Selling Services? Get your pitch right!

 B2B Service Providers face far greater challenges than their product selling cousins. When you’re selling a product it is easy to show samples and build expectations, it is easier to build a pricing logic and end of the day the tangibility factor - the what you see is what you get syndrome that works wonders and eases the selling pains. When it comes to competitive analysis, it is simple to work around features and score brownies vis a vis your competition.
Now consider the context of selling B2B services. You are offering the intangible. There is nothing to showcase other than perhaps a few laurels from the past. So how do you make a high impact presentations and impress upon your capabilities on the prospects?

There are clearly two strategies that one can pursue, the first being, play by the market rules and take that wafer thin margin home- and you are just any other service provider. If you are happy with this then you need to acquire more business volume and a scaling up strategy should work for you. However, you will have created a passive loyalist for your business at best and you have to initiate sales from a scratch with even repeat clients and beat down competition each time.

The better option is to customise your services as per the needs of the clients. This is a tricky one, it will fetch you better margins and a sense of accomplishment at a job well done. The client goes home delighted and you should expect more business from the same client. Next time around the client has confidence in your abilities and hence the competition ceases to be much of a factor and you have acquired for yourself an Active Loyalist.

So how do you address the issue of pitching for business the first time and then subsequently? The first pitch is the most tricky one, most of the prospects are not ready to open up completely and explain the problem to you and yet they expect to hear great solutions from you. You need to be patient and glean out what you can from your discussions with them.
Then comes the first formal pitch. In order to make that high impact presentation, you need to understand the product from the Consumer’s angle and for that it is always a good idea to conduct a research- and not just a dipstick research, but a formal one albeit with a smaller universe. Once you are clear what the Consumer wants, you are in a better position to pitch for the client’s business, because you will then understand the consumer much better than your competitor.

If your deliverables have a line of sight to the Consumer, the client is bound to sit up and take note of your offerings. Vox Populi is a great idea to catch the client’s attention. However, they should be real people in the markets that are interviewed rather than easily available friends and family. Once you have key take aways from the consumer research, you should build your deliverables’ strategy in lines with those.

With an understanding and a killer strategy like that, not only do you stand better chances of securing the business but also can hope to get better prices for your services than your competitor on account of your better understanding of the consumer and all the hard work and investments in the pitch are rewarded. Subsequently, the client will always prefer you to the competition- but a consumer research should not be discounted even then!

Most importantly, when you create solutions that work well, it is you that is the happiest, isn’t it? And oh Yeah! All the best for, when you fall in that cash vortex ;)