A Guide to the Perfect Pitch

Wassup, and welcome, to Revenews edition number 5️⃣.

🙅‍♂️ Sales is a divisive job, some love it, some hate it, some judge it, and some envy it. Regardless, improving your audience pitching prowess is always going to be a net positive…

Selling the importance of sales aside, lets dive in! 🚀

1. How the ideal pitch should go when selling your audience

2. My 2 favourite small newsletters

3. $1m with less than 100k subs, and other news

4. 1 meme plus my favourite tools for newsletter-ing

^{🤷‍♂️ How should you pitch your audience?}

Today we’re going to look at the ideal pitch structure, plus have a closer look at each stage.

I am referring to a typical outbound deal here, so let’s set the scene…

• Because you read my guide to cold outreach, you’ve been smashing it, and have bagged yourself a meeting.

• The brand in question, knows a little bit about you from your brief exchange of 2/3 emails. But, they hadn’t heard of you before you reached out.

I could/should probably do a deep dive newsletter on each stage alone.

🔒 Meeting Structure

📝 Pre-call prep. Research, set up your notes, make sure the invite’s correct.

💬 Chit chat. Most people deem 2-10 mins of small talk 100% necessary, I ran a poll this week, which is screenshot below.

❓ Question time. Ask discovery questions, to learn their team/individual goals, ICP, challenges, LTV, CAC, and so on. The most important part of the call.

😎 Pitch. Showcase your company, content, audience and the campaigns. Use what you’ve just learnt to get them excited!

🧠 Objection handling. They’ll inevitably have questions/objections, you need to approach these correctly. Which requires emotional discipline.

🤝Close. Finish the call by making sure you have key bits of info, more on this later.

Now, let’s zoom in… 🔎

🫡 Pre-call prep

Your outreach was of a high quality, which is crucial as it will influence their mindset. Think about it, when you’ve received a cold email that you’re 99% sure was part of huge sequence, you don’t exactly have warm fuzzy feelings towards the sender. Even when it’s relevant to you, you enter the sales conversation with a higher degree of skepticism.

Conversely, if you were impressed by the email, it was tailored, concise, and made industry-sense, you’re naturally more forthcoming and open in the subsequent sales conversation.

Research. You don’t have to hire a private investigator, but spend at least 5/10 minutes understanding:

• Their business, and what segment of your audience is most relevant.

• The individual, their role, professional history, where they’ve worked/studied. Common ground is great.

• Previous campaigns, WhoSponsorsStuff is great for newsletters. MediaRadar is also good, mainly for enterprise prospects, and not amazing for newsletters.

• Fundraising, hiring, products launches, and other news.

If the meeting is scheduled more than few days after booking, checking in with them can be a good idea. Sending a relevant case study or interesting audience stat is nice (and easy). Data shows that winning deals have a higher email velocity (awesome research here), i.e. the more email back and forth, the more likely you’ll win the deal. Sounds obvious, but useful to know.

Don’t bother them too much, and make sure you have something interesting to say. Also, if you’re not completely sure of their ICP then you run the risk of putting them off the audience with an irrelevant stat or case study. In that case, just leave it.

BE ON TIME. Non negotiable. For some reason, it’s seems to be the norm to be 1-3 mins late to remote meetings. Don’t be that guy/gal. BE ON TIME.

🫣  Small talk - big effect

The most important part is to ‘read the room’. Some people are super chatty, some people are quite the opposite. Recognise this and tailor the length/style of small talk to suit them. Read Surrounded by Idiots for a great understanding on different personality types in a business setting.

Be yourself. It sounds cheesy, but pretending to be someone/something you’re not will come across as desperate, or just weird.

Humanise yourself. One interesting approach is to tell an embarrassing/vulnerable story. Personally, this doesn’t really suit me, so I don’t like it, but I’ve seen it build rapport really effectively for others.

🖇️ Question time

The most important part, usually referred to as discovery questions. The purpose in traditional (or tech) sales, is to unearth relevant problems and pain points, to then pitch your product as the solution.

However, you’re selling an audience/campaign, not a product that saves time/money, which is why this doesn’t quite directly apply.

The best way to think about the goal here, is that you’re unearthing the prospect’s ICP, budget, marketing goals, KPI, etc. You’re then pitching your audience and campaign in line with everything you’ve just learnt.

Of course, if you do uncover a pain point that your newsletter campaign can help solve, then use it. Two examples could be, if the prospect is complaining about low LTV, or they’re struggling to resonate with a particular demographic which you reach. In this case, you could showcase an example of a partner seeing high LTV, or focus the pitch on the specific audience segment, and how much they love your content.

🐣 Pitching

Practice telling the story behind your content, get them excited whilst showcasing your expertise. Was the founder previously at Goldman Sachs? How did the newsletter start, or did it evolve naturally? Establish yourself as THE expert is the topic, with a unique insight that no-one else has.

Practise pitching your audience from different perspectives. You’ll want to describe your readers very differently if you’re pitching to an investing platform, versus a b2b software company. Both sides of the audience are true, but focus on the stats that matter to the prospect.

When describing the campaign speak their language, use their terminology and goals (which they’ve just told you). Showcase successful case studies and pitch them the most appropriate package to achieve their goals.

🧠 Objection Handling

You’ll inevitably experience pushback around certain aspects. Common ones include:

• You’re too expensive

• Not sure it’s the right audience

• Can we start with affiliate/performance?

• A previous newsletter campaign went badly

Your gut tells you to handle objections like: “no, you’re actually incorrect, and this is why…”.

But, the best way to approach objections:

• Listen properly, agree with them, smile, say ‘good point’.

• Probe deeper into their point with polite counter-questions, what are they comparing you to? Why do they think this way?

• Once you know more context, you can differentiate yourself and explain why they’re wrong, without actually telling them they’re wrong.

• Confirm with them that they’re happy with the solution to this hurdle, and then move on.

Here’s a great article on objection handling.

👊 Closing

Finish strong, depending on how well the pitch has gone, you want to push the sale along, but you don’t want to be too pushy or presumptive.

If you haven’t already, ideally you’ll want to establish:

• Their budget, or the desired package size. This can be a range.

• The timeline of the campaign.

• Their decision-making process. Do they need approvals? Lawyers to chat with? This is more important with larger companies/bigger deals.

• Clearly established next steps. How many options are you proposing? Try to have a another call booked before you hang up, it’ll instil some urgency, and prevent you endlessly chasing with no idea of they’re mindset.

Caveat - Of course, not every pitch will go exactly like this, which isn’t necessarily a negative sign. This is just an outline of something you can aim towards, if the conversation takes a different turn or structure, roll with it. You don’t want to come across as scripted or robotic, after all a sales conversation is still a conversation.

🧐 Recommended Reading

Email magic - Written by a 7-figure entrepreneur, Email Magic helps new entrepreneurs to grow and monetize their email lists. Sign up, and get insightful and entertaining emails a couple of times per week.

Remote Revenues - is the ultimate weekly newsletter for digital nomads and remote workers who want to learn how to buy their first niche website or SaaS business. Shlomo shares his expertise on identifying hidden gems, avoiding pitfalls, and maximising your returns.

📰 Newsletter News

🤝 How one newsletter got acquired.

📈 How Houck grew to $80k subs and $1m revenew.

👨‍🎓 5 LinkedIn accounts that have taught me something new, here.

👂Mastering efficient organic growth, on the Send & Grow podcast.

👏 Learn from the best newsletter growth ads here

🤣 Inbox Banter

When someone hasn’t opened your newsletter in a month…