By Troy Harrison
It happened last week and I cringed. A new client wanted to know how to create a winning sales presentation and he asked me, “Hey, could you take a look at my slide deck? I teach my salespeople to present from it, and they just aren’t doing it well. That should be one of our areas of focus.” With great fear, I asked, “How many slides are in it?” “41,” he replied proudly, telling me that he’d paid a lot of money to a marketing firm to develop it.
Oh, God. When I looked at the deck, it was just as I feared. Some great graphics, lots of one-size-fits-all puffery, and precious little that any customer would care about. I called my client and told him to never use it again. I know I burst a big bubble, but the truth is that “slide decks” don’t do anything for you in the Solution phase of the Buyer’s Journey (or really, any other phase), UNLESS you are presenting to a large buying committee and need the visuals to keep everyone interested. And even then, it shouldn’t be one size fits all. Our job in the Solution phase is to persuade. Customers aren’t persuaded by slide-deck babble. I’m going to show you a simple three-step process for building a presentation that will persuade.
First of all, we need to understand how people are persuaded. Pardon me while I get a bit nerdy, but I first learned how people were persuaded in competitive debate in high school and college (yeah – I was a real babe magnet). In debate, we constructed our cases in three parts, in a tight, logical flow that would set the stage for a debate and give the judge reasons to give the win to us. Of course, there were many speeches yet to go before we won! When I started selling, I found that this same three-part presentation could create a winning sales presentation that engages customers and guides them towards a purchasing decision.