3 Tips to an Effective Sales Presentation
Improve Your Next Sales Presentation in Three Easy Steps
Be Interactive. While it’s important to be in control of the room during a sales presentation, make sure that you are speaking with your prospects – not at them. Use your sales presentation to ask questions and gather feedback. This style of dynamic presentation ensures that you won’t miss important buying signals.
HubSpot suggests you ditch the memorization when it comes to delivering a great sales presentation. “Of course, you’ll want to be familiar with your presentation before you deliver it, but memorizing it word-for-word can add extra stress on you, potentially taking away from the value of your presentation.”
According to Inc.com, “Some people wrongly believe that sales presentations should be like keynote speeches--entertaining but without much meat. Other people believe that sales presentations should be like lectures--informative and instructive. Both groups are wrong. The purpose of a sales presentation is to persuade a large group of people to make a collective decision.”
One of the easiest ways to create an interactive & persuasive presentation is to ask questions, which brings us to my second tip – personalization.
Be Personal. If you walk into a sales presentation ready to run through the same slide deck you can deliver in your sleep, you are missing the point. Address the unique needs of your prospect and explain how your product can solve those specific challenges. Frankly, few prospects care about the parts of your presentations that don’t speak directly to them.
Yasin Abbak of Paired Media suggests personalizing your presentation by taking advantage of the intimate setting to check-in with your audience. “Too often, people approach sales presentations like a performance: there’s a script with a beginning, middle and end, and engagement is not part of the equation. Acknowledge that opportunity to connect with your audience on a personal level, and use the intimate setting to check in periodically.”
Our prospects have easy access to information. As a result, generic sales presentations just don’t cut it anymore. Prospects are no longer looking for you to educate them. Entrepreneur Magazine, suggests that “If you use a linear sales process that goes over information they already know, you will frustrate your customer and slow things down.”
Be interactive during your sales presentation; create a custom presentation for each prospect and provide further personalization by asking questions to learn more about their needs.
The folks at Salesforce agree, “Prospects don’t care about every benefit your product has to offer. They only care about the aspects of your product that address their specific challenges. Everything else is irrelevant. Once you’ve addressed all of your prospect's challenges, stop the presentation.”
Knowing when to wrap up a sales presentation is a skill that often goes unacknowledged, which brings us to my final tip – keep it short.
Be Brief. Face it, people have miniscule attention spans. If you are rambling on, you are going to lose the attention of your audience. Worse, you can lose the deal. Nobody wants to buy from a person that can’t read a room. Get to the point, get feedback and get to the next step of the sales process.
Salesforce goes on to say, “Keep your presentation as short as possible, focusing on the most critical aspects of your offering. A good rule of thumb: Present what you absolutely must present and then shut up.”
On that note, I leave you with three easy-to-action steps to make your next sales presentation the best one yet.
If you want to check out more sales presentation tips from the amazing resources referenced in this article, links to the articles are embedded below. Please also connect with me on LinkedIn.
Comments
Post a Comment