable information.

By the way, according to a Bizzabo, a company that specializes in event marketing,  in-person seminars and conferences  are one of the big trends in recent years. Big companies like Apple started the trend with their huge product roll-outs to Apple enthusiasts. However, other huge companies have followed the trend as well. Last year, I was invited to speak at Transitions Academy. This is a conference where eye doctors, lens manufacturers, and salespeople come to learn about trends in the industry (and about Transitions Lenses). I had a blast speaking there, and the attendees gave positive feedback on the event as well.

Companies have realized that they can  replace the missing education part of the sales process with webinars . However, webinars are a little tricky. If you make them too “salesy,” you will turn off your audience.

Especially in web-based products and services,  webinars have become the go-to education and sales channel  (According to Go-To-Meeting… No pun intended.) They claim that 73% of the top marketers in the world believe that webinars are the best way to market, today. If you recall, since the education function of a sales professional has practically been eliminated in most industries, webinars are a great way both educate the potential customer and move them through a sales process.

Just as a warning,  leading webinars and leading in-person speeches are TOTALLY different skills . Just because you are good at one, doesn’t mean that you will be good at the other. For instance, when I lead an in-person meeting, I typically use few and simple visual aids, because my goal is to build the trust of the audience in me. In a webinar, your visuals are critical to keeping the audience tuned in to the presentation. So, when I speak for 30 minutes in person, I might use three or four slides. But when I lead a webinar, I might go through as many as 20 slides in the same time period.

For details on  How to Design a Good Informational Webinar , click here.

Paid or Guest Spots on Podcasts/Webinars

If you want to really get good at using a speech to promote a product, start a Podcast . However, this is a real-time commitment. If you want to test the waters,  promote yourself as a guest on someone else’s podcast or webinar . It does take a little homework to get one of these guest spots, but there is a tremendous opportunity if you are willing to do the work. An easy way that doesn’t take much effort is to just  Google [Your Industry] with the word “podcast” .

I tried to pick a really obscure subject matter just to show that Google will find anything. I found an article called  12 weird jobs you’ll be surprised to know exist  published by Business Insider. One of the weird jobs is a “Professional Bridesmaid.” If this was your career, you’d likely type “wedding podcast” into Google. When I did, I got  Top 10 Wedding Podcasts .

You’re likely to think, “Oh sure, Doug, weddings — of course there are a bunch of podcasts about weddings.” Okay, another obscure career is “Snake Milking.” I Googled “Snake Podcast” and I found  Best Reptile Podcasts . If you happen to be in either of these industries, I suspect that many of the podcast hosts for these programs would ABSOLUTELY LOVE to have you on as a guest!

Once you know who the host is, you can often easily find the person’s website, fill out a “contact us” form, and wait for a callback.

If you want to move faster on a guest slot, many companies have lists that they will market to and be the host of an impromptu webinar, teleconference or podcast. You can use the same process as we just talked about, but offer a fee to the host. He/she will likely move you to the top of the list.

The final genre for using a speech to promote a product or service is video. I won’t be able to cover everything that you will need to know in order to show the value of video when promoting your product or service. However, let’s cover a few basics.

Practice with Instagram Stories

The live video social media and “stories” are fantastic ways to begin to practice making marketing videos, but they have a short shelf-life. (They go away after 24 hours or so.) So, while you are learning, you won’t be leaving embarrassing videos of yourself all over the internet. (See my embarrassing early video here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ja_BEMmpcUo). It’s also a good idea to use these kinds of social media platforms to test your main points on the public. This will help give you a reference point for which topics you should put more effort into.

Get Some Help

The best investment that I ever made for The Leader’s Institute ® is hiring a full-time video expert. You don’t have to invest in a full-time person, though. You can contract out most video jobs very easily. Hiring the right people can get you solid advice on filming, lighting, and sound as well.

Don’t Post to YouTube Until It is Perfect

YouTube is hard work to break into, so you only want to put your absolute best stuff on that platform. Use Vimeo, Facebook, or Instagram for anything that looks less professional.

We will be talking a lot about video (especially live video) on future podcasts, so stay tuned and subscribe to the podcast!

You are Your Best Marketing Strategy

In today’s world, there are a tremendous number of ways to share your expertise with others to market your product or service. Using a speech to promote a product is just one of many. But always realize, that you are your best marketing. A fancy proposal, a flash ad, or an expensive business card will not do nearly as much to promote your product or service as you share your expertise with a potential customer!

Podcasts , presentation skills

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