go.
✔ Diving in to PowerPoint to start cutting and pasting from previous presentations.
✔ Creating a presentation plan to gather all the information you need.
Whether you have 10 minutes to prepare or 10 days, the third option is the winning choice. In a competitive market, planning plays a more critical role than ever in the success of your presentation. Planning means gathering as much relevant information as possible about your prospect prior to your presentation so you can tailor your message to her specific needs in a way that motivates her to take action. Failing to gather the insights you need or ask the right questions with today’s savvy buyers can damage your credibility and leave room for your competition to slip by and win the business. Because planning takes time, isn’t fun or sexy, it’s tempting to skip this step and jump right into picking out graphics and themes or loading up the standard deck – even though neither option may be a good fit for the current opportunity.
Planning a presentation is like building a house. You want to first make sure you have a design and a solid foundation that will produce the results you want. All of the cool videos and flashy graphics in the world can’t make up for faulty structure or inconsistent messaging. Without a plan, you may find yourself dodging the following landmines when you’re in front of your prospect:
✔ Disagreeing on value or goals
✔ Focusing on the wrong issue with the wrong person
✔ Being surprised by preferences or allegiances
✔ Fumbling through unanticipated objections
✔ Failing to make a logical and persuasive case
In this chapter, I show you how to create a solid foundation for your presentation. I help you determine what you must know before your presentation to successfully align your solution with your prospect’s goals, establish value, and overcome potential objections. I help you uncover the prospect’s challenge and define and quantify the impact on her and her organization. In addition, you discover how to prepare for a presentation that involves multiple decision makers by setting up and conducting discovery conversations and asking questions that produce valuable insights. You also find out how to keep everything on track – your team, your materials, and your technology – by creating a presentation planning checklist.
Evaluating the Presentation Opportunity
As a salesperson, you may have a knee jerk reaction to say yes to any opportunity to present your product or service to a potential customer. With the amount of time and energy that go into pursuing many business opportunities today, you need to make sure that the prospect is qualified and the opportunity is viable before you start to commit limited resources. Being a top sales performer requires being smart about where you spend your time and energy as well as having a clearly defined outcome.
A prospect is someone who has expressed an interest in your product or service and seems like a good fit for your business. Whether you’ve had an initial conversation or meeting with your prospect or just been handed a lead, before you begin planning, make sure that you have thoroughly qualified your prospect. That means your prospect should meet the following criteria:
1. The prospect has a need or desire for the solution that you provide.
2. The prospect has the authority to influence or make the purchase.
3. The prospect (or the prospect’s organization) is financially capable of making the purchase.
4. The prospect is likely to take action within a definite time period to resolve their problem.
Even if your prospect is qualified, you want to determine if the opportunity is worth all the time and effort you’re going to put into it. It’s always better to find out before you’ve spent two weeks preparing that your product or service isn’t well-aligned with your prospect’s needs. Here are two guideposts for determining if the opportunity is a viable one for you and your company.
✔ You have a favorable chance. Being the odds-on favorite from the start isn’t always realistic, but it’s best if the odds are at least even. Not every deal is in your wheelhouse. If your product or service isn’t an ideal match, you can’t compete on price, or if you don’t offer deal-breaking features, you must decide whether to invest the time and energy into pursuing a long shot. Reserving your resources for those opportunities where your chances of winning are more favorable is better in many cases.
✔ The outcome is worth it. If you’re going to invest a significant amount of time and resources in pursuing an opportunity – true in many complex sales – you need to know with some certainty that the payoff is worth the effort. Before you commit, factor in what it takes to win the deal and maintain the business as well as less measurable considerations, such as whether the partnership will be good, whether it can lead to additional business opportunities, or whether it will simply be more work that keeps you from pursuing more profitable business.
Every presentation needs a clearly defined outcome. When defining that goal, the outcome must be measurable and specific. Otherwise, how will you know if you’ve achieved it? Actionable and measurable goals give your presentation focus, direction, and a clear call to action.
For example, a goal of “letting a prospect know what we offer” is neither measurable nor specific. In fact, it’s not so much a sales presentation as it is public service announcement because no selling is actually taking place. A clearly defined goal would be, “to convince the prospect to recommend our solution to the financial decision makers within two weeks.”
1. Determine what the next step is in the sales process after your presentation.
For example, scheduling a product demonstration.
2. Identify the action your prospect needs to take at the end of your presentation.
For example, setting a date and inviting attendees to the demonstration.
3. Create your call to action around this actionable goal.
For example, “For next steps we recommend setting up a demonstration to key parties within the next three weeks. Bill, if you agree, can you come up with a list of names of people who you think would benefit from attending?” Check out Chapter 7 for tips on how to build a strong call to action.
Determining the Nine Things You Need to Know
The success of your presentation is dependent on the quality of your information. Without relevant, insightful