The sales presentation is a great opportunity to establish a relationship with the customer and align your offering with their specific needs. Whether delivered in person or using a web conferencing solution, the presentation should serve as a launching point for a collaborative working model.
Often times, however, sales presentations become a one-way conversation and a rush to flip through as many slides as possible. Here are 3 tips that can help improve your presentations:
1. Tailor the presentation to the customer: Do you have a good understanding of the customer’s needs and perspective prior to the call? What are their primary pain points? Are they using a competitive product? Why are they considering your offering?
While it may take additional effort, tailoring your slides to resonate with the customer’s expectations can significantly improve outcomes. Try splitting all your sales collateral into modules that you can pull together and edit to build a story relevant to your customer.
2. Engage the audience: Through your presentation style and the PowerPoint slides aim to establish a collaborative and engaging meeting. Here are a few ways to achieve this:
– Pause to ask questions and ensure that your audience is following along
– Keep your slides simple and use images and charts appropriately to bring your ideas to life
– Ensure that your slides add to any knowledge the customer may have already acquired from your website or other sources
3. Understand your desired outcome: The presentation is likely an early step in the sales process and it’s unlikely the customer will immediately send you a PO. However, each presentation does have a goal even if it’s as simple as setting up another meeting. As such, you should build the goal into the presentation and leave enough time to address it. Otherwise you may find that the customer was engaged but that the next steps were unclear.
If the presentation goal is logical and represents a small step in the sales process it may make sense to devote a slide to it. However, if the ask is large and the customer not prepared, it may make sense to more gently bring it up.
