Posts

Too Much Eagerness. Bad for Customers. Bad for You.

/6 Comments/in , /by

Last week, I had a coaching session with one of my clients who is a pretty talented business development person. I say ‘talented’ because she has all of the raw materials: enthusiasm, energy, work ethic, and decent communication skills.

Then, last week she relayed a deal that her company is working on. As she described the situation, a couple of things caught my attention. She proceeded to tell me how important this deal was to her company and how excited she was and how desperate some of her teammates are about landing this deal. (I suspect the desperation came directly from the sales force, but that’s a different matter).

After she reviewed the situation I asked her if she noticed anything about how she described the deal. She said she didn’t. But I did.

What I noticed was the underlying theme of neediness and awestruck-ness about this deal. It’s that “this-one-would-be-a-huge-feather-in-our-cap-if-we got-it” attitude. But that kind of thinking, to me, assures she won’t get it.

It’s Bad for Your Internal Team

Since one of the strategies with this prospect was a presentation meeting where she was to bring her engineers to discuss the deal with the customer, it becomes even more vital that their (engineer) minds are right when in contact with customer.

Anytime you give those people ample reason to be scared they’ll take it. Feeling pressure and stress is no way to go through a presentation like this. And the more magnitude and burden you put on the situation, the less likely you will be to care/focus on what the customer wants.

This is part of that overall misguided myth that the more excited we are about getting a deal, the more excited the prospect is about giving it to us. I know we were all taught that-and really want to believe it. But in my experience, it’s the cause of more lost deals than won deals.

It’s Bad for Your Customer

More importantly, anything that takes your eye off of the customer’s problems and goals creates a block for you – and they’ll feel it. Feeling that pressure to perform is one of the most common mistakes made in business development /sales. In coping with that pressure, you take the attention off of them and put it right on yourself. Read more

When One Picture Equals 62 Slides

/1 Comment/in /by

When we have a big presentation, why do we reach for the slide deck?

Isn’t it funny how distasteful we find PowerPoints to be when we’re on the recipient end, but how intriguing and inviting they become when we’re the ones giving the presentation?

I was speaking with a potential client the other day and asked them what their typical process was when a customer called and wanted information. He sheepishly said that they went out and gave a slide deck presentation.  When I asked how many slides there were, he responded, “62 – and growing.”

Sixty-two slides and growing!?  “Yes,” they said.

They began presentations a few years ago with a deck of 12 slides, but the Marketing Department and the subject matter guys were always wanting to add slides to be more specific about the results that a customer can expect. And now it’s up to 62 slides.

The Antidote for the 62-Slide Deck

Yes, there is an antidote for this slide deck disease and that is the Cornerstone Slide.

This is the one slide that you reveal at the beginning of any presentation that depicts the typical pain the customer will go through in the absence of your solution.  Preferably, it has no words on it, but instead, a graphic illustration or a drawing of your customer’s problem.

This could be a stick figure illustration or a high-end graphic illustration, but regardless, when a customer sees the slide and hears your explanation, they should be able to pinpoint exactly what their issue is.

We’ve watched organizations do away with the 61 other slides and just use the Cornerstone Slide because it’s the thing that engages the prospect at a deeper level of the brain than a slide with 1,000 words on it.

So rather than continuing to add slides so that in two years it becomes 102-slide deck, go back to the basics and do one really good slide up front.  You may find the rest are irrelevant.

Caution: Your marketing people may not like that (they actually will NOT like that), but your customers will and probably will buy more.

Three Tips for a Modern Presentation

/in /by

Last week a client asked us into his office to review his presentation on a massive project he was bidding on.

He told me upfront that he didn’t do a lot of these presentations so he was a little bit rusty.

As we watched him go through the presentation, I could tell that there were some presentation principles that he’d missed. No fault of his. He just wasn’t skilled in this area.

So I wanted to give you a recap of three tips that he used that tremendously improved his presentation to his prospects.

Tip 1: Pictures speak louder than words

Always, always, always have a visual diagram or illustration of the value that you bring. Perhaps it’s a circle divided into five components or a pentagram that is divided up into easy segments but you need to have a visual representation of the process you take people through or the value you bring.

Tip 2: Always start with a story

People love stories. You’re presentations will be remembered a lot longer and will be a lot more compelling if you can weave personal stories of tragedy and triumph into the presentation. Perhaps you can start with the standard “story of woe”. That’s the story of a prospect who was struggling and came to you for a solution. You can tell your audience what they went through, what some of the problems were and the process you used to help them alleviate the pain. Make it real and make it compelling.

Tip 3: Make sure you’re answering the real question

Throughout your presentation you will have questions from the audience. A mistake we see salespeople make is they answer the question that’s posed instead of getting to the real question before you submit an answer.

A good way to test this is if you answer a question and nobody says anything, chances are you’ve not answered the right question. A good way to clarify the question is, “To help me answer the question better, I would like to understand a little bit more about it and about why you asked it.”

This wasn’t an exhaustive list of all the points we recommended he changed but I thought these were three of the most important that can help you make a more modern, compelling and convincing presentation to your prospects.