They call it teamWORK for a reason
Most sales presentation training, including my own, focuses on individual presentations. Yet that has to change, because in all the research I’ve done for my forthcoming book on strategic sales presentations, I’ve found very little written about how to effectively plan, practice and deliver a team presentation. Unlike a group presentation, which is merely individual presentations strung together, a true team presentation is seamless and synergistic.
Part 1: Team Presentations Are the New Normal
The reality of strategic B2B sales is that they usually involve teams. This is a fact that has clearly emerged from my interviews with top executives in researching for my book. Everyone I spoke to said that the majority of presentations they attend at their level are conducted by more than one person, and some said all of them are.
It makes perfect sense, because strategic sales presentations nowadays are almost by definition going to be team sales. They are generally complex system sales, and systems have many parts which generally can’t be comprehended or explained in sufficient detail by one person. Individual parts of these systems require specialized knowledge.
In addition, they are not transactional sales; you are either establishing or continuing a close working relationship with the customer, and that relationship can involve multiple individual connections across various functions and levels.
Often, the customer’s senior level executive is in the room precisely because the decision will have a broad impact across various functions within the organization. As a result, there are various people in the room who have a stake in the decision to be made and who will be working with various members of your team if you are successful. They want to get to know your team and gauge their compatibility with them.
The age of the heroic individual salesperson is over. Even if one person has all the knowledge and expertise to handle the presentation alone, it’s not a good idea. If you’re a short-listed candidate making a closing presentation, you have most likely already passed two crucial tests in the buying cycle: the customer has determined that the need is sufficiently important to invest in a solution, and they have agreed that your offering meets their minimum standards. The key remaining question at this point is “Can you deliver?”
A team presentation goes a long way toward answering this question by addressing two important issues:
First, they want to know: “Are these people we can work with over the long term?
An effective team presentation lets the customer see how your team works together and lets them try the team on for size. Several executives told me they pay attention to how the team works together during the presentation as an indicator about how they will work with the purchasing company.
When a team presentation goes well, the impact can be impressive and immediate. An executive who sat in on a presentation by a PR firm told me their team presentation was so impressive that “the foot of the last guy was barely out the door and the President looked at me and said, hire them.”
What did they like so much about that presentation that clinched the decision? They became comfortable that the firm could deliver on its promises because each person who was responsible for the different aspects of the relationship had a chance to present. They were also impressed by the obvious camaraderie that the team displayed, and had the feeling that spirit would make them easy to work with.
Second, they want to know: “Are we trusting our critical project to just one person?”
Actually, it’s a bit more nuanced than that. They want to be assured that they have “one throat to choke,”—a single responsible point of contact and accountability—plus the depth of an entire team to support their needs. If you’re in charge of the presentation, the structure and delivery of your team presentation must convey both of those characteristics. Numbers also count in terms of reassuring them that you have the depth of capability and talent to handle their needs.
From a delivery standpoint, team presentations also help to add variety and maintain attention. Even the most dynamic presenter can get a bit stale after about twenty minutes, so it helps to have different speakers.
Of course, anything with such strong benefits is bound to carry some risk. Team presentations are much more difficult to pull off properly. Anytime you add moving parts to a system there is much more chance of something going wrong. Plus, any team is at the mercy of its weakest player.
In the next two posts, we’ll discuss how plan, practice and deliver a knockout team presentation.
Good presenters analyze their audience, craft a presentation that meets their needs, and deliver with confidence and polish. Great presenters do that as well, but they also spend far more time thinking strategically and carefully shaping the conditions for success. As I wrote in my previous post, negotiations are largely won or lost during the time leading up to them, and the same idea applies to presentations, whether it’s an internal presentation to get approval on a proposal or a sales presentation to a customer.
I first learned how to do this early in my banking career. Back then we used to have to present loan proposals to a committee. We would put together a presentation that described the customer’s business, how they planned to use the money, and why we believed they were a good credit risk. My first few presentations met with so-so success, so I began to step back and try to figure out how to improve my success rate. I quickly figured out who was the most influential member—based on expertise not rank—and began going to him with a rough outline of what I planned to present the following week. I would ask his advice on the best way to structure the deal. If the deal was really big, I’d go to another member and say, “Chuck and I think this deal would work this way. What do you think?” This did three things for me:
Objectively, it taught me a lot about how to put together a good proposal. Subjectively, it gave me a high-ranking ally on the committee. It also was a sanity check: if Chuck did not like the deal, I would “lose early” and pull it from the agenda, and I developed a reputation for only bringing in good deals.
It may seem that I got an unfair advantage over others who did not work the system before their presentations. In a way, that’s true, and if you’re a salesperson you want every unfair advantage over your competitors (within legal and ethical bounds, of course) that you can get. But keep in mind that the benefits flowed both ways. The committee members, who were my “customers”, got the benefit of sound proposals that met their standards and did not waste their time.
My banking days ended over twenty years ago, but I’ve applied those early lessons in my sales career…
Pack the crowd with your friends
Of course it’s important to know who will be in the audience and know what their stake is in the outcome, their potential objections, their history with similar decisions, etc. But you don’t have to passively accept the customer’s attendance list. One of the first mistakes that salespeople make in any complex sales cycle is to be so happy about getting their foot in the door that they don’t set certain conditions as the price for showing up. If it’s too easy to get that first meeting, you should remember Groucho Marx’s quip that he would not join any club that would take him as a member!
The more you know about how your solution will affect your customer’s cash flow engine, you’ll be able to expand the range of stakeholders who will benefit from your proposal. Make sure that they are invited to attend. As much as possible, talk to them before the presentation to understand their needs; it’s a great way to improve your proposal and to establish rapport (which also helps with pre-speech jitters). I once had a presentation set up with the Region President of a company in Detroit, and got his permission to reach out to some of the other attendees to make sure I could address their needs. That led to a conversation with his Director of Sales, which led to having dinner with him the night before, which resulted in a champion during the presentation.
But make sure your opponents are there, too
It may be counterintuitive, but you also want to do the same thing with your potential opponents. Make sure they all attend and try to talk to them before the meeting if possible. They need to be there during your presentation, because if they’re not, you won’t be able to answer their objections or concerns. They can wait until after the presentation and then do their internal selling against you and you won’t be able to do a thing about it.
By talking to them before the presentation, you have a chance to prepare for their concerns, and potentially to gain some respect. Simply ask them questions to sincerely understand their point of view and answer any questions they might have, but don’t try to “sell” them or change their minds, or you run the risk of entrenching their opposition.
When you have a good understanding of their objections, you can build “presponses” into your presentation: steal their thunder by bringing up the concern and answering it before they do. It will do wonders for your credibility.
Balance planning and flexibility
Of course, because people are unpredictable and circumstances change, you have to strike the right balance between planning and flexibility. Football coaches game-plan very meticulously, but quarterbacks and defensive captains still need to be able make changes based on what they see the opponent doing. I personally have never seen a sales presentation go exactly as planned, but the process of planning has saved me on numerous occasions. As Eisenhower said, “Plans are nothing; planning is everything.”
Avoid drama
It’s kind of exciting to see yourself as the hero of the hour, standing in front of a skeptical audience and winning them over through the brilliance of your argument and the force of your personality, but the most effective persuaders in the long run usually do it without the dramatics. They understand that, in the words of Sun Tzu, the best general is not the one who wins the most battles, but the one who wins without having to fight battles.
When do most of your sales negotiations begin? If you think the negotiation phase of the sale only happens after the customer has decided in principle to buy your offering, you may be leaving a lot of money on the table.
I’d like to illustrate my point by describing a scenario unrelated to negotiating. I teach a module on listening skills, and the first thing I do is put students through a listening exercise to show them that they’re not as good as they think they are. I tell them that I will give describe a situation and then test them at the end of it. They are free to take notes or do whatever they want to make sure they don’t miss anything. Then I begin by saying, “You are the driver of the Main Street bus. At the first stop, three blue-eyed people get on the bus…” I go through several iterations involving various numbers of people with different colored eyes, and it’s funny to watch people listening intently and writing down numbers, because at the end I ask them the one question: “What color are the eyes of the bus driver?”
It’s rare for more than 10-20% of the participants to get the answer right. Most people miss the first and most important word in the scenario, because they are so intent on paying attention to what they think is important.
The same thing applies to sales negotiations. Literally everything you and your customer do and say from the first contact may make a difference in how the negotiation goes:
First impressions count for a lot, and the small talk before you get down to business can have a disproportionate impact on the rest of the relationship. If you establish a personal rapport with the other person, it can set the tone for a collaborative rather than competitive spirit during the actual bargaining phase later on. Subtle signals such as your confidence on the first meeting may influence their relative confidence.
In the unguarded moments during the small talk before you get down to business, little tidbits of information may slip out and influence perceptions and positions. They—or you—may say something that tells the other party about their hidden motivations, likes and dislikes, or time constraints. When I was a banker, I used to pay close attention to anything the other person said about their background, (where they were from, work background, etc.) and then compare those details to written information the borrower would provide. Even minor discrepancies were worth following up on.
Also, because reciprocity is so important to persuasive communication, you want to look for opportunities to give our counterpart little gifts early during the process, even if those “gifts” are bits of information. If they give you something in return, that’s great; if they don’t, that’s useful to know.
Your early questions can often be your most productive; because your counterpart may also think the negotiation does not begin until later, they may be more unguarded in their comments and answers early. For example, I like to talk about how they are positioned relative to their competitors. If they brag about how they get a premium because they compete on quality (and most of them do), that’s a good tidbit to file away for later when they tell you that you have to sharpen your pencil if you want to get the deal.
Questions that get the other person to quantify the cost or impact of their current challenges can be used to establish value in the earlier stages. It’s usually easier to grow the pie before you get to the phase where everyone is concerned with the size of their slice. Those types of questions can also be used to involve as many problem owners as possible. The more possible impacts your solution can have on their business, the more people will potentially benefit. You’ll want to talk to as many as possible so that you can a) have more allies and internal champions and b) accumulate more value for your solution.
Pay close attention to the questions they ask you, for indications of what is most important to them. Their questions may also provide a clue about which of your competitors they are talking to.
During the early stages, you should also overcome your natural reluctance to hear objections, and actively seek them out. Some objections that can be easily overcome in the early stages may assume artificial importance and become major sticking points during the bargaining process.
All of these precautions may seem like so much paranoia, but just remember that experienced buyers know how to use early moments to shape the negotiation in their favor. I know of one who used to brag that simply making sure he had the competitor’s coffee mug on his desk when a salesperson walked in was worth at least a 10% discount!
As Dave Brock says, “Deals are won or lost in the discovery phase of the sales/buying process.” Events, interactions and information that surface early carry much more weight than those that come out at the end.
Even with one of these, if you’re not learning, you’re losing.
Which would you rather have working for you, a salesperson with 10 years of experience, or one with one year of experience ten times? The unfortunate fact is that the majority of sales professionals fall into the second category.
The world’s foremost expert on experts is K. Anders Ericsson (who discovered the 10,000 hour rule that Malcolm Gladwell made famous). He tells us that:
“Some professionals continue to improve steadily during many years and even decades, and are eventually recognized by their peers as having attained the highest levels as experts or masters. In contrast, most professionals in a domain reach a stable, average, undistinguished level of achievement within a relatively short time frame and maintain this mediocre level for the rest of their careers.”[1]
Like any complex problem, there are many causes for this unfortunate situation. The one I address in this article is the lack of feedback that most sales professionals receive, especially after sales calls.
