The market for gaining a prospects attention is saturated. Prospects receive dozens of calls and emails throughout the day. You won the battle of securing an appointment to present your offerings to someone. Don’t blow it with these common ways to ruin a sales presentation.
Conducting a winning sales presentation requires strong observation, quick thinking and the ability to dance a beautiful waltz with the prospect. Don’t be that sales person who ends up doing a street dance instead.
Not fully understanding their current state:
- Street Dance – You take misguided comfort in your high-level understanding of their current state. You aren’t prepared with questions that help you gain a deeper understanding of how they are doing business today and why that isn’t helping them achieve their goals. You latch on to the surface problem because it is the easiest diagnosis.
- Waltz – You need to know how they got where they are, what has been tried, what failed, why it failed and what they don’t want to repeat. Identify the daily triggers and failures that contribute to the problem. Speak to how you can solve the root causes at each stage of failure. The real problem is usually several layers deep, go deeper.
Neglecting the details of their goals:
- Street Dance – You know their goal is to achieve X in revenue but you don’t take the time to learn the micro-goals and milestones they want to meet along the way. Without understanding the micro-goals you can’t accurately suggest services and products that will help them accomplish the overarching goals.
- Waltz – Seek to know more than just their current state and the end game. What does point B, C and D look like? Having these milestones along the way will also help you demonstrate value and achieve wins throughout the life cycle of the project which further embeds your services into their organization.
Presenting unsophisticated basic suggestions:
- Street Dance: You bill yourself as the expert in a field or market but your presentation doesn’t reflect that expertise. You arrive with a presentation that mostly outlines sales 101 tactics and strategies from days gone by.
- Waltz: To be an expert you have to have something new and bold and act and sound different from everyone else. Don’t reach too far back in your toolbox to find things that have worked way back when. The market has changed and the fundamentals that got you to where you are may no longer be applicable. Present ideas and processes that they have not already tried.
Not reading their body language:
- Street Dance – They keep shifting in their chair, staring out the window, pulling out their mobile devices and this is all lost on you. You continue down the same path following your script and PowerPoint.
- Waltz – When you observe these things change it up, insert a joke or ask a compelling question try anything, something that will pull them back in. However, if you suggest a break you may find people had some emergency to deal with and won’t be able to return.
Ineffective presentation delivery:
- Street Dance – The presentation is chaotic and all over the place. There is no clear logical flow of how the information is being presented or how it solves their problems.
- Waltz – Present the problems in order of priority, how your solution can solve them and the predicated outcomes based available data and on past experience. By the end of the presentation there should be a clear picture of how the solutions are all interconnected and how they will accomplish the overarching objectives.
Your clients have educated and experienced people on their staff. They have come to you because those people have been unable to solve a problem. Understand their current state, intimately know their goals, don’t act and sound like everyone else, listen to what they aren’t saying and present your solution in a logical sequence and you will never blow another sales presentation.
Do you have other examples of ways to blow a sales presentation? Use the comments below to add to the list.
Last updated on March 6th, 2018 at 06:17 am
