Three Tips for a Modern Presentation
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.
