Several of you have been asking about what kind of sales presentation do I use in B2B sales or what should I focus upon during the sales presentation?
Good questions and my answer is simple.
First, don’t do a sales presentation until you have all the information you need to build a case for the customer to make a simple decision. Meaning the faster way to lose a sale is to present too early in the sales process since there is probably no value built up for your customer to feel it is good thing to change to your solution.
Second, resist the temptation to do the easy – corporate presentation – early in the sales process. Some corporate person who has never seen a customer, much less made a customer sales presentation, will prepare a sales presentation that is heavy on the internal – we are great – approach. This is usually boring the customer to tears and anger management is needed sometimes when they realize you are wasting their valuable time. Yikes! Wrong approach – stop it.
Third, if for some reason you are involved in a marathon sales presentation setting where several companies are lined up to present their solution or products all day (and sometimes over several days) it is a good idea to “break the state” of the buyers by turning off the projector and the computers and “have a conversation with the buyer.” Now for some of your this is really radical and somewhat risky – in your mind. However, experience has shown me that the buyers are so tried of the sales presentations on how great the sales company is, they are actually no listening after the second presentation. Break their state by having a conversation – usually lead by you asking a series of great questions about their business and their worries and what their ideal situation would look like. Surprise! You will get great responses and more insight into the decision process. And, guess who will be remembered after the presentations are over? Yes – You.
Finally, if you must give a sales presentation here are some rules…
- Limit the amount of time covering your organization to less than five minutes total – they don’t care about you.
- Get to the problems and issues you uncovered and get validation and agreement from the group as to the size of the issue.
- Connect as many dots to the problem as possible to show their need a sense of urgency to make a decision.
- Give success stories, case studies and testimonials during the presentation to show you have done this before and will be bringing expertise and knowledge to the table.
- Use graphics and photos (pictures of their operations and people make it personal) to emphasize points – resist the temptation to show any kind of spreadsheet. Graphs of the spreadsheet data with good explanations of the info are much better if you want to get the business.
- Be sure to ask for the business – and mean it, you want their business because they are very important to you.
- Make sure you have time at the end for a good Q & A time – be prepared with several questions you can answer to seed the process and get them thinking about questions. (The quality and detail of their questions is the best indicator of their overall interest in your solution. Enjoy the questions and be confident in your answers.)
There you have my response to the sales presentation question and what should be a simple b2b sales presentation? Let me know how you feel about my answers. I really do enjoy comments and questions from my readers. Take care and make more sales!!!
Voss Graham
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