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Chapters

Overview

Whether it’s a 1-sentence elevator pitch or a 40-minute sales presentation, a compelling pitch and origin story is a foundational component of any strong sales motion. This guide will walk you through how to create a pitch and how to leverage discovery questions to proactively direct talking points to address customer needs.

About Peter Wooster


Peter has 25 years of Tech Sales and Executive Management experience. He founded Wooster Advisors 8 years ago to help early-stage and growth-stage technology companies with setting-up and growing Sales and Customer Success. He has advised over 85 venture-backed companies to date.

Prior to Wooster Advisors, Peter was the Chief Revenue Officer for Marin Software, where he grew revenue from $0-$80 mill and was part of the Executive Management Team that completed a successful initial public offering (MRIN). Joining salesforce.com in 1999, he was the founding member of the sales organization (15th employee overall). Peter was responsible for Strategic Accounts as well as building the first ever SaaS sales team. He was at salesforce.com for 4+ years and was a member of the sales organization during the IPO.


Key Terms

Included below are a variety of key terms that we'll cover throughout this guide.


Optimizing the Sales Process

There are 5 distinct stages of a sales process - Prospecting, Discovery, Presentation & Demo, Closing & Follow Up, and Onboarding. Throughout each stage, your pitch and discovery questions should be used to engage the customer and fine tune your message to their needs, ultimately with the goal of successfully closing the deal.

Compelling Pitch or Origin Story

Your pitch helps educate the customer on your product: what it is, why it exists, why you were the founder/team to build it, and how it relates to the customer’s pain. 

When first meeting a customer, expect them to have little awareness or interest in you or your product. Additionally, as you progress in your sales motion and involve more team members in your demos and presentations, jumping straight into a demo and failing to keep everyone up-to-speed can result in a lost deal. 

Discovery Questions

By the end of each interaction, you and the potential customer should have a mutual understanding that your product is a match. Discovery questions can help you understand customer pain points and determine if your product is the right fit, and if so, discovery questions can help anticipate next steps and objections as you move them forward in the sales process.

Crafting Your Pitch

In order to create your pitch, you need to make sure to clearly and concisely describe the product, hook the potential customer with your background, recognize the customer’s pain points, and leave questions until after the pitch. Here are a couple of steps to help you create a pitch. 

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Determine Your Product Type

Depending on your industry and the customer you're talking to, your product will fall into one of two categories: disruptor or evangelist. It's important to determine your product type early-on in the conversation and to adjust your messaging to fit.

Disruptor

Disruptor products are products that are part of an existing product category. Typically, prospects are aware of the problem you’re solving, and there’s often competition in the space. 

When you’re a disruptor product, you should focus your pitch on your product benefits (v. alternatives). When you ask discovery questions, you should tailor your questions to figure out what’s broken with their current workflow. Because they are more familiar with the space, you can quickly move to the sales presentation / demo stage. 

Evangelist

These are category-creator products. Prospects may not be aware that they have a problem or that the problem is solvable, and competitors are unlikely to exist. 

Focus your pitch on educating the prospect that they have a problem AND that they value solving it. Discovery questions should focus on the pain in their current workflow. Once you convince the prospect of this pain point and need a solution, you can go through your sales process as if you are a disruptor product.

Outline Your Core Message

Every pitch should follow a similar structure -

Here’s an example we created using the company, Tome and their 43 million series B funding announcement: 

“Hi, [Name], 

Great to meet you. I’m the founder of Tome, an AI-powered storytelling tool that lets anyone create compelling stories. 

My co-founder and I realized that the current methods of creating and delivering presentations were outdated and hard to maneuver. Creators and teams often spend countless hours tinkering their presentations only to make them look marginally better, and, ultimately, these creators are unable to achieve the desired impact on their audience. 

Through our work at Instagram and Messenger, we realized there was a better and faster way to tell stories. Tome has beautiful, modern creation tools that are powerful and easy-to-use for anyone. For example, our text tool automatically beautifies text,saving you the time to search for the perfect font or adjust letter spacing and shadows. Our table feature is also simple, useful, and powerful.

Tome is seamless to incorporate into your team's workflow, and we have a dedicated Customer Success team to help you onboard. 

Can I ask you some questions about your current presentation workflow and learn how Tome can make it more seamless for you? "

Why This Framework Works

Many founders or salespeople fail because they start their pitches by asking questions right away. If the first thing you ask the customer is, “How do you perform X today?,” you may waste their time, since you're not providing a baseline understanding of what your product is and they have no context to give you a relevant answer. A better approach would be to share your pitch first and then ask how they perform their current workflow. This way, the customer is intrigued and their responses will be more specific. 

Providing a simple understanding of your product, an engaging personal hook, and asking questions at the end can set the stage for a more meaningful interaction.

Using Your Pitch

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Discovery Questions

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Assessing Outcomes

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