Book Review – How to Win a Pitch

Joey Asher’s How to win a Pitch would be more accurately titled as How to Reinvigorate Your Sound Sales Strategy or How to Regain Your Contact With Reality.  Asher makes no claim to have a magic formula, no claim to a 12-step process to fill your pipe.  He promises work.  Sales requires effort – effort to listen, understand, assimilate client requirements and communicate that match to the client. 
 
HTWaP builds on 5 core components:  Focus on the Business Problem / Organize Around Three Memorable Points / Show Passion / Involve Your Audience in the Presentation / Rehearse, Rehearse, Rehears – matching the “pitch” a formal presentation to a client to a broad concept of the solution sales process.  Refreshingly, his approach avoids jargon, clichés, and focuses sales people on the common sense of engaging the prospect, communicating interest, and presenting yourself and the company as a credible information source. 
 
Asher spends an appropriate amount of time and emphasis on rehearsal.   The simple act of pulling the team together and walking through all aspects of a sales meeting gets overlooked in the vast majority of organizations and sales teams do not prioritize it.  If you read back over the life of The Sales Wars, you’ll see a good deal of success and failure in our posts can map to Asher’s book.  
 
Given the current economic situation, HTWaP resonates – salespeople do not need to focus on gimmicks – we need to actively listen, creatively engage, and understand our customers from the beginning of the process all the way through to the pitch.

Kevin Cahill