How to Give a Compelling "Pitch" on Cold Calls

Most salespeople think that the key to being a great salesperson is to have a really strong pitch or value proposition. And that's actually not the truth. In this video, we're going to show you what's wrong with most value propositions or pitches and we're going to teach you what to do instead. And a three, two, one. Let's hit it.

Alrighty folks, here's why most value propositions suck. Most salespeople are copy pasting the garbage marketing language that they're taking that sounds like Acme code is a single source of truth, or pave is an all in one solution that helps you do this, or ping is a single pane of glass. And the problem is all of these things are the exact same way that every garbage telemarketer and garbage marketer is describing their products as well. So number one, when you use these buzzwords, they immediately categorize you in with every other telemarketer and get them categorizing you as someone of lower status. But then two, they also nothing to a prospect. And so there are three reasons the traditional value proposition sucks. Number one is they use a lot of those traditional buzzwords that categorize you as a telemarketer. Number two is even if you used better benefit language that explains what your product does and why it benefits them, prospects tend to not understand how to use your product or achieve those benefits in absence of a problem. So for example, if I was selling titanium cookware, I can explain all the reasons why titanium is a really, really good material for cookware and how it's going to make sure that nothing ever gets stuck to your pans. But unless I tell you why your current pans have the omelette sticking to them or the tomato paste sticking on the edges, or they start to erode after three or four washes, you don't realize that any of those benefits are any better than your current solution. And the last reason is people, for whatever reason, they tend to just react better to to problems or pain over benefits. So for example, I have a bottle of multivitamins on my desk and I take them almost every day. But I usually forget two or three times a week because I don't have to take my multivitamins. I wanna be healthier, but I don't have to take multivitamins to be healthy. I have never forgotten to take an Advil when I have a headache because a headache is painful and it's in my face and I wanna solve that problem right now.

So what you're saying Armand is somebody is going to have to connect the dots between the value of your product and does with what problem it actually makes go away for your prospect. And so if you're not convinced, let's actually take a look at some value propositions for common consumer products and compare them to the problem proposition for that exact same product. I'll read the value proposition Armand, and then maybe you can say the problem proposition. So the first one is easy Dog food delivery service.

Never carry kibble to your car again.

Speedy home cleaning.

Let us deal with the scum behind the toilet.

Home laundry service.

Are you going to lose another sock this week?

Well, I didn't lose any, but how about ergonomic insoles?

If you're tired of taping your heel blisters?

Nose tape for clearer breathing.

Who likes breathing through one nostril because this guy snores.

And I also don't get hot because I have eucalyptus cooling blankets, which means.

You'Re waking up at 3am Sweaty, right?

So you can see the problem wins every single time. And data from Gong analyzing over 300 million cold calls actually backs this showed that when you use value proposition buzzword language, you have a 5.5% success rate on a cold call. But that success rate triples to 16% when you use problem proposition language like we talked about there.

That's right. And so folks, instead of giving a value proposition as your pitch, we are going to give a problem proposition as a pitch. Now, we're not just going to jump on our cold call and start complaining about problems. There are three steps to delivering a great problem prop. Step number one is you want to describe a triggering problem. A problem described in such specific detail that it literally triggers your prospect and reminds them of a painful visual memory. Step number two is once you're done describing the triggering problem, you want to solve that problem in a one sentence solution. And here's the thing, if you spend 80% of your time talking about all the food getting stuck to the pan, you only need one sentence to explain that a titanium pan has certain types of coating on it that make you never have to deal with those problems again. And then from there, once you've described the problem, the one sentence solution, all you have to do is ask if they're interested in learning more. And that's step three, an interest based CTA where you just say something like, hey, are you open to learning more when I'm not cold calling you out of the blue? Or I know you probably have this all set, but are you open to taking a look at this thing maybe sometime next week.

So, Armand, let's actually make this real for people and give some examples. So the first one is I used to sell billing software to law firms. And one of the challenges that law firms have with sending bills to clients is usually they have to send bills to insurance carriers who are paying for the client. And these insurance carriers have really, really strict billing formats and guidelines. And oftentimes there's a ton of back and forth between the law firm and the insurance company on getting the bill paid. And so my problem proposition would sound something like this. Armand, the reason that I called you is Most of the CFOs of the insurance defense law firms that I work with think it's pretty ridiculous that they have to deal with so many deductions, rejections, and appeals on the bills that they send to their insurance carrier clients after they win a big case for them. And we work with about 300 different law firms in the US helping them cut down on their bill appeals by alerting their attorneys to any billing violations right when they're doing their time. And I know I'm getting you totally out of the blue here, but I guess I'm wondering if you might be open to learning more when I'm, when I'm not cold calling you out of the blue.

So, folks, the biggest mistake that people make when describing the problem that they solve is they are not specific enough. So I'm going to take that same problem that Nick was just describing and. But I'm actually going to dumb it down to a generic problem that isn't specific enough. And then I'm going to add four things that can make it more specific. So if you're following along on video, you'll actually see us highlight the things that we're adding on the screen. If not, just listen to the change. So the most generic version of what Nick was talking about would sound like. Most CFOs tell us that billing takes a lot of time, not specific at all. If I add the Persona and make the Persona more specific, that becomes most CFOs of insurance defense law firms tell us that billing takes a lot of time. Now, if I add the specific things that they were annoyed about, why it took so much time, I might say most CFOs of insurance defense law firms tell us that billing takes a lot of time because of the deductions, rejections, and appeals. Now they're getting triggered by the specific annoyances. Number three is I can start to set the scene More so most CFOs of insurance defense law firms tell us that billing takes a lot of time because of the deductions, rejections and appeals they get are from insurance carriers after they win a big case. Even more specific, and then the last one is, I want to explain how pissed off they are. I want to re explain the way that they felt in this moment with the emotion. So lastly with the emotion. It says most CFOs of insurance defense law firms think it's ridiculous that they have to deal with so many deductions, rejections and appeals they get from insurance carriers after winning a big case. So try to add those four things to your generic version, the Persona and the annoyances, the scenery and the emotion. And that will get you a specific problem proposition.

Great. And so there's a couple mistakes that people frequently make when they're putting together their problem proposition. You just talked about the specificity and how to layer that on. So the second mistake that folks will make when they are delivering their problem proposition to a prospect is they won't match the problem with the altitude of the person that they're calling. And so some examples of this, when I was selling billing software, if I was calling somebody who is at the power line, if I was talking to a billing manager, that person would be stuck in the day to day clicks and permissions and the time and the frustration of actually putting these bills together. And so my pitch would be targeted on that. But when I would call the law firm cfo, that person wouldn't be aware of all of the day to day problems related to the bills. And so they wouldn't care about that in my problem proposition. Instead, my problem proposition would have to be something they did care about, which would be, hey, you've got a ton of outstanding receivables. You have people who aren't paying their bills because there's errors on the formatting. My pitch would have to be focused on that. If I called a different department, sometimes I would call the attorneys at these law firms. They wouldn't care at all about the billing formats and guidelines. And so I couldn't talk about that. But they would care if the firm didn't have cash on hand to be able to make capital investments that they wanted to in their business. Opening a new office, acquiring a competitor, or acquiring a group of attorneys to add to the firm. So I would have to focus my pitch on those problems instead of. So it's important that you match your pitch to the altitude or department of.

Who you're calling the last Bit is people oftentimes speak in sales language instead of their language. So, for example, when I was selling compensation software at pave, the first thing that I did is I listened to a bunch of compensation podcasts to understand the types of decisions they were making in the compensation world and how they talked about them. For example, if. If they wanted to calculate a compensation increase, they would use something called a compa ratio to calculate their current compensation and the ratio to what their new compensation. So my problem proposition would include some of those bits of language to show them that I understood their space. It would sound like, typically when I'm talking to a head of people, operations or compensation, you're buried in a mountain of spreadsheets because you have a million vlookups where you're trying to match every employee to their compa ratio, to their performance rating, to their comp increase. And by painting the problem in their language, I recreate that story for them in a way that feels familiar to them, as opposed to using other sales language like single source of truth, all in one platform or language that's just not familiar to that Persona.

Great. So, folks, now you know how to pitch your product using problem based language, not value or buzzword based language. But even if you nail this when you're making a cold call, a lot of prospects are still going to resist and you're gonna get hit with objections. I'm not interested. I'm all set. Maybe send me an email, maybe call me in a quarter, and we've got a way for you to overcome and get through those objections. There's a video on this channel on the Mr. Miyagi series on how to overcome objections. And if you liked this video. A lot of this content came from our book that we wrote. Cold Calling sucks. But that's why it works where we give you talk tracks, we give you a ton of detail to get really, really good at the number one way to build pipeline, which is picking up the phone and making a cold call. Thanks for watching, folks.