#546 - Fixing the WORST Cold Call Pitches Known to Man

Time is money, save both. Probably can't save that on a pitch because prospects can be like, "Well, what do you actually do?" Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting, and a whole lot more all in one place. Okay, so this already is a trap that a lot of sales people might fall into. Most B2B salespeople have been lied to by their marketing teams about what their cold-call pitch should actually sound like. And so in this video, I'm going to break down the three biggest mistakes that salespeople make with their pitches, what to do instead, and then I'm going to go rewrite a bunch of real-world pitches so that you can see this stuff in practice and learn to improve yours. So most people lead their pitches with what they've been taught to say by their marketing team or their enablement team. And they lead with what is called a value proposition where they tell the prospect why their product is great and hope that the prospect says, "Yeah, we need something like that." And so most of those pitches sound something like, "We're an all-in-one AI-powered platform that streamlines your expense workflows for modern teams." Or they'll say, "We're a next-gen cloud-native platform that leverages machine learning to optimize your workforce productivity." Now, if your pitch sounds anything like those, there are three major mistakes that you should fix ASAP and I'm going to run through them right now. Mistake number one is that your pitch pitches like those sound like what every other telemarker is saying. If you're using words like, "optimize" or "streamline" or "automated platform" or "AI-powered," you are literally hitting your prospects with the exact same telemarker or buzzwords that literally every other rep is using to describe their solution. Today's show is brought to you by Insightly. The CRM helps you spot deal risk early. So pipe reviews actually drive your number. One question I ask in nearly every deal review is, what do we need to get in our next interaction with the customer? If my rep can't answer that question, the deal has a risk and I have something I can coach to. Now, we built a guide with our friends at Insightly CRM on how to run pipe reviews that surface real risk and get deals moving again. And you can get it for free at the link in the show notes. Today's show is brought to you by Text Us, which helps you move your deals forward faster when timing matters. The fastest way to move a feel forward is to avoid getting stuck in the inbox. And so my favorite way to get on a text basis is literally when your prospect requests a demo, just send them a confirmation text saying that you're looking forward to the meeting. And that opens the text channel for you to call back on it later. Folks, we put an entire guide on how to revive ghost deals, nudge next steps, and use texting to keep deals moving forward with Text Us. Check it out. It's free in the show notes. Hey, folks, if you keep getting grilled in your pipeline reviews, try this. Show up with your deal risks already flagged. So gaps in pain, timeline, or power, and your net's move ready to dock. That's kind of where Clary helps is they will show you live signals and risks on your deals in one clean view. So you can run your business, not have your manager do it for you in a poke bunch holes. So we put together a free guide on three plays to get your sales manager off your back. The link is in the show notes. Go check it out. And a golden rule in sales is you cannot be perceived to be better until you are first perceived to be different. And so even if the word optimize or AI-powered workflow or machine learning algorithm accurately describes what you do, you have to find a different way to describe your solution. Because otherwise, you're going to get lost in the noise of what every other seller is hitting them with. Mistake number two is that you fail what I call the SNSN test, which stands for Sounds Nice, but signifies nothing. Pitches like leverages, machine learning, to optimize workforce productivity might mean something to you if you sell workplace productivity software, but to me, to everyone watching this YouTube video and frankly to your buyer, that doesn't mean anything. You've gone through a full boot camp and training of what your product does and what it is. But to your prospect, when you hit him on a cold call, half the battle is getting them to very, very quickly understand not just what you do, but what it means for your buyer. And when you use these catch all buzzwords, like optimize and streamline and single source of truth, it actually makes things more confusing for your prospect. So instead, I recommend using what we call dumb human language that actually simplifies what you do. Now, you might need more complex and more sophisticated explanations of your product once you are in sales cycle. Even selling to CFOs of law firms or managing partners of law firms, we had to dumb down and simplify the explanation because on a cold call, your job is to hit them at the headline level to get their attention and interest and willingness to learn more when you are not ambushing them with a cold call in the middle of their work day. Mistake number three is that you pitch without a problem attached to your pitch. There's a golden rule in sales that says, your products value only exists in the context of the problem that value solves. If you don't have a problem or if the buyer is not aware of the problem that you solve, there is very little reason for them to care about your product. And I'll give you a real example here. If I decided to quit this job and get into the profession of selling titanium coated cookware, and I cold called you and said something like, well, look, the reason for my call is we're the leading provider of premium, titanium coated cookware that comes with an anti-adhesion layer to help you optimize your cooking process. Would you like to learn more? You'd probably say, hey, thanks for the call, Nick, but we've already got pans at home. We're good. You don't care about our titanium coating, which in this weird example is my value proposition. You don't care about that because you don't know what problem that titanium coating solves for you. You're just thinking of like, it's gonna be a pain in the ass to replace all of my cookware and go through this sales cycle and I don't really need to make a change. And so instead, if I wanted to get you interested in my titanium pans, I would need to give you a problem that the titanium coating solves. And so my revised pitch, if I got a chance to call you again, would be something like, well, look, Mark, the reason for my call is I talk to a ton of working parents who get really, really frustrated that every time they cook breakfast for the kids, they end up spending more time scrubbing at crust off the pan than they do enjoying family time. And so our pans are coated with a titanium nonstick surface so that your egg slide right off without any soaking or scrubbing required. What I'm doing here is I'm showing, hey, problem, how we solve it. And that gets you to care about the how we solve it. Now you know why the titanium coating is actually valuable. So let's talk about how to build one of these for whatever you sell because if you're not a cookware sales person, you're probably like, all right, sounds cool, but how do I do it for myself? So there's a couple different steps here. Step number one is you need to paint the movie scene of the problem that you solve in extremely specific detail. Almost like you are telling a story or writing a script for a movie. And so there's a couple different components that go into that movie scene that you are painting. Component number one is you need to describe who is feeling the pain. Are these working parents? Are these lawyers at insurance defense law firms? Are these lawyers at intellectual property law firms? Are these heads of people ops at venture backed startups? Is this real estate firms in Northwest Chicago? You want to be extremely specific with both the persona, the title of the person that you're calling, as well as the company that you are calling. This shouldn't be, yeah, I talked to a lot of lawyers. It shouldn't be, yeah, I talked to a lot of lawyers at big law firms. It should be, I talked to a lot of lawyers at big insurance defense law firms in the Northeast. The next piece is when does this problem happen? Does the problem happen after they win a big case? Does the problem happen when they're closing on a new building? Does the problem happen when they're preparing for a merit cycle? Problems don't just happen all the time. They're not pervasive. And even if they are pervasive, there's typically times that they spike harder for your prospect. We want to attach to that. The next piece is we want to use painful feeling words. Those are words like frustrated, anxious, concerned, think it's ridiculous, annoyed, et cetera. We want them to feel the pain. People buy on emotion and then back it up with logic. And on a cold call, it is almost entirely emotional. I want to say something like, look, most of the attorneys and insurance defense law firms I talk to think it is absolutely ridiculous that they have to log their life in six-minute increments just to be able to get paid by their clients. Step two is if you want them to say, yeah, I'd like to learn a little bit more about your product, then you need to tell them a tiny bit about your product. So that they say, oh, that's interesting. I might want to learn more. We're not giving them the full picture. We're giving them one sentence of our biggest differentiator in terms of how we solve this problem. So we get them to lean and say, I'd like to learn more. So if I continue that law firm example of calling the attorney at the insurance defense law firm who is sick of tracking his or her time, I might say, and so Laurel tracks all of your calls, emails, and legal research and actually drafts a time sheet for you so that you're not stuck having to piece together a time sheet yourself at 10 o'clock on a Sunday. That is enough. Now, it's not enough to get them to say, yeah, send me the contract I'm ready to sign, but my goal here is to peak their interest and show that we actually can solve that problem. And then I'm just gonna finish that problem proposition once I've painted the problem, given them one sentence on how we solve. And I'm just gonna say, and look, I know I'm calling you totally out of the blue. I'm wondering if you might be open to learn more when I'm not cold calling you out of the blue. All right, so let's get started. get into a couple of real examples here. We're gonna start with this company Laurel, which it looks like they automate time sheets, save hours and increase leverage. I gave a lot of examples of that earlier. I'm gonna give an example of what like a bad pitch might sound like and then what a good pitch might sound like, but let's see if we can pull some stuff from like what they do. So it looks like they help accounting firms, legal and time keepers. Streamline your practice with AI. That might work for like marketing landing page, but if I quote call a prospect and say that, I'm dead in the water. So this is interesting. They've got a bunch of big logos here that they work with. I see EY, Crowell, Frostbrown Todd, big law firm. I didn't really talk about this earlier, but there are some industries where I think social proof is really, really important when you're reaching out to a prospect. Like law firms, it's rare that you get a law firm that's like, I wanna be the first to try this new AI technology. And I don't think it's a bad thing to weave into your one sentence solution. One, maybe two, extremely relevant, current customers of yours that you can cite. If I'm calling Pepsi, I might cite we work with Coca Cola. If I'm calling like a mom and pop soda shop, though, that's got 12 employees, I probably don't want to cite Pepsi because there's too big of a size difference. So I love that Laurel leads with the problem. Legacy timekeeping solutions create a costly disaster, frustrated professionals, missed revenue, and zero insight into where to improve operations. TDS inaccurate timekeeping professionals spend non-billable hours logging, work time, and failed to document all hours worked. Revenue leakage, there's missed billable time. No operational insights, blind AI investment. This is awesome. This actually makes my job really, really easy. And then there's the solution. So this is actually awesome. Laurel does a really, really good job leading with the problem and then going into, hey, I'm gonna zoom out a bit. Here's how we solve that problem. Say professionals time, grow profits. So if you get into like what a, maybe, eh, versus great pitch for Laurel might sound like, eh, meh, pitch might be something like, we're an automated timekeeping solution that uses AI to track your work and generate a time sheet for you. Most firms that we work with see a 20% increase in their billable hours. I don't think that's horrible. Now that I think about it, 'cause I think it makes it real using that like dumb human language of like, generate a time sheet. They can actually picture what it does. I think we can dig the knife a little bit further. I think I can go something like, if I was calling a partner in a big law firm, I might say something like, look, big law partners that I talk to tell me that the most mind numbing part of their job is having to log their life in six minute increments just to build their clients. And so Laurel tracks all of your calls, emails, legal research and meetings and generates a draft time sheet for you so that you don't have to waste your Sunday's piece in together time sheets and you actually end up increasing your billable hours. One other way I could improve that, I could probably find a way to integrate in that Laurel works with other big law firms like Frostbound, Brown Todd or Crowell. But that's a decent draft to start. So let's do one more example. We're gonna do ramp. I'm actually a ramp customer. I think we use it for like our credit cards and other expense management. I don't really know because they don't trust me to run our finance function here at 30 minutes to president's club, but time is money, save both. Probably can't save that on a pitch because prospects can be like, well, what do you actually do? Easy to use corporate cards, bill payments, accounting and a whole lot more all in one place. I quote call a CFO and I say, hey, we offer easy to use corporate cards, streamlined bill payments and all in one accounting. The prospects going to hit you 99% of the time with we already have a solution in place. Why? I don't know any enterprise that doesn't already have corporate cards a way to pay their bills or a way to keep track of all of their finances. And so this is another trap a lot of sellers fall into is they will pitch what they are or what they do. And unless your prospect is bleeding and actively looking to make a change in which case they're probably gonna come inbound to you anyway. They're gonna be like, we already have something in place. And so we need to start with the problem instead because they might already have a way to pay bills, but there might be problems. And I need to hit them with the problems I think they might have on those things. So let's keep going, get to know, ramp, replace multiple broken tools with ramp. Okay, great. I can put ramp AI to work for me. What's it gonna do? I can control spend before it happens. That one's closer to a problem. I like that. A lot of CFOs get frustrated when they get hit with surprise expenses after a sales team offsite or something. I bet I can turn that one into a problem. Run intake to pay without delay. Okay, maybe on this procurement one, there's like a delay thing. Accelerate monthly close. Here's a really good one where anytime you have a benefit like accelerate your monthly close, that's not a problem. The way that I can turn accelerate your monthly close into a problem is if I can think about, okay, why would somebody want to accelerate monthly close? Well, it might be because monthly close is taking too long. It might be slow. So if I was pitching this piece of accelerating monthly close, I might say I talk to a lot of CFOs that are frustrated that monthly close takes too long because of accounting errors. I talk to a lot of CFOs who are really frustrated that monthly close takes way too long because they have to clean up errors. They have to categorize expenses manually, which I'm not crazy about. And they literally have to review things line item by line item. I don't know how to sell ramp, but like that could be one way for this piece of the solution that I could make it more problem oriented. So instead of saying, hey, we offer a full accounting automation suite that allows you to streamline and speed up monthly close, I can turn that into a problem by saying something like, look, most CFOs of mid market tech companies that I talk to in San Francisco, tell me it is immensely frustrating to have to waste hours at the end of every single month, cleaning up the books and focusing on monthly close. And so ramp helps speed monthly close by automatically collecting receipts, categorizing expenses, and flagging the issues that actually need your attention so that you're only focused on the most important stuff when you're closing the books. I don't think I would get hired at ramp anytime soon, but I think it's closer and better and resonates more powerfully with an executive than if I'm just like, we can help you automate and speed your monthly close using AI. - Today's show is brought to you by Unify, which helps you prioritize the right accounts at the right time. Try this, stack your tier one highest intent leads at the front of your morning dial block. So if someone signs up for a trial, visits your pricing page, dial them first before any other accounts, before you open your Slack, your email, before anything. Unify makes it stupidly simple to surface those tier one accounts automatically. We built a guide with Unify on how to get 100% of BDRs to quota in 2026, go check it out in the show notes. Today's tactic is brought to you by attention, which uses AI to capture all of your sales interactions, automate sales busy work like CRM updates, and flag hidden deal risks. So if you wanna avoid ghosted deals, end every discovery call with these three questions. Number one, do you wanna buy? AKA, validate if the deal is real. Number two, when do you wanna buy? Validate if it will close this year. And then number three, how do you buy? Validate that they will get you in front of power. We put together a guide on how to unblock the three biggest deal blockers in your pipeline. There's a link to get it down in the show notes. - Today's show is brought to you by 11X, you're all in one digital GTM team handling, creating, qualifying and converting pipeline across every channel. If you are still using stale triggers like congrats on the funding, you're getting blended in with everybody else. The best use unique signals, exact linked in posts, negative product reviews, podcast appearances and use those as their trigger. And we built a growth playbook with our friends at 11X breaking this stuff down. You can get it for free at 11X.ai/30MPC or grab it in the show notes. - All right folks, let's wrap this thing up. So we talked about why you need to ditch your buzzwords, ditch your value proposition. Those words optimize streamline single source of truth. Those all don't work because they are what every other telemarketer is saying to describe their solution. They don't mean anything to your prospect. They fail the SNSN test. Sounds nice, but signifies nothing. And also, they don't give your prospect a pain or a problem upon which the value of your product has meaning. And so instead we talked about hitting your prospect with a problem proposition where you'd lead with a hairy, meaty, movie scene problem that includes the persona, the company, when the problem happens, the feeling associated with the problem as a way to hit them in the stomach and then say, "But wait, we can help you with just one sentence. This isn't a full product pitch. It's enough to make them say, yeah, I might want to learn more." And that's what your CTA is at the end of your problem proposition. Would you be open to learning more when I'm not cold calling you out of the blue? So if you liked this video, and one, I'd appreciate a subscribe on this channel. Two, we've got some resources in the description of this video that will help you build out a meaty or problem proposition for yourself. So hopefully this was a good start, but if you want to go deeper, check the description. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you on the next video. Today's show was brought to you by Nooks. Nooks is the AI-powered pipeline engine that researches your accounts, builds your target list, writes your emails, and gets you more live conversations on the phone. Thousands of reps at companies like HubSpot, seismic and deal use Nooks to automate the busy work and prospecting so they can focus on closing deals. Reps that use Nooks daily have twice as much pipeline as their peers, and we put together a guide with our friends at Nooks on how to automate the busy work and prospecting and dialing so you can focus on winning. Go get it for free at the link in the show notes.