Earlier I referred to the fact that the better the sales presentation, the better the outcome. The question for some then becomes, what does a good sales presentation look like?
Perhaps the easiest way to answer that is to think of you as a customer and the kind of presentation that floats your boat. We will all have slightly different views because we are all individuals. No two human brains are the same; we are unique. That does not mean we can’t provide a consistent and attractive presentation that will win the hearts and minds of all the people we present to. We can.
All we need to do is ensure that our marketing, sales, brand, values and principles are aligned and underpinned by our one big reason ‘Why.’ A good sales presentation will have taken all of those items into account.
Be aware that the same applies to anyone working for you or on your behalf; they need to be a reflection of all these elements too. Your sales presentation starts long before you start communicating directly with the prospect. So as a business owner who understands the sales process, you will want to ensure everything in your machine is aligned. Everything is on message and takes account of the core selling rules. Your brand, values, and principles you work to must all resonate and be clearly illustrated in all you do as a business and, in particular, in your sales. Your sales presentation must be based on the following:
- A genuine passion
- A focus on the desires & needs of the market you are in
- Materials that are based on data from your prospect
- Alignment to core values and brand
- An emphasis on giving value first
- Clear and educational information
- A full and actionable understanding of the core rules of selling.
When you consider a good sales presentation, we must include the traditional approach, face-to-face sales and increasingly consider virtual sales and what a good presentation in that environment looks like. I believe that if you are good at one, it should follow that you can be good at the other. All you need is the knowledge and practice to gain the expertise required; that is what we will briefly look at now.
There is a principle in business which is described as working Lean. This is certainly something I subscribe to in all of my business dealings. I suggest you apply the same principle to develop your sales presentation skills. The principle in this regard would tell us that we should go ahead with the minimum viable product or, in this case, presentation, and then learn on the job, test and adjust the assumptions we make regarding the content we choose to use in our physical and virtual presentations.
Regardless of the method, the process and content remain very similar, which is why I am suggesting that if you can do one, with a bit of adjustment and practice, you can do the other. I want to now share a generic framework for a sales presentation, physical or virtual, in the form of our version of a sales funnel to answer the question of what should a sales presentation look like.
As you may already know, we work on the top-line model of Hook, Story, and Offer to describe the process we use for the production of attractive content for both prospecting and attracting people into our funnels and then the same model within the funnel too.