Another great article by Tony Jeary.  

To merit a spot on your prospects’ calendars, you need a pitch that holds the promise of monetary returns for them.

Do your homework.

If you are going to book first visits, you need to sound like someone who has the business acumen, experience and ideas that can make a difference in your prospective client’s business—in other words, a compelling value proposition for your sales call.

This means doing your due diligence before you make that phone call or write that email. You need to know what the three or four major issues your prospective customer is likely to be dealing with—or will be soon.

Instead of introducing yourself and your services, your prospecting pitch needs to be built on your ideas about the root causes of your prospects’ challenges and how they can think about them, hopefully leading them toward a groundbreaking solution. It sounds like this: “Hi, Mary, this is Anthony with XYZ Inc. My company helps people deal with the challenges of low productivity, high consumable costs and employee dissatisfaction. I am calling to ask you for 20 minutes to share the three biggest trends impacting your business and give you some ideas that help our clients produce better results at lower costs. Could we meet for 20 minutes on Thursday? I’ll share these ideas with you, and even if you never buy from me, they will help you and your team.”

This pitch doesn’t suggest that I will talk about my company or myself. It doesn’t indicate that I am going to try to make a personal connection; instead it says I am going to help the prospect think about her business and its problems. You have to focus on helping your prospects with their biggest challenges, those same challenges you discovered when doing your research.

Pitch to the correct contact.

For decades salespeople were told to start as high up in the organization as possible and then let the C-level executive introduce them to his or her team. This used to be wise advice, but now folks in the C suites wantconsensus about solutions before they weigh in, and if the salesperson hasn’t been vetted by their teams, the executives aren’t likely to push their solution onto lower-level workers.

Today there’s a new contact to target with your prospecting: the CEO of the Problem. The CEO of the Problem is the person who must achieve results in dealing with the issues that you can resolve. The contacts who fit this role will also be the people who are the most susceptible to your message because they’re the ones struggling to produce results. You can help them, and they will meet with you, provided you’ve convincingly conveyed your ability to help when you reach out with your prospecting call, voice mail or email.

(Note that the CEO of the Problem may have a C-level title. But the larger your prospective client company, the less likely that your vital contacts rank this highly.)

Nurture your prospects.

Read the entire article  here:  http://www.success.com/article/how-to-get-a-yes-to-your-next-sales-pitch