Seven Deadly Sins of Sales Presentations

It’s impossible to overstate the importance of communicating effectively in sales presentations. Prospects aren’t just buying product. They’re also buying YOU. Or, if your presentation skills aren’t as good as your rivals’, they’re NOT buying you. Today sellers are giving buyers more reasons NOT to buy from them than TO buy from them.

In many cases you only get ONE opportunity to give a winning presentation.

A sales presentation is an audition. Buyers tell us they want three things from sellers; “Don’t waste my time, understand my situation, and solve my problem.” You succeed when you provide a solution-driven presentation that accomplishes those three things. Problem is, there are dozens of ways you can fail to communicate in a way that captures their attention and clearly communicates how your solutions can empower them to solve their most critical business problems.

Our SolutionSpeak presenter, Helen Talmadge, focuses on seven classic presentation mistakes that even seasoned veterans often make. And she’ll reveal communication strategies that enhance your sales messages so they resonate more powerfully than your competitors’.

“The seven deadly sins salespeople make in presentations:

1. Inability to answer these three questions before you present: To whom am I presenting? Not just name and title, but what role they play in this opportunity. Where am I in the sales process? On the first call or is this the last presentation to close the deal and what do I want to accomplish? Have a clearly defined goal of what you want to occur as a result of this presentation.
2. Failure to capture your audience in a targeted, relevant way. (Title slides and introductions don’t count as capturing them) Tell a story, show a video clip, use a visual aid or make a bold statement. This is your opportunity to get their attention and differentiate yourself from the competition.
3. Not connecting with your audience by answering their unspoken questions. Buyers have so many things running through their mind before your presentation it’s hard for them to focus or buy in to what you are saying if you don’t use some audience connection tools, like letting them know what’s in it for them, right away.
4. Using too much content and too many facts, figures and research that you think are powerful and persuasive can actually HURT your presentation. Buyers have a saturation point with too much information. When they are overwhelmed it’s hard to say “yes” because they aren’t sure what they are saying “yes’ to. Less really is more.
5. Missing the payoff at the end of the presentation. End your presentation on a high note that will give the buyer chills. Do not end it by asking, “Are there any questions.“ Put the bookend on your presentation by paying off the capture.
6. Lack of clearly defined action. Buyers can’t move to the next step in the sales process with you if they aren’t asked to. Have a plan of action after the presentation and ask them to take the next steps with you.
7. Not adding value and credibility to your presentation by reading all the slides. You provide no value if all you do is read slides and ask a few questions. You don’t need to show up at all, just email the deck to them. Buyers want to do business with sellers who can be a valuable resource from them, show them how valuable you are by using flip charts and clear descriptive language instead of 49 PowerPoint slides full of text.

Why Solution Marketing is So Challenging for Most Organizations

It is rare to find an organization where salespeople actually understand the key problems that the organizations’ solutions solve. This is normally a much larger problem the more solutions the company offers and the more technical the solution sets.

Feature Envy - Most of these firms have thrived off of the high growth, interconnected world of product innovation – a world centered on the concept of never-ending feature improvement. Each feature is really important. So important that an “impossible to understand” technical name is required or even, sigh, an acronym. These new features are then taken by marketing and twisted into an end-user benefit based on the logical extension of that feature. The benefit is the “goodness” of the feature. The rapid growth of the technology landscape has produced a “build it and they will come” mentality.

Lack of Real Product Marketing Experience – Most product marketers today were reallocated from product management/engineering or graduated from the help desk. They get the technology and get those features even better. They love PPT, technical diagrams, flowcharts and believe that more is in fact more. For the most part, these resources struggle to really “get” the customer problem or need by situation and across market segment and industry. They don’t think that way, never had to and in some cases may never make the leap.

Explosion of Mediums – Marketing now has to map all of their “messages” through a dizzying array of mediums which has done nothing more than make everyone busy propagating techno-jargon in as many places as possible. They have also sought to ensure that all of this information is available to sellers in whatever medium they want but can’t understand why sellers don’t ever find it , know where to start or even seem interested. The needle in the haystack would be welcome for most organizations.

That ADD Thing – Let’s face it, we are all somewhat attention deficit disordered in this new world, but no one more so than salespeople. They need big animal pictures, plain language and constant reminder of context. And please, let’s keep it short. After all I have to be calling on customers (or playing a round of golf).

Some of the best practices that we see from our clients include the following:

• Sales and service participation in messaging material creation
• Focusing on the 80/20 rule
• Creating constructs that center on Problem-Reason-Capability vs. Feature-Benefit
• Creating a “translation” function that sits between marketing and sales

Remember, most sellers would prefer to pick up the cliff-note version of Ivanhoe than actually read it.