with their many bullet points, bouncing shapes, and dizzying animations. If slides are your medium of choice, get updated on contemporary design guidelines to keep your presentation from triggering nausea. Following are some key things to remember when planning your presentation material:
✔ Start with a concept. Most salespeople jump to create slides the minute they get the presentation on their calendar. Taking the time to stop and consider what you want to accomplish can save you from showing up with a PowerPoint collage of ideas and styles.
✔ Focus on one idea. The rule of “one slide – one idea” can keep your presentation clean, clear, and on point.
✔ Set the tone. Is it serious or light? Emotional or logical? The tone or feeling you want to create influences everything from your theme, your colors, your choice of pictures, and your fonts.
✔ Say it with a picture. A bold graphic can communicate an idea quicker than a slide full of text.
You can discover more helpful design tips in Chapter 9.
Like an actor, you’re auditioning for a role in your prospect’s business. To win the part, you need to do more than just memorize the lines. Most salespeople spend the vast majority of their time preparing the message and forget about the messenger. The following are your performance tools, and they’re a ready resource for enhancing and reinforcing your message:
✔ Your voice: As the delivery vehicle for your message, your voice holds a lot of power, yet few people use it to its full potential. Variety in volume, pacing, pausing, and emphasis can draw attention to key messages and make your content come to life.
✔ Your body: How you use your body – gestures, movement, eye contact, stance – sends a steady stream of information to your prospect. That information can say “I’m credible and confident and you should listen to me,” or “I wish I were anywhere but here!”
✔ Your stage: Your stage is your surroundings. How you move about your stage can renew flagging attention or be a source of distraction.
Refer to Chapter 11 for more about using your voice, body, and staging.
Logic is great stuff and presentations are packed with it. But logic doesn’t engage your prospect on an emotional level – and most purchases are decided with emotion and justified with logic. Stories are powerful vehicles for triggering emotions, changing opinions, and creating memories.
You may be hesitant to use a story in your presentation because you’re concerned your prospect will get impatient. Of course, the real danger is if your story is too long, irrelevant, or trivial. In Chapter 12, you discover how to craft a purposeful story that addresses a specific need in your presentation and connects quickly and easily to your prospect’s goals.
Dealing with Potential Problems
Texting during your presentation, prospects entering and exiting the room, technical difficulties, objections – can and will occur – when giving a presentation. How you deal with them determines whether your presentation gets back on track and running smoothly or ends up at the wrong destination.
These sections introduce you to a strategy for regaining your prospect’s attention after you lose it and for handling objections when they arise.
Attention isn’t constant. Planning to reengage your audience throughout your presentation is a necessity today. Luckily, certain things have the power to draw people’s attention. Leveraging this fact by using a variety of these different techniques throughout your presentation can keep your presentation fresh and your audience engaged:
✔ Introduce a prop. A whiteboard, flipchart, a product sample, even an ordinary object like a phone, or a book, can serve as a visual cue to regain your prospect’s attention and reinforce recall.
✔ Interact with your audience. Questions aren’t the only form of interaction; try taking a poll, running a contest with a cool but inexpensive giveaway, or giving someone in your audience a role in your presentation to regain attention.
✔ Use movement. Getting out of the comfort zone behind your laptop is crucial in order to form a connection with your prospect. Look for opportunities to approach your audience, like when you’re telling a story, posing a question, or discussing your prospect’s challenges. If you’re seated, use gestures to underscore your message and focus your prospect’s attention.
Check out Chapter 14 for more fresh ideas on keeping your audience engaged.
Although most salespeople would prefer not to get any objections, objections are actually a sign of an engaged prospect. What makes it uncomfortable is not having a good process in place for handling an objection. Here are some quick tips for dealing with objections in a way that moves the sale forward:
✔ Preempt an objection. The best defense is a good offense! Brainstorm possible objections and come up with a response for each type – price, timing, features – and diffuse the objection by including it in your presentation before your prospect has a chance to bring it up.
✔ Break up the objection. Objections can trigger your fight-or-flight instinct, negatively affecting how you respond. Before you jump to answer the objection, take a deep breath, break it down by listening, pausing, and then clarifying to make sure you’re answering the real objection.
✔ Say “yes and … .” This rule of improv is effective and easy for handling the toughest of objections. Simply acknowledge your prospect’s objection (say yes), add your perspective (with “and”), and ask an open-ended question to collaborate on a solution with your prospect.
Head to Chapter 15 for more suggestions on how to prepare for objections and handle them during your presentation.
Preparing for Special Presentations
Although persuasive presentations share many common characteristics, certain types of sales presentations – team, virtual, demonstrations, and so forth – offer unique challenges. These sections give you a quick overview.
If you’re involved in a strategic sale – high stakes, multiple steps – more than likely you’re a member of a sales team. Your success rides on your team’s ability to present a united front and a cohesive message. With unfamiliar team members often stretched for time, team presentations can start to resemble Frankenstein’s monster: a mish mash of styles, an unsteady delivery, and unpredictable results. To make sure that everyone on your team is singing from the same songbook, remember these points:
✔ Assign clear roles. Having one person as the point person who collects all presentation materials and another who handles all the logistics can keep information from getting lost or balls from being dropped. Having a go-to person to handle certain types of questions can avoid missteps during your presentation.
✔ Use good rehearsal practices. Forget the dry
