The Best Ways to Improve Your Sales Presentations

The Best Ways to Improve Your sale PresentationsThe Best Ways to Improve Your Sales PresentationsYouve spent hours placing cold calls and have managed to scrape together a few appointments to make your sale pitch. At this point, how you act during your sales presentation will determine whether youll close another sale or walk away in defeat. Stand Up for Your Sales Presentation Always give your presentation standing up rather than sitting. When you stand as you speak, you are speaking from a position of strength. A standing person feels more energetic than a sitting person, and that will come through in your presentation. Its also easier to speak loudly and clearly when youre standing because sitting puts pressure on your diaphragm. Finally, standing allows you to use your body language to its full extent - pacing, gestures, writing on a whiteboard, etc. And body language is a huge part of your appearance and the attitude you project. Make Eye Contact Eye contact is also a c rucial component of body language. Regularly making eye contact with your audience maintains a connection with that person. If youre giving a presentation for more than one person, glance at each of them in turn. Dont just focus on the most important person there, or youll make the rest of your listeners feel excluded. Usually, youll want to maintain eye contact for five to ten seconds at a time before switching to a new person. Make It Enjoyable Try to have fun with your presentation. If you dont enjoy your own presentation, who will? If youre having a good time, that energy will come across in your presentation and will help your audience have a good time, too. Inject a little fun into your presentation - whatever will help you to enjoy yourself. That might be an amusing slide, a great quote, or joke or two thrown in. Just be sure to stick with business-appropriate humor. Then, before your presentation begins, think about how great it will be if your prospect decides to put i n a huge order right on the spot. Visualize yourself in that situation, and bring that mental energy into the room with you. Plan and Practice but Dont Be Stuck to Your Script Anytime you give a presentation you should know in advance exactly what youre going to say. Do some rehearsing, sticking to your script exactly. But when you go into the actual presentation, be prepared to do a little veering from your script. A presentation almost never goes exactly as planned. Your listener might have a question youre not expecting, or he might be very interested in something you mention in passing, inspiring you to dedicate several more minutes to that topic. But in those situations, dont think that youve wasted your time by preparing in advance. Your script provides you with a jumping-off point. Without a distribution policy to start, your presentation would be much weaker. Break the Standard Mold of a Sales Presentation And speaking of scripts, the traditional sales presentation, in which a salesperson talks about his product and the prospect listens, isnt the best way to sell. Any old-style presentation will be designed to work well with a wide sortiment of prospects. As a result, it wont be a perfect fit for ANY prospect in particular. The first step most salespeople should make to improve their sales appointments is to ditch the standard pitch. A typical sales pitch starts with the salesperson describing his company and laying out its role in the industry, including any awards or certifications it might have. The reason salespeople start out this way is quite logical they want to show the prospect that their company is a legitimate and respectable provider, establishing their bona fides from the very beginning. Unfortunately, what the prospect hears is Now I am going to talk about myself and my company for a while. Look, I have slides. The first few minutes of the presentation is when the prospect is listening most closely, but if you fail to say anything that interests him, hell start tuning you out. Find Out the Interest of Your Potential Client During the first appointment, most of your prospects wont be feeling a huge need for change. They may be mildly interested to know what options they have - thats why they agreed to the appointment in the first place - but if you dont pique their interest pretty quickly, your window of opportunity will close. And if the prospect isnt seriously considering making a change, hell hardly be interested in hearing about how your company stacks up compared to Company X. So instead of breaking out your standard PowerPoint deck, try coming up with a new agenda that will revolve around your prospect instead of around yourself. This agenda should be centered around one or several issues that are significant for the prospect. These issues could either be problems that hes facing or opportunities that he wants to seize ideally, youd include some of each. For example, you might start out by saying something like, My goal for this meeting is to help you lower production costs by at least 20 percent. Now youve got the prospects attention. Then you can ask the prospect questions about his current production setup and what hed like to change (and keep the same). At this point, its finally time to talk about your product, but in terms of what the prospect needs. For example, if your prospect cited fewer production line breakdowns as his most pressing need, you can focus on that aspect of your product. Youll be telling the prospect exactly what he wants and needs to hear, and showing at the same time that you listened and are responding to his answers. How do you figure out what issues will interest your prospect? You might pick up on something the prospect says during your cold call. Googling the prospect may also generate some more ideas if your prospect is gearing up to meet new legislation, just had a record-breaking quarter (for good or bad), is about to open up a new office o verseas, or is facing other major changes, you can probably dig up the necessary information online. A third option is to speak with some of your existing customers who are similar to your prospect in size, industry, or schriftart of business. If several customers who are all similar to your prospect mention the same issue, theres a pretty strong likelihood that your prospect will also be concerned about that issue. Make It a Conversation As you design your presentation, remember that interaction is the key to building a presentation that will appeal to the specific prospect in front of you. If instead of doing all the talking you bring the prospect in by asking questions and responding appropriately, you can address that prospects target issues without spending a lot of time on topics that dont interest him. And the more talking the prospect does, the more likely he is to sell himself on your product - which makes closing the deal a whole lot easier. Using a conversational pre sentation structure doesnt mean you should be ad-libbing. On the contrary, its important that you stay organized and do plenty of research and preparation beforehand. The more you know about the prospect before your appointment, the better. If you already have an idea of what the prospects most pressing needs might be in relation to your product, you can bring along customer testimonials, research data, even news stories about how your product will fill those needs. At a minimum, you should have a list of 20 to 30 questions prepared in advance. You almost certainly wont have time to ask that many questions, but its far better to end the appointment without using all your material than it is to groe nachfrage out of things to say. If you use slides in your presentation, you can keep your prospect involved by asking him a question every slide or two - even if its as simple as, Do you have any questions about this? Keeping the prospect involved also keeps him paying attention to your material. If the prospects response to one of your questions takes you off on a tangent, go with it... its better to spend the time talking about subjects that interest the prospect instead of saying Lets talk about it later and moving on to the next slide. Write the Perfect Opening Once youve determined the subject or subjects for your appointment, start by crafting a few sentences that youll use to open the appointment by asking the prospects permission to discuss that subject. For example, you might say, Mr. Prospect, many of my customers are working hard right now to gear up for the upcoming legislation. Fortunately, Ive been able to help them significantly reduce the amount of time and money they need to spend to qualify for the new rules. With your permission, Id like to tell you more about this so that we can see if I can be equally helpful for you. If your research has been successful, your prospect will enthusiastically agree. Probe for More Information Now that you ve gotten the prospects interest, you can start probing for more information. Asking questions is an important part of the appointment for two reasons first, it helps you to qualify the prospect and second, it helps you to fully identify the prospects needs, information you can then use to fine-tune your approach. It also helps to keep your prospects involved by making the appointment more of a conversation and less of a presentation. The Next Steps Towards Closing At this point, you may have impressed the prospect enough that you can now close the sale. In more complex sales processes, the next step may be another meeting, or you may need to draft a formal proposal. In either case, if youre not closing the sale on the spot, be sure to schedule your next activities before you leave the appointment. In other words, you and the prospect should agree on the specific date and time when youll speak again. This helps keep your sales process on track and moving along to the close.