Pitching is: establishing what you are going to say.
Diagnostic Selling is: establishing what is missing.
That is the whole difference. And it changes everything that comes after it.
Underneath every decision sit three conditions. If one of them is missing, nothing happens, however many arguments you throw at it.
Stake
The reason to move. Not yours, his. You find it in the conversation before a solution is on the table.
If you cannot find it, you stop there. That is the cheapest decision you will take all week.
Trust
It does not come from a reference but from the size of the step. Small enough to take on his own, without a board meeting and without procurement.
If the amount is too high, the offer gets smaller, not the price. A discount lowers the amount, not the risk.
Urgency
You do not make it. You lay all the problems side by side and let him say which one takes priority.
Then he names his own urgency, and you do not have to invent a deadline that no one believes anyway.
And only then the paperwork
Only once those three are in place does the decision fall. And it falls in a conversation, not on paper.
The contract merely records what has already been agreed. That is why proposals do not sit around in this method: there is nothing left in them for the customer to weigh up.
The full working-out, with the six steps and two cases from practice, is on Diagnostic Selling.