This is the first in a series on the fastest ways to kill a sale before it ever gets started.
At Antimatter Consulting, we spend a lot of time teaching reps how to pitch products. I’m a big believer that “winging it” is a bad idea. Sure, people hate PowerPoint, but having a 45-minute conversation with a prospect without ever explaining your basic capabilities doesn’t work either.
But there’s a problem. Once a rep has spent some hours honing that new pitch, they REALLY want to deliver it. And they will. To anyone. At any moment. Whether anyone asked or not.
Reps can’t win a deal on charm. But they can blow any chance of getting in the door by jumping into a pitch when nobody asked.
Scene 1 · A first call. The CTO picked up because a mutual contact passed along his name. The rep has been polishing the deck for a week.
Rep “Hi Dan, thanks for taking the call. So, just to give you a little background on us: CloudServe is a Premier Tier AWS partner. We’ve got over 200 certified engineers. We were founded in 2009, we’ve done more than 400 migrations, we hold competencies in security, DevOps, and data and analytics, and we were just named to the Inc. 5000 for the third year in a row. We work across healthcare, financial services, retail…”
Four minutes in. The CTO has not said a word since hello.
CTO “Sorry, what was this call about?”
I’ve sat in on that call more times than I’d like to admit. The rep wasn’t lazy. He wasn’t unprepared. He was over-prepared, and he had nowhere to put it.
Sound familiar? Have you ever listened to one of your reps open a call and wished you could reach through the phone and hit pause? Yeah, we’ve been there.
Think about what the CTO is doing during those four minutes. He’s deciding how painful the next few weeks are going to be if he lets this person into his calendar. Every sentence of that monologue is a vote for “very.”
Early sales conversations are about getting permission. The prospect decides in the first two minutes whether you get to keep talking. The pitch comes later, after they’ve told you what they care about, and only if it’s relevant.
Here’s the version that works. Same rep, same CTO, same deck sitting in the next tab.
Disarming opener.
“James Roarty gave me your name, so if you hang up now I’ll completely understand.” (Read the room. Say something brief and human. Give them a reason to smile before you give them a reason to listen.)
Permission to engage.
“I saw you guys just acquired TechSoft, so I’m guessing Q1 is absolutely insane right now. I used to work with them, and if you have two minutes I’d love to ask a quick question about the merger.” (Be direct and confident, but give them a safe way out if the timing is wrong. They’ll remember that you offered.)
Open question with a compliment.
“I hear you’re kind of the brains behind the operation. Are you involved in the whole integration project?” (Make the conversation about them. Now they’re talking, and you’re learning what the deck should actually be about.)
About me.
“My company, CloudServe, usually comes in right after an acquisition and helps assess all the new apps and architecture. Then we offer migration, app refactoring, and ongoing security and operations support.” (Be honest, don’t brag, leave them wanting more.)
See? They got the elevator pitch in after all, but only after the conversation led there. Four sentences of background instead of four minutes, and every one of them tied to something the CTO just said.
Timing is everything.
Teach your reps to pitch. Then teach them to wait for it. The deck is what you earn with a good first two minutes.
At Antimatter, we help sales reps figure out when to pitch and when to shut up. It’s one of the most valuable things we do, and the results show up in their pipeline. If your reps are launching into their decks before the prospect has said ten words, let’s talk.
Next up in Sales Suicide Vol. 2: The Corporate Word Salad.
“We provide your organization with a canonical reference architecture for scalable enterprise innovation.”
“Ah… Ma’am, this is a Waffle House.”