Your closing process will often require you to speak to a board or a group of people about your product or service, and you must provide value to your audience when presenting in person.
The Sales Evangelist Certified Sales Training Program provides specific sections for prospecting, building value, and converting to a paying client, and we’ve designed the training to help sellers prepare for presentations and to train their teams to do the same. It’s designed to help sales reps and sales teams improve their skills, find the right customers, adopt the right activities, ask the right questions, build strong value, and close more deals.
Guessing game
Many situations demand that sellers meet with a team of individuals who will ask a variety of questions about the product or service. You’re wasting your time if you don’t understand the problems they need to solve or the challenges they are facing. It doesn’t make sense to play the guessing game during the limited time you have with this group of people.
Once you understand the issue, you must also determine who the decision-makers and buyers are. You must understand the timeframe they are working against and their budget for the purchase.
The company you’re pitching to will also bring in competitors who will pitch as well, but they aren’t your concern.
Storytelling
John Livesay recently spoke about storytelling and the need to be memorable. It doesn’t matter who presents first or last, but rather who tells a better story.
Consider having other team members attend the presentation with you and introduce themselves by telling an interesting story. Perhaps your CTO can share how his love of Legos® pushed him to create complex things and find solutions to problems. It inserts personality into the presentation.
Tactical presentation
Make sure you know who will present information on the buyer’s behalf. Have someone from your organization research to determine who will attend.
If possible, learn what those people hope to discover from your presentation. Engage your champion, or the person you’ve been working with to this point, to find out whether you can introduce yourself prior to the presentation. When you do that, ask them what questions they’d like you to address in your presentation and then be prepared to address those specific topics.
Once you understand who will attend and what information they’ll be seeking, you can build your presentation around those topics.
Recruit help
If at all possible, take someone else to the presentation with you. Take several people if you can. Assemble a team of people from different departments.
When you set up in the conference room, don’t divide yourself on opposite sides of the table. Use name cards for both groups to indicate where different people should sit. Also make sure you spell everyone’s names correctly.
Intersperse the members of your group among the members of the company you’re pitching to. When you have breaks in the action, because the two teams are sitting together, they’ll be able to share conversation instead of squaring off like rival gangs.
We recently used name cards for a presentation and they were a huge hit. The company was blown away by the preparation and the organization that went into the meeting. They assumed that if we were willing to invest that much preparation in a presentation like this, we’d certainly do it in our efforts to help them solve their problems.
Control engagement
Develop slides that include imagery rather than a jumble of words. Tell a story about the problem your prospect is facing and how you can help solve it. Demonstrate your solution.
Assign one member of your team to watch for reactions from the others in the room. Use him as a spotter. If he notices that someone is disengaged or fighting against sleep, he can signal that to you by interjecting or posing a question that will signal to you to adjust your direction.
Have him watch for body language that indicates interest or to take note of those people who are jotting down things while you’re talking.
If, for example, the IT director takes lots of notes during the presentation, at the break I could suggest to the presenters that we talk a bit about IT and the most common questions we hear.
The spotter’s role in any presentation is to be an integrator and to make sure questions get answered. We don’t want anyone to leave with unanswered questions. #SalesPresentation
Business case
Thank your champion in front of the entire group for making the presentation possible. Make her feel good in front of her colleagues.
Then begin the work of building a business case for your prospect. Explain that you’ll answer the questions they submitted ahead of time and address the challenges you see based on the lessons you’ve learned. Describe how you’ve solved these problems for others and how you’ll translate that to this organization.
Talk about how much the problem is likely costing the company and why they need to fix it. Explain how you’ll help, and do it all using stories.
Virtual meetings
You can apply many of these same concepts to your virtual meetings as well. Although you can’t intersperse the participants, you can consider sending some treats that will arrive prior to the presentation. You can even send treats that somehow tie to the presentation you’ll be making, like Swedish Fish to make the case that you’re going to help them land bigger clients.
Work to stand out from the pack by being unique and telling an amazing story.
Action plan
When the meeting is complete, everyone in that room should leave feeling like they participated and like they were fulfilled by what happened. Then provide a specific action plan for what happens next.
Present a few different options for ways to move forward. Give them time frames and explain the steps required to progress.
I conduct presentations this way and they work well for me and for the people I’m presenting to. I want you to realize the same benefits in your own presentations.
"Presenting In Person" episode resources
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