Pre-sales professionals are critical in in the sales process to validate, prove and influence technology decision makers. Too often, however, fundamental behaviours actually prevent the client from clearly seeing how the technology fits into their world, leaving the vendor with no realistic way of pursuing the account. You can overcome this by presenting your ideas with maximum impact and integrity. Here's how:
In the past 15 years I’ve coached hundreds of technology sales and pre-sales people, CEOs, and BDMs to present powerfully and engagingly and quite simply there is a difference in the way pre- sales technical consultants present, especially to non-technical audiences. So, if you’re in a boardroom, pitching for business or find yourself with a microphone at a conference, here are my Top 10 Professional Presentation Tips for Pre-Sales.
1. Stop talking about yourself, your company, how passionate you are about your new widget and start talking about the audience. Passion is compelling, but it’s not hard to become the bore at the party if you focus your presentation on your world rather than the client’s; Simple rule: if you’re still talking about yourself and your technology after 5 minutes, you have become the self indulgent talking to the self interested
2. Voice matters (1). If you have a flat voice, it will only sound flatter 20 minutes later. The audience will then be thinking of ways to get out of the presentation, rather than staying. Practice modulating your tone and volume. It’s OK to be louder. It’s not screaming, it’s interesting to listen to.
3. Voice matters (2). Talking fast about virtualization and 1EEE802.11 compliance is natural with two of your best engineering buddies and a beer, but business audiences (especially senior decision makers) can’t take it all in. The issue is if it’s too quick and we don’t get the language, it’s as if you haven’t said it at all. Add three times the number of pauses as you think normal and ditch the techy speak. Don’t slow your delivery –just add pauses.
4. Don’t Jargonise Them. Yes, I know this is obvious in 2013, but it still happens far too often. The TLA’s, HCAP, BHAG, AFUK language may work for some but it is not perceived by the majority of decision makers as important.
5. Watch the Slides – I’ve seen presentations where the presenter had 92 slides in a 60 minute presentation. Stop it –you’ll go blind. It just becomes a total distraction – and totally prevents the audience form clearly understanding your key messages, You should be able to get your point across with a simple Whiteboard description.
6.Tell stories – It amazes me that so many companies have great case studies around the use of the technology, yet become more formal in a business setting and leave all that natural storytelling ability behind. Tell a story about a client’s result, rather than putting up slides about functionality. Tell a story about your research into the client’s goals, rather than just boring facts about features and product sets.
7. Talk outcomes, not process. Pre-sales tend to be really poor at saying ‘right this is the bottom line – if you pay us $50K per month, we’re going to cut 15% off your total expenditure over 2 years. Yes, I know it depends and you have to install the bloody thing and make sure it works but if you don’t present what success typically looks like, why should they get excited about it.
8. Don’t Mitigate. You don’t need to be defensive because your competitor has one lousy feature out of 100 that you don’t. Avoidance and mitigated language such as probably, maybe, perhaps, hopefully just makes you sound uncertain. Concentrate boldly on what you can do for the client, not what can’t.
9. Use visuals and creativity not boring slides. Use pictures, images, YouTube videos to make your case. It freshens up the whole presentation and makes you stand out.
10. Practise. Yes, I know it’s boring but there are pre-sales people that will spend three hours checking the diagrams, preparing the choice of font, inserting reveals and fades and 10 minutes rehearsing their content over their Weet-Bix in the morning, If you don’t rehearse, where do you find your mistakes?
Elliot Epstein
As CEO of Salient Communication, Elliot is a sought after keynote speaker and corporate trainer who has coached and trained over 4000 people including CEOs, senior management and successful sales teams throughout Australasia and Asia including Hong Kong and Singapore.
Elliot is a specialist technology sales speaker and trainer for high profile corporates having spoken at over 1500 conferences, workshops and break-out sessions on presenting, selling, negotiating and pitching for leading companies such as HP, Alcatel – Lucent, Commonwealth Bank, Hitachi, Computershare and SEEK. He is renowned for ensuring presentations are engaging, interactive and relevant to winning business in competitive markets.
He is an advisory Board Member of Generation–e, one of Australia’s fastest growing IT companies.
Elliot is based in Melbourne where he lives with his wife and two expensive children
For more information : salientcommunication.com.au
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Salient Communication Category: Sales Profile: As an authority in coaching sales people and leaders, we apply over 25 years of experience in business, sales and corporate consulting to over 4000 CEO’s, senior executives and sales teams throughout Australasia and Asia. Clients include Forbes 100, ASX 100 companies, BRW Fast 100 companies and award winning SME’s, all who use Elliot’s Salient Approach to get real world results and immediate ROI. Challenging the ‘cruise control’ thinking and old fashioned prescriptive methodologies of sales exec ...
