Sales Presentations How-to Guide

Learn how to make your sales presentations more interactive and interesting so you fully engage your audience and close more deals.  Learn about new software and presentation tools and techniques.  Get a list of questions to ask to accelerate buying decisions.

Great tip from Tom Searcy from Hunt Big Sales

"Here's how customers consider your value, from lowest to highest:

• If you know your product, you are a human catalog
• If you know your services, you are a technician
• If you can match your products and services to the customer's needs, you are a sales person
• If you know a customer's problems and business, you are a consultant
• If you know a customer's industry, market challenges and competitors, you are an expert"

Tips to get the sales presentation off to a good start

1.  Talk to the administrative assistant ahead of time and ask if you can show up 30 minutes early to set everything up so when people come into the room you can greet them.  Reduces your stress too because all the technical stuff is set up.

TIP:  If you show up thirty minutes early, assign someone on the team to talk to the administrative assistant.  She (or he) can tell you a lot of helpful information about who will be at the meeting, how their day is going, what's typical for presentations at their company, who else has been in to present, and so on.  You need to build rapport with the admin!  They can be a huge advocate for you to get future meetings and to share positive word-of-mouth about you, your team and how well prepared and nice you all were after the meeting. 

2.  If you require wifi for a demo or presentation, bring your own.  You can waste 15 minutes just trying to configure your settings. 

3.  Bring your own remote control so you can advance slides by clicking a button from wherever you are standing or sitting instead of saying "next slide please"

4.  Practice presenting together!

TIP: "If someone on your team other than the presenter is running the slide show, make sure you practice together. Nothing worse than having the discussion get out of sync with the slides. I was once part of a group presentation to a potential customer where this happened. A more senior member of our team had just completed his presentation and offered to run the slides for me. Huge mistake that led to a very awkward presentation."

TIP:  "One thing that I thought from experience to add is to have a designated speaker (usually the CEO) drive through the deck, then allow the whole team respond to Q&A (where the real value is) based on the context. Unless the presentation has logical blocks like (marketing vs. engineering), I've seen some awkward presentations where everyone does a slide and it looks like some kind of college presentation where everyone has to participate."

5.  Always turn off your email and IM.  It's annoying for the audience to watch email or IM notifications pop in and out of the frame.  And things may pop up that are inappropriate or embarrassing for you. 

6.  Be prepared to give the presentation without a computer or any slides. 

Every sales person has experienced this.  The best ones handle it with a calm grace and use not having any slides to their advantage.  It actually is so unusual to not have someone presenting slides at sales meetings that you may command more attention from the audience!

Do not waste valuable time with prospects and customers struggling with your computer and technology. 

7.  Figure out ahead of time where you are going to sit and where you want everyone on your team to sit.

TIP:  Great advice in this blog post from Venture Capitalist Mark Suster about where to sit at sales meetings.  He advises that the presenters (people selling) sit at the seats closest to the screen so that the audience is looking at you and the screen.  He also advises that if you are in a sales presentation with several people from your company that you split up and sit on both sides of the table so you can more effectively talk with people.  He advises against your team sitting on one side of the table because that creates and "us vs. them" situation. 

 

8.  Decide if you are going to present standing up or sitting down

Pros and cons of either approach.  If you're standing up, you'll command more of a presence and show more passion.  But that may be inappropriate and overbearing if everyone else is sitting down and create more of a monolog vs. collaborative dialog discussion.  Room size and the size of the audience affects which approach may be best.

If your goal is to build rapport, not to lecture, then you may want to sit so you're on "common ground" with the audience. 

TIP:  If you decide it's appropriate to make the sales presentation standing, then stand on the left of the screen in the front of the room.  People will be reading left-to-right so their eyes will naturally return to the left where the speaker should be standing. 

9.  Think edu-tainment.  That means educate + entertain. 

• How can you use a YouTube video or one you've created to start the meeting with a story or anecdote that's relevant to what you are covering?
• How can you engage the audience and keep them entertained throughout the entire presentation?  Junior high teachers know they have to "change it up" every seven minutes to keep kids attention.  Adults sitting in meetings have about the same attention span.  They get easily bored. 
• Any way to create some suspense?  Get people in the audience involved?  Use props. 

TIP:  at a presentation to fortune 100 company marketing and sales executives about investing in a CRM (customer relationship management) software system/tool, someone asked everyone to contribute some coins.  That made everyone joke a bit.  Then she unveiled a small automatic coin sorter machine and dumped the coins in while explaining that a customer database should be set up the same way to organize and sort different customers based on their lifetime value.  What props can you bring and use at your next sales presentation like this?

TIP:  Tom Searcy of Hunt Big Sales recommends this,

"No one wants a standard presentation. People want your presentation to be relevant to them personally and to their business.

You have to tailor the presentation in advance, but more importantly, you have to tailor the presentation during the meeting. 

At the beginning of every meeting, say the following to the attendees:  Please, if you would, can each of you tell us what the single most important thing is that we can cover for you to make your investment of this time worth it for you?  Now you know exactly how to tailor the conversation."

10.  Do more listening and asking questions than talking

This advice was given by a sales person on a blog post (they didn't give their name).  It's so insightful we're sharing it.

"Listening, is initially, the best approach...the good sales person will then take this info provided by the customer, and formulate a response which should not only address the customers issues, but should also open the customers eyes to items they have not even considered.

There is a saying in Sales: When the sales person is talking, he is Selling...while when the Customer is talking, he is Buying. I would much rather have a customer talking and giving me as much information as possible, before I start "selling" to them."

11.  Know how much time you have!

Confirm "Everyone have an hour?"  If not, better to know that upfront so you can adjust.

You might want to also convey, "We can cover the key information in twenty minutes and then leave time for your questions."  A dialog is much better than a monolog. 

12.  Consider using two presenters who act like co-hosts.

This is a very effective technique used for focus groups that can be applied to sales presentations.  Instead of everyone having to listen to one person "drone on", two presenters (who have good chemistry and have practiced together), can "play tennis" to keep the presentation and conversation more lively.  While one person is presenting the other person can be listening and studying the audience to see who is engaged and who isn't.

13.  Establish immediate rapport

Find something you have in common with each person.  Get there early so you have time for some "ice breakers" and can get a sense of what the company is like by even sitting in their lobby.

• Business networking - you'll want to do a good job mixing and mingling before and after the sales presentation
• Adjust to different people's learning styles and personalities.  Some people are visual learners; others audio; others kinesthetic (learn by doing).