Avoiding "Death by PowerPoint"

Let’s talk about sales presentations.

In the corporate world, everybody presents. And almost everybody sucks at it. The standard behavior is to display dozens of slides crammed with as many bullets as possible, and then to read each bullet aloud as if the audience were illiterate. 

Sales reps have a term for the standard corporate presentation: “death By PowerPoint.”  They also have a term for sales reps who try to use them with customers: "unemployed."

Sales presentations – effective ones, that is – are models for what most corporate presentations should be (but aren’t). This is because sales presentations don’t just communicate information, they must inspire the audience to take action (i.e. actually buy something).

Here’s how to do a perfect sales presentation, in five easy steps:

1. Stop Using PowerPoint. Yeah, you’ll feel naked without it, but top sales pros stick all the complicated information (like product specs) into handouts and brochures. They never risking boring or boggling a customer with reams of on-screen data.
2. Do Your Homework. Learn everything that you can about your customer, before presenting. Remember, unless the presentation is an academic lecture, you’re trying to get somebody to do something. Therefore, your presentation must be primarily about the customer’s needs, and only after those needs are established, about what you have to offer.
3. Create an Agenda. On a single page of corporate letterhead, put the full name of the customer, the date, the start time and the end time of the meeting. Then, based upon what you learned in Step 2, add five or seven questions that focus the conversation on the customer’s needs, going from the general to the specific. (This idea comes from Brian Tracy, author of some 300 training programs for sales pros.)
4. Focus on the Customer. Keep the presentation moving forward by using each agenda question as a springboard to discuss and clarify the customer’s needs. As appropriate, show how your offering meets those needs. Pace the presentation so that the customer is never overwhelmed with information.
5. Close on Next Steps. If both you and customer agree that there’s a good match between the customer’s needs and what you have to offer, ask for the business. It’s really that simple.