When was the last time you overwhelmed your audience with a killer sales pitch? Do you remember what actions you took to achieve this? Great sales presentations have a few habits in common. And it’s probably not what most people do.
Innumerable PowerPoint slides, long text blocks, complex language, and too many details. When it comes to presenting, we might know all the traps we usually fall into, but do we also act upon it? We still see traditional presentations where half of the audience is distracted, not engaged and looking at their phones. We give you some tips to give an excellent sales presentation that will blow away your audience.
Keep it short and simple
While your colleagues might understand all the product specifications, complex pricing structures, and abbreviations into detail, your customers’ stakeholders will definitely not! What do you think if the audience sees that your presentation will contain 74 slides? Yes – indeed. Keep it short and straightforward. Get to the point.
Provide insight
Demonstrate at least one crucial insight in a presentation. Challenge your audience with new insights about their market, their competitors, and their own company. When providing unique insight, they are going to see you as a trusted advisor.
Customize differentiators
Lots of salespeople sum up all the Unique Selling Points (USPs) their product has, but forget to customize it for their customer needs. What’s in it for your customers if you show them differentiators that don’t make any sense for them? So customize them and only leave differentiators in your presentation that are crucial for your customer. Make it relevant.
”Customize your USPs. Make them relevant.”
CEO of Sales
Focus on value; not on specs, details, and features
There are almost no decision-makers that care about details and how good your product is. They want to know what’s the value for them and how their organization will benefit from it.
Make it interactive
Nothing more boring than a one-way presentation without any interaction from the group. Ask questions during every slide. How do you see this? What do you think of that? Built your story on that. Ask for opinions and feedback.
Stop with ROI – instead, tell stories
You might have been trained to present an ROI. But research shows that it triggers the wrong part of the brain. It even leads to a drop in won sales. Instead of triggering the logical part of the brain, you should trigger the emotional part of the brain. As Simon Sinek calls it: tell your WHY. So tell stories. It triggers the limbic system, and this is the part where decisions are made.
Present price after the value
Lots of people find it difficult to present a quotation. And if they do, they often do it at the wrong moment. Only show the price to your audience when you feel they are 100% convinced of the added value you offer. And do it in the end.
Animate
People like to get entertained. They want presentations that contain energy, animations, and great stories with visuals. So play with your voice, tell stories, be energetic and positive and you will increase your chances of a deal.
Talk like TED
TED is an organization that spreads ideas, usually in short, powerful talks. The TED rule is that no presentation or talk might take longer than 18 minutes. In the bestseller ‘‘Talk like Ted” a few principles are mentioned. The principles are that people should be emotionally involved, the audience needs to learn something new, and that that the presentation should be memorable. If you want to learn more, I highly recommend reading the book.
Close
And last but not least, don’t forget to close. With closing we mean; ask for feedback, check your position and agree on the next steps. Great salespeople know how to do this.
What do you think about these tips? Do you have something to add? Are you ready to blow away the audience in your next sales presentation?
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