The Sales Warriors Guide to Sales Presentations

I love slideshare.net

Being the emotional cripple that I am, i.e. my father and I shook hands on his deathbed, this is a big deal for me to say.

Having used it to prepare for some extremely important presentations, it has made a big difference on how I plan, prepare, and give my presentations.

Recently I sat in on a sales presentation that would have had to put forth a Herculean effort to be upgraded to “less than stellar”. Good god , it was just awful.

The presentation started with the company’s logo slide, then immediately we saw this:

While the real version of the slide had very descriptive bullet points, the manner in which it was presented generated such little interest that a slide of “Blah’s” would have been more compelling.

Notice the colors? Those were key points that should have been grouped together, for example the green points are risk management features. These points could have been very strong if they were grouped into their own slides and discussions but were almost ignored because they were jammed together and weren’t noticed.

When we reached the highly anticipated conclusion of the presentation, the audience could not immediately recall a single benefit that would be experienced by anyone who made the surprising choice to purchase and use the solution that was the thesis behind this poorly executed effort.

So here is the

Lesson One: Its not whats important to you thats important, its what important to the prospect.

The majority of sales slides start off with a brief overview of the vendor, a slide full of client logos that are so small and distorted that they could be easily confused with pigeon droppings, and then slides that state some generic, industry-wide challenges.

The great news is that these are usually presented with the prospect’s attention span is at its highest. So instead of remembering the value of your solution, they will remember that everyone has the same problems.

Try this. Next presentation move all of your company and generic industry stuff to the back of the slides. See if you need them. If you get the client engaged, you wont.

Lesson Two: If you don’t know what’s important to the prospect, ask

In most B2B enterprise deals, your prospect is trying to make money or save money by purchasing your type of solution.

In your sales process, ask a series of questions that will tell you which one they are shooting for.

When you present tell them how you are going to make this happen within the first four slides.

I am a huge fan of Solution Selling, but do not make the mistake of starting your selling process in your presentation.

The presentation is your opportunity to validate your solution by solidifying the facts on how it will deliver value.

Lesson Three: Hymnal, Same Page, Get On It

If you have multiple people on your team in the presentation, pick a Quarterback. The Quarterback runs the show, fields or delegates questions and brings members of his team into the conversation, and when finished, thanks them and moves them out of the conversation. The Quarterback also has the responsibility of shutting up one of his team when they choose to take the conversation into an unproductive area.

Trust me on this one. Develop a subtle hand signal that will be used to politely tell a teammate that its time to move on to another discussion topic.

Lesson Four: Take out the Crap.

If you have any slides you “breeze through” take them out. You are doing nothing but wasting time. If you can not deliver a slide with passion and authority, then you are actually hurting your sale.

If you have anything close to “You Need a Vendor that will Deliver Better Customer Service” take it out now. Worse, if that is followed by “We are that Vendor“. Someone needs to be beaten.

This type of information is generic, can not be substantiated, and robs you of credibility.

Lesson Five: The guy who is sitting in the very back of the room, who cant really see the slides….thats the decision maker.

12 point font. I actually used a 12 point font on one of my old slides. If you do this today, you should be assigned to teach Latin to Paris Hilton.

Screen shots of your website or product that are not clear and crisp, delete them now. They look like a big visual turd on the screen and they are doing nothing but weakening your credibility.

If there is a main point in the middle of your screen shot, learn how to crop images and put only that on the screen. It will be far more powerful.

Anything on your slide should be easily read, when projected on a screen, across a typical size conference room. DO NOT USE ANYTHING LESS THAN 30 point font.

Lesson Six: Marketing is not in Sales, Sales is not in Marketing

You are the new sales rep competing against IBM, Pepsi, Apple, GE and their media resources. You just learned how to do cut/paste so you are going to “tweak” the slides. Dummy.

You’ve been in marketing for years and presented to hundreds of analysts and user group meetings. You have never been into a “cold” situation where no one in the room has any vested interested in you and your company, but you feel the need to tell sales “they are doing it wrong”. Bigger Dummy.

A Sales Warrior will befriend a series of people throughout the organization. The first is the head of your customer service, the second is your best marketing/graphics person. If you haven’t done that, and you’ve been in sales more than six months, you are a schmuck.

A good marketing person will have sales contacts that keep them abreast of what works in the field and what doesn’t.

Lesson Seven: Just Say IT

Your prospect is trying to figure out in the first ten minutes of an hour long meeting why they should seriously consider doing business with you. If you do nothing but speaking in cliche’s and 500,000 foot generalities, you are not going to get the business.

Vendor A = A mid-tier player in the enterprise space with over 200 clients in the perverted arts vertical.

Vendor B = The company that can help me with my widget problem.

Lesson Eight: Your Slides Are Not a Script

PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word.PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word. PowerPoint is Not Word.

Do not confuse the two.

Unless it’s a quote, there should never be a complete sentence on your slides.

Instead of :

• This client has grown to over 100 websites in multiple languages

Try

• 100+ Global Websites

You, not your slides, are telling a story, the slides are simply queues to motivate discussion.

The team of your prospect has a real job on which they are following behind because they are in your demo. They are going to be bombarded with 100s of facts that may be relevant to them, 10% to 20% of which they will actually retain. Oh by the way, they are going to be looking at least two other presentation from vendors just like you.

Anything you can do to lighten the load on the short term memory is a benefit to you. Shave a few words here and there and you will be amazed how well the comprehension and retention increases.

Lesson Nine: Prepare Like You are Going Against Your Competitor’s Best Sales Team

Have you Googled your prospect? How about the meeting attendees?

Have you searched Hoovers?

Have you searched the social networks for employees? Whats the grade of their people?

Have you checked any regulatory websites (FDA, FDIC, etc.) to see if there some issues that your prospect hasn’t shared with you?

How about internally? Has your company ever done business with the prospect? How well did that go?

Lesson Ten: Be Honest

“The Russian” was this big, gruff IT wizard that the prospect had bought into our second demo at this DC-based non-profit. For over two hours he challenged every statement my sales engineer had made, each question digging deeper and deeper.

Finally, the Russian asks, “Can your system update the database to our single sign on application”?

In four years, I had never heard this question and had no clue what the answer would be.

My sales engineer, thought long and hard and said “No”.

“Good, because if you could, we would have eliminated you from our evaluation”.

If there is a gray area question to which no one is confident in their answer, do not throw out a “Yes”. Stating that you are not sure, followed by the question “Could you share with me why that is important to your organization?” will serve you far better.