Pareto's rule about how the world works is a universal constant and works out concerning sales, as well. According to the University of Florida’s study, TOP sellers, who account for 20% of the total sales force of a company, make 80% of all its sales. This speaks to the fact that only a few employees have a top-scoring blend of soft skills - a kind of a natural talent for selling. But what to do about the remaining more than two-thirds of salespeople? How to train and motivate them and achieve higher KPIs and more closed deals?

The answer is - to provide employees with opportune incentives and roll-out of best selling practices. With regard to the latter, a well-designed lead generation pitch is a good point to start with.

Check this blog with 3 steps to create a lead generation pitch that will boost up sales, with mind mapping tips you can't miss.

Step 1. Know your audience

Work on your buyer persona and ideal customer profile

Whether you develop B2C or B2B lead generation strategies, always start with grasping who your target customer is. This is not only about identifying segmentation factors, such as gender or income. Understanding the client means to be aware of his or her personal traits, reaction to stimuli, “pains”, needs and wants. Because even if you perform a B2B lead generation, you sell to humans, who have frailties and desires, don’t you?

So, for a perfect lead generation pinch, it's advisable to create buyers’ profiles at first:

1. A buyer persona (on business-to-consumer)

A written portrait of a real person that may want to buy your company’s product or service.

“To create a perfect lead gen pitch, start with knowing the portrait of your customer”, source

Use a mind map to analyze a bit more on the buyer’s persona, and find out connections on the map and generate better strategiesstrategy to approach and communicate with the buyer.

This shall include both demographics and value judgments, e.g. life guidance, typical daily routine, and challenges. If you want to reach a broad audience, you may need to develop several Persona profiles.

2. ICP (on business-to-business)

A set of firmographics of the organization of your target. For example, its industry, number of employees, geography, etc.

With real people in mind, your selling story is more likely to be what they will react to and believe in.

Get in as many conversations as possible

To know how to sell, you need to talk to people. It is utterly backward to believe that CPMs or social media profiles can give details on the personality. "Fieldworks" are no less important than analytics - you only need to choose the proper channel for communication and the message. Try these positive receptions:

• congratulate leads’ with achievements, appreciate their skills or the work done, and discreetly ask about future plans, goals, or needs
• offer a value in return for sharing the information; for example, you can launch a customers survey and praise participants with discounts or free staff
• keep in touch; state holidays, anniversaries, birthdays are a great opportunity to email or send a greeting card and strengthen relationships.

Generate a targeted list of business contacts

Compelling lead databases is simple and tough - at the same time. The easiest approach is to pay for contacts. But how do you know that the database you buy contains working emails of real people - not disposable or counterfeit ones. You can take a step further and hire more employees - to scrape data from social media profiles. But this is neither a good option because manual search takes longer and is unreliable.

A way out is - to rely on dedicated software, like Snov.io, Sendinblue, Mailchimp, or any of your preferences. These “busy bees” will:

• automatically perform an email address search upon settings
• validate scraped email addresses
• schedule outreach and deliver content on specified time
• track campaigns’ performance and calculate metrics.

You can enhance emails with leads’ open personal data by using additional tools, for example, Expandi or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

Step 2. Craft your lead generation pitch

A great lead generation pitch takes a team, and mind map is an effective tool to track the progress, and assignment. Use the Icon to mark the person in charge and the task progress helps the team to stay on the same page. Use Boundary, Summary, and Relationship to display collaboration between the teams, and mark important notes on it.

Decide what design should it be

People get up to 90% of all information through their eyes, so the visual part of a pitch is no less important than its content. Whether you design a slide or handouts, pay attention to:

Colors
Blue, green, purple in combination with the white color is one of the most used in PowerPoint presentations and, probably, the best option for commercial addressing. They are intense enough yet do not tease eyes for too much, like bright yellow or deep red colors. The last two are best used to highlight numbers or facts that are rather negative. If you want to know more about colorways in Sales, read these LinkedIn guidelines.

Richness
As a general rule, do not overload pages, slides, or sentences with the evidence. Express 1-2 key points at a time, and don’t fall into details for too much. Remember, a client wants to hear about a solution - not a path it takes.

Length
Try to use pep talks where possible and for more substantial dialogues - stick to a 15-20 minutes interval. If you think you can’t compress a speech to that duration, a speech clearly has to be revised.

Decide what format should it be

A lead generation pitch shouldn’t necessarily be a meeting with a PowerPoint presentation. As the world switches to remote - use flexible formats:

• video calls - via Skype, Slack Video Calls, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, FreeConference, or other.
• interactive online PPTs - via Visme, Canva, Microsoft Events, Prezi, etc.
• shareable workspaces, like Notion, Weje, Miro, and others.

But if you do have a chance to run an offline meeting - don’t waste it. An eye-to-eye talk remains irreplaceable in terms of selling efficiency, even in the 21st century.

Get to the point fast

After a few introductory words, get to the point right away - don't waste too much time on polite talks. Start with conclusions and, if necessary, present arguments, facts, and sentiments after. Avoid wordy sentences and general phrases. Check out the difference:

“We have analyzed your competitors’ assortment, prevailing trends on the market, conducted customers satisfaction surveys, and upon these - we present a marketing strategy that’ll increase your company’s sales”

“This marketing strategy we offer will raise your sales by 30%. Grounding: a) competitors analysis, b) market analysis, c) customers’ satisfaction assessment”.

Use mind maps

A good way to neatly present what you offer is to create and share a mind map. This is a scheme where separate ideas or conclusions are shown as deriving from one another.

You can design it on your own, but a more time-saving approach would be - to pick up some good-looking template, for example, from the XMind’s Mindmap Gallery.

If you still prefer a slide format, Pitch Mode helps you to click and play your mind map right away, so that you can focus on your delivery instead of wasting time on formatting.

Insert statistics and infographics

In order to sound competent and genuine, add numbers to your story. Statistics can serve as evidence or an attention magnet, for example, if you show some unbelievable or shocking facts. “Did you know that 34% of adults sleep with a stuffed animal?” - start a pitch with something like this. Of course, the fact should be relevant to what you’re going to sell. Apart from internal sources, you can access information from:

• aggregators, like Statista
• scientific findings that are published on trusted resources, like Harvard Business School
• reputable media, like Forbes
• market reports provided by Big 4s, like PwC or McKinsey.

For ones who are curious about information accuracy, we suggest familiarizing themselves with a TED presentation on bad statistics.

Tell a real customer story

Facts work well, a customer success story works even better, and together they become a real combo for marketing. Instead of boring encouragement, tell a new lead how exactly other clients benefited from your company. Be specific and don’t use general phrases or figures. Compare:

“Our email marketing tool has helped thousands of marketers around the globe”

“The company X has reported a 25% increase in open ratio because of a faster email search that we offer”.

Encourage satisfied customers to leave testimonials on your website, so you can always refer to these.

Show current growth and progress

Graphs with trend lines work well also, so if you have data to build these - do it. Different graph types serve distinct purposes:

• Present time series, for example, monthly sales growth - a line chart 
• Show segments - a pie chart
• Compare - area, radar, or bar charts 
• Show a relative position - a scatter plot.

Provide clear visuals

It's better to use copyright-free images, ones that you can find on Unsplash, Shutterstock, or similar platforms. You can additionally include trending memes or funny pictures - to win over the listeners. Two important notes here: pictures must complement, not top your storytelling. And they shouldn’t appear somehow offensive or discriminatory.

Highlight benefits, not features

Sales lead generation is an arduous task - a salesman has to flatter a product itself, and, at the same time, show how it will solve a particular client’s problem. Never list benefits on their own - enhance them with examples:

“our production line is now faster, so you can increase daily production by 20% or more”

“we use cloud storage, so you can access and share files with colleagues effortlessly”.

Use analytics tools

While A\B testing is principally used in the development of websites or ad creatives, you can practice this smart approach for lead generation pitches as well. Monitor content effectiveness and see what customers react to most:

• Do they like monetary or in-kind incentives?
• Do they react to hard facts alone?
• Do they prefer formal or intimate communication? etc.

Step 3. Send out your pitch

After spadework is finished, email or share a text link to the pitch with customers. If possible, organize follow-ups, Q&As, or - some better ways to collect reactions, questions, opinions from your audience. Feedback is very important - it will serve as a source for improving future pitches and developing your soft skills.

We've build a mind map based on this article, you can click and download to view all the branches when crafting your pitch.

We hope we’ve shed some light on how to create lead generation pitches that will put together your selling efforts. In our humble opinion, the key lies in giving a human face to one’s speech and owning the numbers. The rest is up to visualizing and your audience's willingness to hear you.