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.
Don’t blame the audience
As part of my research for my forthcoming book, Strategic Sales Presentations, I interviewed dozens of senior level executives to understand how they perceive the presentations they receive from salespeople. One of the questions that really got most of them talking was “What are the top mistakes that you see salespeople making during presentations?” Here are the Top 10:
Try too hard to sell me. When you reach my level, you have been vetted by people in my organization whose opinions I trust, so make your presentation educational and factual. Teach me something new.
Talk too long. “By slide #2, most salespeople have already used up 75-80% of my patience and I’m looking for the exit.” Get to the point. On a related note, don’t use too many slides, especially about your corporate “story”. Sometimes even you look bored with it.
Ask me what keeps me awake at night. That’s one of the most overused questions in sales. You should already have a pretty good idea of my problems.
Be too sure that you know all about my problem already. This is the opposite extreme of the previous one. If you act like you know it all, we will push back and expose what you don’t know. Be humble and ask a lot of questions.
Not listen. Don’t be so wrapped up in getting your message out that you don’t listen to us. If we interrupt you to ask a question or say something, there is a pretty good reason for it.
Try to circumvent our buying process. “Don’t force your sales cycle on me.” On rare occasions, we will bend this rule, but you’d better have a damn good reason to do it. Also, “If you get in too easily to see me, that’s not a good sign. It means everyone else can too.”
Be too canned. We like to talk to real people who know our business. If you’re too slick or too “coiffed”, we’ll get suspicious.
Use “$75 words”. When you make something more complicated than it is, it “makes us think like you’re full of it.” On a related note, a CFO said that you should not use terms like ROI and payback unless you really know what they mean.
Bring too many people. Too many teams bring in many more people than are necessary. If they don’t have a reason for being there, or don’t play an active role, leave them home. If you have that many people to spare, I may end up paying too much.
Wear a Gator tie when selling to the University of Georgia. Yes, this actually happened. The big picture point is that you should know your customer and tailor your presentation to them. On a related note, don’t show me a generic slide presentation that could have been seen by anybody.
Let’s make sure it works before we put passengers on it
I’ve written often about the importance and benefit of planning, whether it is for a sales call or a presentation. The discipline of planning allows you to refine what you want to say so that you can be more efficient and effective. Most salespeople get this, but even so, getting them to plan can be very difficult. Being fully aware of that, I’m going to crawl even further out on to that limb and propose yet another step. In this article, I’d like to focus on the step between the plan and its execution, the one that is probably most neglected by sales professionals, either because of a surplus of self-confidence or a deficit of time.
I can hear you thinking already: “Why should I rehearse? I’m an experienced professional, and I’ve done this many times before. I don’t want to sound scripted.”
The rehearsal step is most often skipped for three reasons. The reason most often given is the least valid: you don’t have time. That answer is totally unacceptable and unworthy of a true professional. Your time in front of high-level decision makers is the most highly leveraged use of your time that you can have. If you don’t have time to make sure you’re at your best, how do you find time for all the other things you do in your work life? Besides, if you don’t care enough to rehearse, why should they care enough to listen?
In Part 1 of this series we saw how important team presentations are for today’s B2B complex sales. In this part we look at how to plan the team presentation so that it is more than just a collection of mismatched parts bolted together.
The first thing to remember is that you are planning a team presentation, not a group presentation. Any collection of individuals can form a group at a moment’s notice, but it takes time and care to mold a team. They call it teamwork for a reason. That’s why there is a big difference between a group presentation and a team presentation.
A group presentation is a series of individual presentations that might or might not have a strong connection with each other. Each one could probably stand on its own. A team presentation, by contrast, is a single presentation with several participants. This is a critical difference, because it changes how you plan it, practice it, and deliver it.
Because a team presentation is a single presentation, there is one plan for the presentation, and one person is in charge. As the USA Olympic basketball team has demonstrated on occasion, even a Dream Team of superstars is going to lose if you just have a collection of individuals trying to do their own thing. People have to keep their egos under control and see their part as a contribution to the big picture.
It does not mean that one person writes the entire presentation for all the participants. They can still craft their own individual parts, just as long as they do it within the agreed-on architecture. Their specialized knowledge only makes sense within the big picture, and that is what the account manager brings to the table.
The good news is that most of the process that you use to prepare an individual presentation is exactly what you need for a team presentation. Because it’s a single presentation, the same principles apply. The additional complexity comes from meshing the individual contributions into a seamless whole.
Who does the planning? That’s up to the sales team. The Account Manager could decide on the overall structure and then ask participants to build their presentation to fit. However, best practice is to have the team come together for at least an initial planning meeting. This brings several benefits:
First, as the old saying goes, “none of us is as smart as all of us.” The combined input should result in a better presentation, especially as some team members may have specific information not known to the whole group.
Second, when everyone knows what everyone else is going to say, it helps them build references and links to other parts of the presentation. It also avoids the potential trap of having someone contradict a teammate.
Third, it provides a greater sense of ownership. Team camaraderie of the sort alluded to earlier in this section can’t be faked or just turned on for the presentation.
A team presentation is just an individual one on steroids
Everything you have to do for an individual presentation applies to team presentations, but the addition of others adds another level of preparation. Let’s review the required steps for a successful strategic sales presentation, and see what adjustments must be made for a team presentation.
Analysis: One of the benefits of a team sale is the diversity of connections, perspectives and information that each team member has. The challenge is to get all that information out on the table so that the team has the information needed for effective analysis. The important task here is to connect the dots between the various collections of information that each team member has.
During the planning phase, the presentation team should have a common document so that all members of the team can see it. Besides the obvious benefit of “being on the same page”, this process can often spark new ideas as knowledge is brought into the open and combined.
Shaping the conditions: The entire sales team should be working from a single opportunity planning template or document which details the buyer’s decision making process, with the relationships and influences clearly mapped out and understood by the entire team.
Core message: One of the most important reasons to have one clear theme in an individual presentation is to keep your presentation from being rambling and unfocused. Imagine how much more important that is with several people being involved.
It’s absolutely critical to have the discipline of one message that everyone supports and sticks to during their portion of the presentation. Buyers will get confused if they can’t connect all the threads, and even more so if presenters appear to contradict each other.
The reliance on a single clear theme was probably the most common denominator among the top team presenters interviewed for my book. One company called it the Central Question, another called it the Win Message, but nearly all insisted that this is the critical first step in all their team presentations.
Military planners use the concept of commander’s intent to ensure that subordinates can respond to the unexpected while still furthering the purposes of the operation. In team presentations, the one clear theme serves the same purpose. Because the presentation will never go exactly as it’s drawn up during the planning, it’s all the more important to ensure that when things go off track, the person speaking at the time can adjust and adapt, within the boundaries of the original intent.
Structure of the presentation: The main points that support the theme remain the same; the only difference is that each main point may actually be the complete presentation for individual team members. By having a clear structure, individual presenters see their piece as a part of the whole presentation. That main point then becomes their core message for their own specific piece, and the process is taken from there. This way, when the pieces are put back together, everything works the way it’s supposed to, as a seamless whole. It’s like the way Boeing built the 787, with different contractors working on a major assembly such as the wings and tail, working to exacting specifications so that when it was all bolted together the thing would actually fly.
It’s also important that each individual piece include references to previous and upcoming speakers, such as “As Chris mentioned, one of the root causes of the problem is the fluctuation in density from one batch to the next, and our solution addresses that by…”
Evidence: The supporting evidence portion is put together individually, and then brought back to the team. It’s not up to the team to parse the evidence, because the person putting it together is the recognized subject matter expert. However, it’s useful to have the team review what will be said to reduce redundancy or avoid contradiction.
Introduction and close: The team leader is probably going to be the person delivering the introduction. Besides the standard ingredients of an individual presentation, the team leader should also introduce the individual presenters and briefly explain their roles. The emphasis here is on brevity, because he or she will want to say a little more about each person just before handing off to them for their part.
The team leader may also take over for the close, or leave it to the last speaker to tie everything together. Since team presentations may be longer than individual ones, a brief summary at the end is a good idea.
Visuals: The only difference on visuals is just to ensure that the entire deck, if one is being used, should have a common look and feel. It should look like one presentation, not a patchwork.
