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Presentations
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 The Best Sales Training
Book in a Decade!
Selling Power - the nation’s premier
sales-management magazine - created a fantastic, new
sales-training tool, which has already produced millions of
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better results from their team. |
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Every Issue Of 2005!
Selling Power’s
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The Guide to Delivering Persuasive
Presentations |
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| Initial Presentations Lead to Bulls-Eye Solutions
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When
you’re asked to present a solution to a prospect’s problem, there’s
a lot of pressure to get it right. After all, if your solution
doesn’t hit the proverbial nail on the head, chances are you won’t
close the deal. So rather than constructing a solution from scratch
and crossing all your fingers and toes on presentation day, ask to
give an initial presentation in which you offer a solution as a work
in progress, suggests Josh Gordon, president of Brooklyn,
New York-based Gordon Communication Strategies and author of
Presentations That Change Minds: Strategies to Persuade,
Convince and Get Results (McGraw-Hill, 2006). By starting with
an initial presentation, you can see how your audience reacts,
gather information about what they like and don’t like, and adjust
the solution from there, so that you can be confident your final
presentation is a winner.
In preparing and delivering an
initial presentation, one of three scenarios will occur. Here are
the scenarios and how you should handle them:
Scenario
#1: A single solution seems obvious. If this happens, present
the obvious solution. But do it in a way that makes your prospect
part of the solution. Douglas Leeds, president of the Tori Group,
accomplishes this feat by taking his audience step-by-step through
the same process of discovery that led him to the solution he is
presenting. He says that sharing his thought process gives prospects
ownership in what Leeds has concluded. It is, he says, much more
powerful than just making a recommendation. Moreover, by sharing
your thought process in the first person, you build credibility
while showing yourself to be professional and thoughtful.
Scenario #2: Several solutions have merit. In this
case, do a very quick overview of each solution and let the client
pick the one they like best. Here’s an example: Michael Clinton,
executive vice president and publishing director at Hearst
Magazines, was challenged by the Milk Producers Association for a
solution to a competitive situation. After determining what the
client needed, what problem they were trying to solve and what
solution they needed to realize, his team worked up three approaches
to the problem. Clinton says he quickly presented all three
solutions at the start of his presentation to get a reaction on each
one. When the audience said they liked one of them best, he put away
the other two and focused on the preferred solution. He went on to
discuss with the audience in detail how the idea could be
implemented, element-by-element. “Presenting several solutions is a
great way to go when there are several approaches that might work,”
says Gordon. “Not only do you avoid putting all your eggs in one
basket, but it also helps get your audience involved as they react
to different elements in each one.”
Scenario #3: Not
enough feedback to pick a solution. When you can’t get enough
direction to know what solution to present, you need to turn part of
your initial presentation into a probing session. Try one of these
two approaches:
a. Focus on the client’s
situation or context. When Gordon uses this approach, he starts
by saying, “I am familiar with your organization and situation. Your
situation as I understand it is…” Then he describes his audience’s
situation in detail, working in questions to complete his
understanding of the problem. The key here, says Gordon, is to
“scrupulously avoid” saying anything about your own products or
services. If you focus on the audience’s particulars, they will
start to pipe up and you’ll begin to see opportunities emerge. “If
you come up with a solution in real time, that solves a problem for
the first time, there is great magic and theater in it,” says
Gordon. “Your audience will find instant ownership of a solution
that emerges from these conversations.”
b. Share a number of solutions in
summary form. If you’re like most salespeople, you have a
laptop full of presentations that describe different solutions your
clients have used. Gordon uses his presentations in this way: He
picks the five solutions he anticipates a particular audience will
like best. Then he tells his audience he has five presentations of a
solution and will give them a quick summary of each. Gordon has used
this approach dozens of times without ever showing any of the
presentations on his laptop. The reason: audiences like part of one
solution and mix it with parts of others to create custom solutions
that are unique to their needs. In short, they sell
themselves.
To reach Gordon directly, visit http://www.joshgordon.com/.
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