If your sales tools aren’t persuasive and compelling, if your sales people are spending time creating their own clandestine collateral, or if your conversion rates are too low – you need to do something different.
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Writing a sales presentation: The process
A PowerPoint sales pitch allows you both to capture the messages you want to present to prospects (straight from the minds of your best sales people) and to distribute these messages in a way that others can use too. So how do we make sure we write a good presentation?
Always prepare properly: I’m going to begin with a disclaimer – creating an effective sales presentation takes hours. Before you even open PowerPoint, there’s a whole pile of stuff that it’s better to know beforehand: content, length, who will be presenting, how complex will your slides be, will you use icons or pictures, colour scheme, deadlines…and the list goes on.
You see, you can’t just make a sales tool and romania mobile number then throw it over the fence to the sales team. You need to work with them to find out what they need. When do they talk to prospects? What messages are they trying to articulate? What objections are they seeing? Where are competitors gaining ground? In summary, what conversations are sales people having that visual slides could support?
Gathering this kind of information does (and should) take time – and it’s definitely worth investing in it to do it properly.
The voice of the customer is often missing in sales messaging. The solution? Just ask they buy from you, or what you do that they value. Better yet, ask them what challenges they face (in your field of influence); now you can start to identify opportunities – areas where they need help but where you don’t currently have competitive advantage.
One word of caution though. Stated preferences and revealed preferences aren’t the same. Just because customers say they want something, doesn’t mean that they do. Offer them a real choice of products, and see what they choose – that’s a revealed preference.
To acquire new – different – customers, it makes sense to talk to those who aren’t currently buying from you, not just those who are. They may have different thoughts, value different things, and have a different view of your competitive strengths.