A pitch slap is what happens when you’re having a conversation with someone and they suddenly hit you with a sales pitch.
Most people hate falling victim to a pitch slap, and yet it’s still a surprisingly common approach amongst salespeople and marketers. Many of them use automated tools and CRM systems to help them.
One of the most common ways that people deliver a pitch slap is to use a “spray and pray” approach to reach out to as many people as possible with a cold sales message. There are even vendors out there that help salespeople to automatically reach out to people on sites like LinkedIn at a high volume.
It’s easy to identify if you’ve fallen victim to a pitch slap.
The classic sign is that you start out thinking that you’re having a meaningful conversation, only for them to hit you with an aggressive sales pitch.
To avoid pitch slapping, instead of only talking to people because you want to sell to them, try to build genuine relationships with people. Get to know them and what makes them tick, and if you do want to sell your company to them, wait until you’ve already established some common ground and lead by identifying their pain points and addressing them.
Does pitch slapping work?
No, not really.
You might have the occasional success if you reach out to enough people, but you also risk doing a lot of damage to your brand and getting a well-deserved reputation as a spammer.
It’s much better to take it slowly and to build relationships with people instead of going straight in for the sell.
Why do people use pitch slapping?
The most common reason why people turn to pitch slapping is that their priorities aren’t aligned with their business goals or they’ve set key performance indicators (KPIs) that don’t tie in with what they’re actually trying to achieve. For example, if someone measures their performance based on how many people they’ve reached out to, pitch slapping makes a lot of sense. If their goal is to actually bring in business, pitch slapping is inefficient at best and outright harmful at worst.
