The Sales Pitch is the single biggest difference between your biggest competitor and you. Getting the sales pitch right 10x’es impact. Marketers don’t like having their work reduced to a simple sales pitch.

I know because I’m a former marketer who now realizes we share most of our 🧬 with salespeople. It’s an uncomfortable idea but I hope to change your mind.

Why Marketers Dislike Thinking in Terms of Sales Pitches

Marketers like to think of themselves as brand builders, not salespeople. Brand building is cool and prestigious, sales is a hustle. There’s a war going on between marketing and sales.

I love marketers, but on this point, they are wrong. Here’s why:

In 2020, Wolfgang Digital analyzed 130 million website sessions, over €330 million in online revenue, and calculated the average session duration (time on site) for all of eCommerce at 2 minutes and 32 seconds (source).

To put this in perspective, their 2019 report had the average session duration at 3 minutes 1 second.

If the visitor is going to linger for just 2 minutes and 32 seconds you can’t rely on the show process of a brand story, you need a direct marketing approach. You need to present your sales pitch.

This Connection Isn’t New

It’s 2022 but in 1904 the great ad man John E. Kennedy described advertising as ‘salesmanship in print’.

How did we end up unlearning this?

Why Does the Sales Pitch Matter?

Shoppers are exposed to an uncomfortable number of ads every 24 hours. It’s not humanly possible for them to evaluate the merits of each marketing pitch they encounter. As a result, our brains have developed mental shortcuts to navigate this neon maze.

How We Stumbled on the Importance of the Sales Pitch

We didn’t start our A/B testing journey thinking about sales pitches or copywriting. Like every other A/B testing marketing firm, we experimented with layout and design tweaks. But the results were uninteresting and marginal.

Then one day, we ran a test for a client (a cherry supplement brand) where we adjusted the copy on the product page. The results were astounding. At that very moment, in 2013, I knew I was on a completely different journey from my peers.

It Was Fucking Hard

I didn’t learn copywriting at college (I’m an engineer) so I had to literally start from the ground up. I read dozens of books– most didn’t help. So I started formulating my own ideas about what a good sales pitch should contain.

At first, we developed a list of 16 elements of a sales pitch. We gradually trimmed them down to 12. Then expanded out to 18 (I can’t even remember the final count we ended with.)

It was a constant inspiration –> hopelessness –> inspiration treadmill.

That’s When I Found Joseph Sugarman

In the previous section, I talked about how the copywriting books I was reading didn’t help. That’s not the whole story because after lots of disappointments I found this book:

Discovering the book taught me I was on the right path. Thinking of marketing as a sales pitch is how Joseph Sugarman made his millions. Equally pleasing was learning that the copywriting methodology we had been toiling away at was very similar to the structure Mr. Sugarman was using to run his highly successful mail-order business. We were in the right zip code.

What Your Sales Pitch Really Is

Your sales pitch isn’t just a throwaway statement like we make good quality air purifiers, trust us.

It is an articulation of your expertise and evidence of your understanding of the buyer’s problem.

The buyer must fully buy into your vision– or your vision is dead on arrival.

So our sales pitch is doing a lot of heavy lifting.

You need to test 40 different ideas to find the version that will fundamentally change the trajectory of your business.

You need to invest your entire creative energy into discovering the words that have the ability to bypass your buyer’s BS filter and attach to their brain.

The challenge isn’t that you don’t know what makes you special. The challenge is that your broadcast frequency may not match the user’s receiving antenna.

Increasing transmission power doesn’t help. We need to tune transmission frequencies.

It’s kinda like unlocking a safe, we need to find the right combination.

Balancing Act

Your reader can’t feel they are experiencing a sales pitch. If they do it will dramatically reduce impact. So that’s the balancing act– deliver a sales pitch without it feeling like one. Stick around and we’ll reveal the secret to that delicate dance.

Why Go Through So Much Effort?

Because once you find the perfect sales pitch your brand is immune to competition. That isn’t worth a few thousand dollars, it’s worth 2x your current annual profits.

And the impact of our discovery goes beyond the message shown on the site. It will transform the efficiency of your advertising (because you will now have new hooks to pull in passing traffic), it will impact how you do email marketing, and it will impact how your customer service team talks to buyers.

Next Steps

Now that we’ve (hopefully) been able to establish that conversion copywriting is nothing but a sales pitch we need to discuss ideas to build a killer sales pitch. To do this we will need to unlearn everything we’ve been taught and look at neighboring practices for inspiration. Let’s first start by seeing what conversion copywriters can learn from debaters. That’s covered here: Debating and Conversion Copywriting.