Sales Presentations For Dummies
Overview
Are your sales presentations stuck in the 20th century?
Sales Presentations For Dummies rises to the challenge of guiding you through the process of engaging and persuading busy buyers in a world that's constantly bombarding them with sales pitches. Motivating today's buyers to pull the trigger on a new deal requires a certain set of skills, and this straightforward text guides you through what you need to know to create and deliver compelling presentations. Pulled from examples and experiences of thousands of actual sales presentations, the information in this innovative resource offers the tools and tips you need to keep your leads engaged from hook to call to action.
Today's business landscape is competitive. When your sales presentation is being compared to countless others, it's important to stand
out for all the right reasons. Instead of using dated sales approaches,, update your understanding of the art of selling—and create compelling, engaging presentations that hook audience members from the beginning.
- Leverage a proven, blockbuster formula that engages audiences in any industry
- Use the power of storytelling to connect with prospective clients and soften their resistance to your sales pitch
- Understand and apply customer insights to ensure that your solution is top-of-mind in purchasing decisions
- Update your professional skill set to encompass today's most motivating sales tactics
Sales Presentations For Dummies brings your sales style into the 21st century and connects you with the skills you need to excel in today's complicated business landscape.
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About The Author
Julie Hansen, who is recognized as the "Sales Presentation Expert," redefines the typical sales presentation and helps salespeople apply best practices. She leverages the power that performers have been using for centuries to engage and move audiences.
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sales presentations for dummies
CHEAT SHEET
A successful sales presentation must grab your prospect’s attention and make a compelling case for him to take the next step in the sales process. Winning presentations don’t happen by chance. Make sure your next sales presentation is designed to persuade and engage today’s busy decision makers by keeping the following checklists handy as you plan, build, and deliver your sales presentation.
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Although running a smooth, professional PowerPoint presentation may not win you a standing ovation, searching for slides, making awkward transitions, or showing off your desktop can give you some bad reviews. A wealth of information on how to create effective PowerPoint slides is available online and in bookstores; however, decidedly less is available on how to interact and deliver PowerPoint presentations.
In a perfect world you’d have weeks to prepare for every sales presentation, but you don’t live in a perfect world. Opportunities can present themselves with little or no notice. Following are ten things you can do right now that will have a big impact on the success of your presentation.
Know your first line.
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Though more than 40 percent of the American adult population owns a tablet, you still can ride on a certain novelty wave if you use your tablet to give a presentation or demonstration. Tablets are lightweight, fast, and flexible, and they set a less formal tone for smaller or more casual presentations.
And by allowing you to walk around, switch between applications, use a whiteboard, and do other cool options, they can create a more interactive presentation.
Despite all your best efforts, the ugly truth is that if you do enough presentations, at some point, something will go wrong. Your presentation material will malfunction or disappear. Projectors will refuse to communicate with your laptop. Your demo will freeze. Vital team members will miss a flight. The way in which you handle unforeseen circumstances or mistakes can make or break your presentation.
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Whether your presentation is 20 minutes or two days, virtual or live, it must answer one or both of two central questions in your prospect’s mind. Which question you address can help you decide what information to include in your opening, body, and closing and how to position your message in response. The two questions are
Why should I buy this product or service?
When was the last time you gave a sales presentation and the prospect signed the contract at the end? If you’re selling a complex or high-priced solution, it may never happen. For many products and services decision makers may not get together for days, weeks, or even months to discuss your proposal. In the meantime, your prospect has seen additional vendors and had to address new demands and challenges.
Prospects are used to being told things in a sales presentation. Stories are an effective way to shake things up and show your prospects, rather than tell them. A relevant, well-told story can gain your prospect’s attention, soften her position, drive home a key message, and differentiate you and your solution.
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Following are nine key areas of information that you need to tailor your sales presentation to your prospect and examples of how to apply them on short notice.
Identifying the challenge or opportunity
You may have a good idea of what your prospect's business challenge is but it's important not to make any assumptions at this early stage.
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A sales presentation that is tailored to address your prospect’s unique needs and interests is a prerequisite for success. Use the following checklist to help you gather key information about your prospect and the opportunity.
The opportunity
___ Identify the opportunity.
___ Qualify the prospect.
___ Set an actionable goal.
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Based on what you know about declining attention spans, the smart strategy is to have a structure that renews your audience's attention every seven minutes. You don't want to wait 10 minutes, when your audience is at their lowest attention point, and you don't want to do it too often or you'll make your audience jumpy.
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An opening to your sales presentation should have a natural, conversational flow to it; however, it still has some distinct parts. Here are the foundational blocks that put together, form a strong, memorable opening:
Hook: A hook in your presentation draws the audience in and gets them interested or curious enough to give you their full attention.
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The best slides tell a story, but that story can get miscommunicated or lost on your prospect if your presentation slide is unclear or difficult to read. Subject each slide in your deck to these guidelines to make sure that you’re using your valuable real estate wisely.
Keep one message per slide.
No more than six lines of text.
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By applying some of these simple preparation strategies you can streamline your process and improve the impact and outcome of your sales presentation. Too many great concepts fail to execute because of a lack of preparation.
Creating dynamic presentation material
You probably have sat through your share of deadly PowerPoint presentations with their many bullet points, bouncing shapes, and dizzying animations.
You can give your sales presentation an even more polished look by adding a theme. A theme is a unifying idea or motif that embodies your prospect's objectives, your value proposition, or your competitive advantage. It's typically very short — one to four words — and lends itself to a clear visual image.
Although used prominently in your opening and closing, a theme runs like a thread throughout the rest of your presentation, even influencing your slide design and messaging.
Your sales presentation needs to build a persuasive case for the value of your product or service that resonates with your prospect. How do you determine what value to build your presentation around? In the planning process you uncover a lot of valuable information that you can now start to apply, including:
Impact: Impact answers how the problem is currently affecting your prospect or his organization and how your solution can resolve it.
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A discovery conversation is a one-on-one meeting or phone call with someone in your prospect's organization who can provide insight or shed light on the challenge you're addressing in your presentation. Don't be shy about asking for input. It's a fair and reasonable request that benefits not only you, but also the prospect.
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You want to match up value to the needs and interests of your sales prospect. For example, although you would certainly want to talk to members of the administrative team about how fast a feature can help them accomplish a task, this message won't wow the executive members of your audience. You need to further tailor your value proposition to the people who will be in your audience, including:
Problem owners: These are typically end users — the people within the prospect's company who are living with the problem and likely will be using your product or service.
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The key to a great discovery meeting prior to your sales presentation is knowing what you want to find out and leaving room for your prospect to surprise you. For example, you may uncover additional challenges, competitive insights, or strategic goals that help you more closely align with your prospect's needs.
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Each topic you cover must contribute to creating a sense of urgency within your prospect to get the problem resolved and get it resolved now. Not someday. Watching some salespeople deliver the body of a presentation would make one think it didn't matter one way or the other if the salesperson received her commission next month or next year.
A value proposition is a clear statement of the results that the prospect can expect to receive from your product or service. Because your sales presentation will be organized around this value proposition, spend the time necessary to get it right.
A weak value proposition leads to a weak presentation with very little persuasive power, whereas a faulty value proposition can lead your prospect right into the waiting hands of your competition.
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Knowing how you stack up against your competition is important as you start to develop your sales presentation. Getting an accurate handle on your competitors' strengths and weaknesses helps you position your product or service accordingly and highlight key differentiators. Here are some areas in which you'll want to look:
Product: What are their primary capabilities and how do you rank against each?
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Logic is never enough in sales. If it were, closing ratios would be through the roof. You must also present your case in a way that triggers your prospect's emotions. The most persuasive cases are a combination of logic and emotion.
Although salespeople may give emotion some attention during the opening and closing of their presentations, they often forget about engaging their prospect on an emotional level during the middle of their presentation.
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As a salesperson, you may have a knee jerk reaction to say yes to any opportunity to present your product or service to a potential customer. With the amount of time and energy that go into pursuing many business opportunities today, you need to make sure that the prospect is qualified and the opportunity is viable before you start to commit limited resources.
Coming up with a theme for your sales presentation is a creative endeavor, and you can approach it in a number of ways. Here are some suggestions to help you find the right theme:
Brainstorm
If you're working as a team, plan a brainstorming session with one rule: There are no bad ideas! If you can't all get together in one place, have everyone list off ten ideas and submit them via email by a certain date.
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Getting your prospect's attention is easy compared to keeping her attention. If you don't work to maintain your prospect's attention and keep it from lapsing throughout the body of your presentation, you're at risk of having your case thrown out and being charged with the crime of committing a boring presentation.
You need a sales presentation with a persuasive structure that leads to action. Hordes of data sandwiched between a company overview and an awkward "any questions?" closing neither engages nor persuades today's prospects.
Hook them with the opening
Fair or not, during those critical first few seconds during your opening, your prospect is evaluating you, making decisions about how and whether they are going to listen to you.
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Keeping prospect’s engaged during a sales presentation is an ongoing challenge, and you need as many good tools in your toolkit as you can find. Gamification — using elements from game playing, like scoring, rules, and team activity — is a hot topic, especially in e-learning where it’s proven to be extremely effective at helping people learn and retain information.
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The three part structure — an opening, a body, and a conclusion — is the basis of most presentations, speeches, film, television, and theater. Invented by Aristotle, it's a structure your audience is familiar with and can easily follow. This structure has many variations: chronological, vendor qualification/problem/solution, and situation, complication, and resolution, to name three.
Some other things you want to do in the opening of your sales presentation and some things you want to avoid doing in your opening.
Don't save the good stuff. An award-winning comedy writer offered this invaluable tip: Start with your best joke, end with your second best, and put everything else in the middle, because if you don't start strong, your audience isn't going to hear your good stuff.
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Your sales tools aren’t limited to your PowerPoint slides and projector. Used effectively, your voice, body, and movement can bring your presentation’s message to life and add impact. Follow the guidelines here to make sure that you’re using your voice, body, and movement to their highest potential.
Voice
___
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A presentation that is organized around value starts off on the right track and has a good chance of staying on track through the course of your presentation. If you don't use your product or service or your features as topics for your sales presentations, where do you get your topics?
You need look no further than your value proposition, the results that the prospect can expect to receive from your product or service.
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More than likely you have multiple benefits that can help your prospect achieve his goals. In order to deliver the strongest value proposition possible, you need to prioritize your benefits to align with what’s most important to your prospect as well as showcase your competitive advantages. Follow these steps to determine which benefits best deliver value for your prospect
List your prospect’s goals and objectives in order of priority.
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Here are the steps you can follow to create a persuasive sales presentation using the situation, complication, resolution structure. The ten steps are as follows:
Plan your introduction.
A succinct preplanned introduction that establishes credibility and jump-starts your presentation is much different than the rambling streams of self-consciousness your prospect may be accustomed to hearing from salespeople.
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In order for your prospect to hear and remember your presentation, you must have her attention. To do so, you must understand what influences attention and apply that knowledge to the structure of your presentation. Neuroscience is discovering more and more every day about how people pay attention and what they pay attention to.
A successful sales presentation must grab your prospect’s attention and make a compelling case for him to take the next step in the sales process. Winning presentations don’t happen by chance. Make sure your next sales presentation is designed to persuade and engage today’s busy decision makers by keeping the following checklists handy as you plan, build, and deliver your sales presentation.
Themes can be a great unifying tool for providing a framework for your presentation and increasing recall. They can also be a hodgepodge of unrelated ideas awkwardly forced into a structure. Here are some ways to make sure your theme works to support your message — not detract from it.
Do keep it short. A theme is different than a catchphrase or quote.
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Many salespeople don't spend the necessary time to make sure their openings capture their audience members' attention. Rather they often wing it, saying whatever comes to mind. Unless you're a professional comedian, leaving your opening to chance is a big gamble. The sale may well be riding on it. Here's why:
Your audience is distracted.
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If you've managed to communicate some value in order to secure a presentation, be assured your competitor has — and will — be tightening its focus on value as well. You now need to step up your understanding of value in order to use it to your full advantage.
In considering value, salespeople can easily get lost focusing on the many features of their product or service, assuming the benefits are obvious to their prospect.
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Your sales presentation needs a good, clear framework for your message. Not only does the right structure help you efficiently get from point A to point B, but it also serves some other very important functions:
Organizing your message: You've gathered a lot of insights and information prior to your presentation.
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You have more ways to open a presentation than Beyoncé has wardrobe changes, however not all are good choices. Successful openings share certain core qualities, including the following:
Cutting to the chase: The chase is that point in your presentation that makes your audience sit up and pay attention. It eliminates unnecessary filler material that adds little in value and wastes precious time.
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In addition to serving as a frame for your presentation, your structure has other duties as well: Gaining attention, engaging your audience, and assimilating information. These sections examine some key requirements of a persuasive structure and how they help you move your prospect forward in the sale.
Gaining — and regaining — audience attention
If you're still talking about your company and haven't introduced value or a benefit within the first ten minutes, then your prospect is likely barely hanging on, despite the continued caffeine consumption.
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A hook is an attention-grabbing device that focuses your prospect’s attention on your message, sets the tone of the presentation, and provides something of value. Here are several types of hooks that ensure that your presentation starts on a strong note.
Quote: Using someone else’s words can add an element of credibility to your presentation or effectively frame your message.
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How to memorize or read from a script is a topic rarely covered in sales meetings, yet the success of your sales presentation lies on your ability to effectively and accurately communicate your message. When it comes to using scripts, there are three basic methods to choose from. Some salespeople like to put their script in the notes section of PowerPoint or Keynote to read from or refer to as they present.
An effective presentation in the past typically meant closing the sale. In today's more complex market, a successful presentation can be more like a play in football; it advances the sale. No matter how you spell success, all sales presentations today must meet the following requirements in order to be successful.
A lot takes place during the opening of your sales presentation, but if you boil it down, there are really three primary objectives, which are as follows:
Capture attention
Getting someone's attention isn't difficult. Wear a funny hat. Show photos of kittens. Give away a hundred dollar bill. But that probably isn't the kind of attention you want.
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