Key to Closing a Sale: Don't Be Overly Professional

There are a million books on how to improve your sales pitch, and most teach you tricks that are off-putting. Jill Konrath on HubSpot has a radical suggestion: don't be too professional — it won't, despite what the books say, increase your chances of making the sale.

You can't, for example, just be "nice" and throw around a lot of industry jargon. You have to do the hard work: roll up your sleeves and prove to a prospective customer that you "know" their industry. This means studying up on the latest industry news so that you can bring the company ideas. You need to come across as one of the customer's colleagues.

To sell, you need to stop selling, argues Konrath. If your calls are immediately met with, “We're happy with our current vendor,” then maybe that's a signal to reinvent your pitch. Another red flag, says Konrath: pitches that are littered with terms like “one-stop shopping, industry leader, user-friendly, scalable, best-in-class, robust, or innovative."

She's not trying to kill all the best weapons in your sales arsenal. She wants to turn you from a sales person to a marketer. She's even implying that you don't really love selling, just making the sale. But a marketer needs to show the value of what the prospect is missing. That requires you to be many things at once — expert, colleague, adviser, friend and tour guide. This also requires the conversation to be more about them than about your company.