Of the many thousands of sales presentations delivered daily, only a select few rise to the level of STRATEGIC sales presentations. What’s the difference?
Strategic sales presentations fit the following profile:
Game changers: Ordinary presentations are fine for ordinary decisions, such as renewing a contract with an existing supplier. Strategic presentations require important decisions, such as changing the way the customer does business to respond to fresh challenges, opportunities, or risks.
New insights: One way to make a presentation “game-changing” is for the salesperson to bring new insights to the client, perhaps about a problem they don’t realize they have. They challenge the client’s view of the world, and this requires a lot of research, and, yes, courage.
Impact: The impact of decisions made as the result of a strategic sales presentation is usually huge from a financial, strategic and even personal point of view. For the client, this means that many different units or functions are involved, which means that the message has to appeal to a wider range of interests. For the salesperson, the outcome may mean the difference between a successful year or a bust.
Unique: Ordinary presentations are usually canned scripts that use off-the-shelf slides and apply to everyone. They practically scream: “to whom it may concern.” Strategic presentations are unique to those people in the room at that particular time, for their particular situation.
Strategic context: Strategic presentations are not stand-alone events that can be plugged in whenever the client agrees to meet with you. They are an integral element of the salesperson’s account or opportunity plan, and therefore they have a clear purpose and intended outcome for the seller and the buyer.
Shaping the conditions: Because they are part of an ongoing strategy, what the salesperson does before the presentation to shape the conditions for success is at least as important as what he or she says and does during the presentation.
Look for subtle signals that you’re wasting the audience’s time.
At presentations, I’m usually the one in the front of the room, but today I attended a presentation as an audience member. The best thing I can say about the presentation was that it got me to start thinking about the tremendous amount of waste that is a part of so many talks.
I’m using waste—or muda—in its formal “lean principles” definition as any activity that uses resources but does not add value to the end customer. When this lens is applied on the factory floor, a surprising amount of it can be found almost everywhere you look. While I was sitting in the audience this morning I began applying that lens and here are some of the examples I saw:
- Unnecessary slides: this presentation was supposed to be an abridged version of a much longer presentation, but the presenter didn’t take the time to cut the deck down to its essence. I suspect that some of the slides would have been superfluous even in the longer version.
- Way too many words on the slides: this would have been bad enough in the original presentation, but it was disastrous for the abridged version, because once the words were on the screen, the presenter had to make sure he read each one (accompanied by a laser pointer to make sure that we knew where to look).
- Overly busy slide background which included the company logo and a stock photo of a group of people supposed to represent something. Studies show that irrelevant graphics detract from retention and transfer.
- Gratuitous questions of the audience: questions asked of audience members gave the impression that they were being asked only because the facilitator’s guide called for them at that point.
- Interesting but irrelevant stories: besides taking up time, these usually subtract value because they tend to be the only parts the listeners remember.
- Exceedingly wordy replies apparently designed to disguise the lack of an actual answer.
I could go on, but by now you get the picture, and any more detail would be muda.
How to get rid of presentation waste
Know your audience. Value should be defined by your audience. What do they want out of the presentation, and how much do they know about the topic going in? How will they use the information you provide? In your presentation journey, this is Point A.
Have a clear theme. The theme clearly spells out Point B. Before you start dumping words onto a screen, figure out the core message that you want the audience to leave the presentation with. The theme is where your purpose and the audience’s needs meet. What do you want them to do or to know, and why should they want to do it?
Have a clear structure. This helps you organize your thoughts in a way that will get you most efficiently and effectively from Point A to Point B. anything that does not clearly lead to the destination will be easier to spot and to remove. Clarity of structure also helps your listeners organize the incoming information in their minds so that they are much more likely to understand and remember.
Break some of these bad habits. The bad habits I observed this morning should not be fresh revelations to any experienced presenter, but we can tend to fall into these patterns through habit and laziness.
Pay attention to the audience. If you’re wasting their time, you will know and will be able to adjust.
Start with the bottom line up front. This applies to most presentations, but it’s particularly important when answering questions. Even if you have to give a nuanced answer, give the general conclusion first and then add caveats and context as necessary.
I guess today wasn’t a complete waste—it gave me an idea for a blog post!
A man of few words but huge influence
On May 13, 1940, as the Western front was reeling under Hitler’s blitzkrieg attack on France and the Low Countries, the United States had a small third-rate army, equipped with obsolete weapons. The new Army Chief of Staff, George Marshall, was trying to change that, but President Roosevelt wasn’t buying.
That morning, Marshall accompanied Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, according to the story as told by Thomas Ricks in The Generals: American Military Command from World War II to Today
Morgenthau then asked the President to listen to Marshall, but FDR said, “I know exactly what he would say. There is no necessity for me to hear him at all.” Others in the room sat quietly, offering no support. As the meeting ended, Marshall approached Roosevelt’s desk and said, “Mr. President, may I have three minutes?”
The President assented, and then began to say something else, but Marshall, afraid that he might not get to speak, spoke right over him. He spoke rapidly, full of facts and figures, saying, “If you don’t do something…and do it right away, I don’t know what’s going to happen to this country. You have got to do something, and you’ve got to do it today.”
At this point, he had FDR’s full attention, and he went on: “We are in a situation now where it’s desperate. I am using the word very accurately, where it’s desperate.”
It must have been a powerful presentation, because the next day, Roosevelt asked Marshall for a list of what the military needed.
What can we learn from this extremely short but momentous speech? That sometimes it is possible to dramatically alter the listener’s attitude and position quickly if that’s the only chance you have. You too, can pull off this feat, as long as you have:
Command of the facts: It begins with content: your proposal has to be grounded in reality, and you must have the facts to back up your position. You must command your material so well that without overwhelming the listener with detail, you leave no doubt that you have all the details if needed. Besides being convincing, facts also provide a face-saving way for the listener to change his mind. When it’s about opinions, it’s hard to change someone’s mind because it can get personal.
Conviction: Conviction is not the same as passion, which is easily dismissed by the listener as purely emotional. Conviction comes from a solid foundation of thought, and the deep belief that your cause matters. It certainly contains a strong core of emotion, but that emotion may actually be more powerfully expressed by keeping it in check.
Courage: It takes tremendous guts to stand up to the President of the United States, but Marshall had the character and devotion to duty that in effect left him with little choice. But the collateral benefit of having the courage to state the truth to power, even when it can be personally very costly, is that it can confer tremendous credibility.
One final thought: Marshall already had a reputation in the Army for his ability to boil down complex issues to succinct statements. It was a skill he had honed over years, and it paid off for his country when it was needed most.
Strong presentations are built of these
Have you ever heard someone (perhaps even yourself) say something like, “our best-in-class quality and performance provide superior value that leads to unparalleled increases in productivity for our customers”?
Try to picture each of these words in your mind. You can’t, because they aren’t real or tangible. There’s nothing “wrong” with words like quality, performance and productivity, but you’re not doing yourself a favor if your conversations don’t use words that listeners can see, hear, feel, taste, or smell.
What do you give up when you lose concreteness?
When you give a presentation, or just have a conversation to persuade someone, you want your listeners to: listen, understand, believe, imagine and remember. Here’s how being more concrete can help:
Listen: People can’t be convinced if they don’t pay attention. Business abstractions such as quality, synergy, world-class, are used so often that we automatically block them out as meaningless buzzwords, while concrete words have the power to grab the listener by the shirt and force them to listen. You can talk about quality, or you can give a dramatic demonstration of it, by showing how beautiful or how tough your product is.
Understand: It’s tough to convince people who don’t understand your ideas. When we first learn about something, we learn about real objects, and then we gradually climb the ladder of abstraction. When everyone in the room shares a high level of knowledge, abstraction is efficient and can convey credibility. But when you’re selling an idea to someone, they typically don’t know as much as you do about it, so there’s always a danger that you will be more abstract and vague than you need to be.
Believe: One of the best ways to earn credibility is to show that you have been there and done that. Those who have, talk about real events, real people, and real things, not airy abstractions. You can mention customer complaints, or you can name a specific customer and share the language they used. Being specific is another aspect of concreteness, which is why even numbers can be used to make something more real. You can say your solution speeds up their process, or you can tell them it makes it 17% faster, which translates to $3.4 million in additional revenue.
Imagine: You are much more likely to be killed by a deer bounding across a highway than by a shark, so why do you think about sharks when you swim in the ocean but don’t worry about deer when you drive? Maybe it’s because the mental picture of having your living flesh ripped from your bones as the water turns red around you is a bit more vivid than a collision with a moving object.
People act on your ideas because they want to move away from pain or toward gain, and they are more likely to move when they can actively imagine the pain or the gain. Imagining real pains gets the motor running, and envisioning the future can get the wheels moving in the right direction. King’s Dream speech is memorable and inspiring because he helped an entire nation picture a better future. On a more mundane level, research has shown[1] that concrete and specific implementation intentions are much more likely to be carried out than general desires.
Remember: Unless someone is making an immediate decision, which is unlikely in a complex sale, they’re going to have to remember what you said when they weigh the pros and cons. They will remember things and sensations more than they will remember concepts, especially when everyone is using the same concepts (quality, value, etc.) in their presentations.
How about a concrete example?
When Boeing designed the 727 in the 1960s, they could have told their engineers to design a best-in-class, high quality and high performance airplane. Instead, they told them to build a plane that could carry 131 passengers nonstop from Miami and land on runway 4-22 at La Guardia (because it’s a short runway).[2] Besides making it clear for the engineers, do you suppose it made it easier to sell to the airlines?
