If it doesn’t fit here, it won’t be clear
The first step in planning a strategic sales presentation is deceptively simple: knowing what your key message is. When you take the time up front to write a theme, it provides brevity, clarity and impact, which helps you and your audience. The theme gets right to the heart of the matter.
Have you ever come away from a presentation and had trouble figuring out or remembering what the speaker was trying to say? Usually it’s not your fault—the speaker probably did not have a clear idea in his or her own mind why she was there or why you should have been.
When that happens, a tremendous opportunity has been wasted by the salesperson, not to mention the valuable time of the high-level decision-makers in the room. How likely is it that they will be able to act on your message when decision time comes, or that you will be invited back?
The bottom line is that you want your listeners to be absolutely clear what you want them to do and why. If you’re not clear on that, why should they be?
The solution to this all-too-common problem is, rather than immediately creating an outline of your points or creating your slides, you should take a few minutes to crystallize a theme for your presentation. The theme is simple: what do you want them to do and why should they do it? To make it even simpler, complete the following sentence before every presentation:
You should __________, because __________.
“You should”__________: What do you want them to do?
Always remember that a sales presentation is still a sales call. Any good sales call begins with a clear purpose: why are you taking time out of your busy sales day to go on this call? What do you intend to accomplish? How will it advance your sale or your position within the account?
So, the first part of the theme is to spell out your purpose in specific, output-defined terms. In other words, don’t have something mushy such as, “educate them on the benefits of cloud computing”. How will you know they’re educated? Will you give them a test? A better way to write this would be: “Gain agreement to form a task force to explore cloud computing”. (Naturally, if it’s a closing call, your purpose should already be pretty clear.)
Just the exercise of forcing yourself to be specific will clarify your mind tremendously and will make the rest of the presentation go much more smoothly.
“…because________: Why should they do it?
This is where you state your value proposition for this particular audience—not the generic one that says, “We are the nation’s leading provider of blah-blah-blah…” Based on your work before the presentation, you should a very clear idea of the specific reasons they should buy your solution. Although it depends on the audience, very rarely will those reasons be based on product specifications. At senior decision making levels, the why is generally expressed in terms of business improvements, solving problems, or improving processes.
“…because you need it to meet your goals of increasing flexibility and lowering your IT costs.”
Even better: “…it is the only way you will meet your ambitious flexibility and cost reduction goals.”
When you write your theme, it is for your use only, to help you organize the presentation, so you don’t have to write it down in marketing language. For example, your theme could be: “Buy our solution, because if you don’t there is a good chance your project will fail.” That’s probably not something you would say in exactly those words, but it very easily could be the impression you want to leave in their minds.
Think of your theme as the elevator pitch for a very short building. If it takes you more than about 25 words to craft it, you probably lack clarity.
Good ideas, like good products, rarely sell themselves. Someone needs to present them in the right way to the right people at the right time, and the three people mentioned in the title above have all had important and useful things to say about how to do that.
In my new book, Strategic Sales Presentations
Aristotle was the original—and still the best—presentations trainer in history. Classical Athens was a direct democracy, which meant that if you wanted to get something done, or defend yourself from a lawsuit, you had to speak directly to an assembly of citizens. There were no lawyers, lobbyists of PowerPoint; it was just you and your eloquence facing an audience as large as 10,000 strong, so it was important to know how to get attention and sway an audience.
Fortunately in those days you could turn to one of the first presentations trainers. Aristotle wrote the best training manual for speakers—The Rhetoric. His major contribution, which still applies today, is the proper use of three principal avenues of persuasion, logos, pathos, and ethos. He realized that the persuasiveness is a function of both the message and the messenger. The strength of the message depends on appealing to the listeners’ hearts and minds through logic[1] and emotional connection, and the credibility of the messenger is earned by who they are and what they do. In the book you will learn how to choose the right mix of solid evidence, present it compellingly and engagingly, while personally conveying executive presence and credibility.
Fast forward a couple of millennia, and we can use modern science to further refine some of Aristotle’s ideas. Daniel Kahneman, the only psychologist to ever win the Nobel Prize in economics, teased out the complex relationship between two main modes of thinking that audience members apply when listening to a presentation. System 2 is the slow, logical deliberative process that we all admire as the ideal of business decision-making, and System 1 is the rapid, intuitive and unconscious undercurrent of thought that exerts a powerful and sometimes overriding influence on our real-life decisions. Executive decision makers try to be exceedingly rational in making important business decisions, but even they can be influenced by how choices are framed, for example. Even they use shortcuts when the choices become too difficult. For example, Kahneman’s substitution principle states that when a question is difficult to answer (e.g. will this multi-million dollar investment return an acceptable ROI?), they will frequently substitute an easier question (e.g. do I trust this person who is telling me it will?).
Although history and science have a lot to teach us about effective presentations, no one in business will be really convinced until they see how successful business leaders embody the ideas in the book. Jack Welch and Steve Jobs are certainly on anyone’s short list of greatest business leaders of the past fifty years. They teach us that regardless of how strong your solution is, or how prestigious the company you represent, your performance during those critical moments in front of some of the toughest audiences in the world can make a big difference. Their regimen for preparing for important presentations should teach us and inspire us to put in the same painstaking and relentless effort and attention to detail they do.
Besides these important teachers, the book also contains ideas and advice from some people that I consider even more important. A lot of senior executives that I’ve had the privilege of working with have also made valuable contributions to Strategic Sales Presentations, graciously consenting to be interviewed and pass on their perspective. (Although I suspect some of them did it out of self-interest—because they’re tired of sitting through boring, mistake-filled presentations.)
The book closes with a reminder that greatness as a presenter is within your reach, if you’re willing to put in the work. Because he started it, Aristotle also gets the last word in the book: “We are what repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit.”
[1] Since he also wrote the first book on logic, I guess you could say he was a full-service training provider.
He knew where the money was
Are sales presentations dead? In this age of Sales 2.0, it’s easy to get that impression. We’re told that buyers are better informed than ever, that they have already gone through more than half the buying process when they first engage us, and that no one likes to be “sold”.
If this is true, then it would seem there would no longer be any need for a sales professional to know how to deliver a compelling presentation. Maybe it’s a far better use of their time to master social media instead.
On the other hand, that news would be extremely surprising to many top sales professionals who have made their year—maybe even affected the trajectory of their careers—by succeeding in those all-important strategic presentations. What does strategic mean? Quite simply, it’s improving your position (or clinching the deal) by saying the right things to the right people at the right time in the sales process. As an example, a top executive from a major technology firm told me that when a sales team from a major PR firm presented to their top management, within two seconds of their leaving the room, the president said: “Hire them.”
Sales presentations are still crucial to success in the complex sales for several reasons.
- It’s true that your buyers are getting a lot of information from the internet and other sources, and we all know that the information we get on the internet is 100% reliable, right? Whether your buyers are misinformed, or have missed some important insights, often the only way to correct the discrepancy is to gain the attention of the right people early enough in the sales process to be a part of their decision-making conversations.
- Most complex sales don’t end with a single transaction. The sales team must remain closely involved with implementation and ongoing support to ensure that the customer achieves the best possible outcomes from their purchase decision. The sales presentation may be the only way for all the people involved in the decision to get to know and gain a level of comfort with the sales team. You may represent a company that has billions of dollars in assets, but to them you are the company.
- If done right, the strategic presentation is definitely not a one-way transmission of information. It’s a superb way to have an interactive dialogue with all the relevant stakeholders and share insights that lead to better solutions.
- According to research cited in The Art of Woo: Using Strategic Persuasion to Sell Your Ideas, important corporate decisions involve an average of eight people in the decision. Major purchasing decisions will require at least that many, so at some point someone will have to present to all of them together. Why shouldn’t it be you?
- Other research by the HR Chally Group found that salesperson effectiveness accounted for 39% of the buying decisions of 300,000 customers surveyed[1]. A presentation to a high level audience is the most direct and dramatic way of demonstrating your effectiveness.
- Another interesting insight from my interviews with senior-level decision makers is that while they are often not experts in the technologies they are asked to decide upon, they do pride themselves on their ability to read people. They welcome the presentation because it gives them an opportunity to “scratch the surface” in a presentation and gauge the competence of the person presenting to them.
Willie Sutton was a famous bank robber in the 1950s. When he was caught, supposedly a reporter asked him why he robbed banks. Willie replied: “That’s where the money is.” The same still applies to strategic sales presentations today, no matter what some pundits will tell you.
This is leadership?
“Leadership” is the sexiest topic in all of business writing, and it’s even more so in sales, with its emphasis on getting the best possible performance out of creative, street-wise and strong-minded individuals. We admire sales leaders like the one personified by Alec Baldwin in Glengarry Glen Ross, who parachute in and solve sales problems through an artful combination of incentives and intimidation. (First prize in the sales contest, new Cadillac; second prize, set of steak knives; third prize, you’re fired)
I think it’s time to point out that this emperor’s clothes are wearing very thin. We need to recognize and promote the sales leader’s quiet and unassuming little brother (or sister): the sales manager. We have too many leaders and too few managers.
There’s a wonderful phrase in Michael Webb’s book, Sales and Marketing the Six Sigma Way: “yelling at the thermometer”. He says that trying to solve sales problems is like trying to fix the temperature by yelling at the thermometer. How many sales “leaders” try to solve sales problems in a similar fashion?
The 4 I’s of Sales Leadership
Sales leaders like to be the indispensable heroes in the middle of the action. They have four major tools that they use as necessary when there is a sales problem:
Intuition: “Analysis is for wusses. I know what worked for me, and by golly, it will work for them.”
Inspiration: “Don’t fire them; fire them up.” (Anyone remember that book from the 80s?)
Incentives: I once worked for a guy who thought the best way to increase sales was to encourage his salespeople to go into heavy debt.
Intimidation: “Of course they’ll use the CRM system. They know what will happen if the don’t.”
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with any of the tools above, except when they are all you have. Let’s see how sales managers do it.
Who remembers Gus Pagonis?
We all remember Stormin’ Norman Schwarzkopf for his brilliant generalship during the first Gulf War, but it takes a geek to remember the real hero of that war. Gus Pagonis was the logistician who accomplished the astonishing feat of moving, equipping and feeding an army of half a million troops to the Gulf and back again. An Abrams tank without gas is just a hot piece of metal sitting out there in the middle of a desert. His fundamental contribution was to make sure the shooters had everything they needed to do their job.
What does this have to do with sales? A sales manager’s job is to make sure their sales teams have everything they need to do their jobs as effectively and efficiently as possible. This requires systems thinking, systematic problem-solving, and process orientation, and future focus.
Systems thinking: Deming said that “a bad system will beat a good person every time.” The sales manager’s job is to implement and maintain a good system-one that gives the right people the tools they need to succeed and gets out of their way.
Problem-solving: Without systems thinking, problem-solving becomes an exercise in “wack-a-mole”, where you hit any problem that comes up as hard as you can (using the 4 I’s), only to have another problem pop up in a different place. Sales managers take the time to analyze problems, get to the root cause, experiment with solutions, gather data, and keep what works. It’s not as exciting as leadership, but it works.
Process: Sales managers know that one of the most important concepts in sales is process. As Dave Brock tells us, “The data shows that people and organizations that use a sales process consistently perform at much higher levels than those who don’t.” While sales often calls for imagination and flexibility, there is a surprising amount of commonality and standard work in all sales efforts, and codifying and improving this work can improve the entire sales organization.
Future focus: Sales managers build for the long term, so that they can leave behind a system that continues to thrive even after they’ve moved on. For example sales leaders like to ride to the rescue to close an important deal (and show the sales team they still have it); sales managers make sure their people get the right coaching, support and training so that they can confidently close the deals themselves.
If you’re a sales leader and find that you have to keep continually applying the 4 I’s of your trade, maybe you should try to ease up—do a little less leading and a little more managing.
