No sales development training program would be complete without talking about how to do a great presentation. You can do everything else correctly, but if you fail on the presentation, the chances of making the sale reduce dramatically. If you examine all of the best sales presentations, you will discover that they all have three keys in common. They use audience participation. They tell stories throughout the presentation. They also handle the objections within the presentation itself.
The first key to a great sales presentation is to use audience participation. People have short attention spans. No one wants to sit through a full presentation and just listen to a sales person talk. They want to feel like they are a part of the presentation. When creating your presentation, make sure you find ways to incorporate the audience into the presentation.
One way you can have audience participation is to survey the audience. First, identify some of the most common situations that people who do not have your product or service experience. Then, ask the audience if they have ever found themselves in one of these situations. Doing this provides two benefits. It allows the audience to participate, which increases the effectiveness of your sales presentation. It also shows the prospect the need for your product or service.
The second key to a great sales presentation is to tell stories throughout the presentation. There is a saying “‘facts tell but stories sell.”‘ This is very true in sales. You can explain the features and benefits in your presentation. However, you will do a more effective job if you share stories that explain how the features and benefits relate to the client. Telling a story allows your audience to picture themselves in the story and identify the benefits that are important to them. In addition, people easily forget facts and figures, but they remember stories.
For example, if you sell truck leasing, instead of just explaining the differences between you and your competitors, tell a story. You can say “‘I have a customer with needs very similar to yours and they were able to use our truck maintenance service when they had a problem in Omaha. We were able to make a service call and get them back on the road quickly and they met their deliveries on time.”‘ Incorporating simple stories in your sales presentation is a great way to convey ideas and concepts.
The third key is to handle objections within the presentation. Many sales professionals encounter a number of objections at the end of the presentation. Often, this is because those objections were not handled at the beginning of the presentation. If the objections were covered as a part of the sales presentation, they would not come up because the presentation itself would handle them.
If you know you constantly get an objection to price because your product cost more than similar products, you should handle that objection as part of your presentation. You can have a point in your presentation where you illustrate what similar products cost and what your products cost. This way the prospect can appreciate the difference in price and you can create value. Because you brought up a common objective, you appear more reasonable and authentic to your buyer.
Your presentation is one of the keys to selling business. If you follow the principles here you will have success in keeping your audience engaged in your presentation. You will also be able to transition smoothly into the next step of the sales process which is to gain agreement.