5 ways to sell yourself in a business presentation

In a business presentation, YOU are the package that carries Your message- the content of your presentation. When YOU show nervousness on stage, it reflects on the quality of your content.  So, how to make the right impression on your audience even if you are nervous? 

How do you make your audience feel at ease, even if your knees are shaking? Read on to find the answers.

·          

Fake it till you make it:

•  A business presentation is not the easiest thing to do. Your nervousness is completely understandable. But, the fastest way to control your nerves is to fake confidence. 

•  Smile, even if you don’t feel like smiling. Shift your eyes from the screen to your audience – even if it feels intimidating. These signals reassure your audience, and they begin to reciprocate your warmth. Soon, you start feeling better and you show even more confidence. The spiral continues. 

·         Walk towards your audience: 

• Don’t stand rooted to one place if you want to connect with your audience. Slowly walk towards them as you make your point. 

• As you move closer to them physically, you reduce the mental distance between you and your audience. When you look at the screen standing close to them, you give a subtle signal that you are ‘with them’ in trying to find the right solution to their concerns. When they connect to you, they start connecting to your message too.

·         Raise your voice to reflect your conviction: 

• Have you noticed that, when you say something you ‘believe in’ strongly, you automatically raise your voice? That is an invaluable cue to convey confidence in your presentation. 

• When you are nervous, your vocal chords get stiff and you sound ‘weak’. Take the effort to raise your voice consciously. Raise it to the point that it reflects the conviction in your product. You will start seeing a new sense of energy flowing in the room.

·         Occupy space on stage:

• Do you know, the space you occupy reflects your ego? That is why, you see footballers running all around the ground, with their hands spread like wings when they score a goal. 

• The freedom of your movement is seen as your comfort with your audience. So, move around stage. Unfold your hands and use them to reinforce your ideas. 

·         Make your audience a part of your presentation:

• A presentation is not about you. It is about your audience. The more they are involved, the more are your chances of winning them over. 

• A simple way to involve them is – to ask polling questions. Ask simple questions that would invite them to raise their hands or share their opinion. Build on those answers. 

• Plan the questions you would ask in your presentation, instead of just planning the text that you would rattle off for each slide. 

These simple tips make your audience LIKE YOU as a presenter. When they like YOU, they start liking your product too. 

Happy presenting!

What do your slides say about you?

Here are some pictures of people. Please take a sheet of paper and answer the 2 questions for each person below:

      1. Do you expect the person to honor his commitment.

      2. Will you trust the person with your money?

Finished writing your answers? Good.

Now, what made you to come up with those views? You haven’t seen their faces. You haven’t met them personally. Then, on what did you base your opinion?

Yes. You made a guess based on their attire. 

As a sales presenter, it is important to realize that your attire speaks a lot about you, even before you utter a word. Your customer forms his opinion about your dependability, professionalism and trustworthiness in the first few seconds of your meeting him.

If you create an unfavorable impression in your first 6 seconds with him, you need to work extra hard for the remainder of your presentation. So, what is the action point?

Spend that extra money and buy yourself a really smart outfit. It is one of the finest investments you can make as a presenter. Let your attire pre-sell for you. Let your presence build the trust. 

When you look dependable, you will sound dependable. 

Another important point;

It is not enough if YOU look professional and your slides look like they are made by an amateur in a hurry. Your slides are the outfit for your thoughts. Make them look professional.

Spend that little extra to buy a set of professional templates for your slides. It is possible for you to transform your usual bullet point slides into professional slides in a matter of 15 minutes when you use the right templates. 

 

I recommend that you visit www.buyapresentation.com and take a look at their presentation template sets. The templates are made by business professionals with exceptional design sense. They have the world’s widest range of animated concept templates for sales and marketing presenters. 

Go and explore the options. Happy selling!

How many slides are ideal in a sales presentation?

When I conduct a Presentation workshop for sales and marketing professionals, the one question I always get is – How many slides should you use in a presentation? 

The opinion ranges from 3 slides to 25 slides. 

The reality is that there is no study that suggests that short presentations are more successful than long presentations or vice versa. But, there are a couple of suggestions about slides to help you make clear and convincing presentations.

Suggestion 1: Don’t spread a single idea over multiple slides

I have seen presentations that drive the audience crazy by dividing a single sentence over multiple slides. What is more, in these types of presentations – the presenter keeps moving the slides at break neck speed, while reading the sentence to the audience. Unless you wish to insult your audience’s ability to read English, don’t use this method in your sales presentations. 

It always helps to put all the relevant elements of an idea onto one slide, so that the audience can see the connection. If you divide your message into multiple slides, the audience needs to strain their memory to recollect the details of the previous slides. 

Suggestion 2: Don’t put more than one idea on a slide

A slide is like a paragraph in a novel or newspaper. You should always start a new paragraph for a new thought. In the same way start a new slide to convey a new thought in a presentation. 

This ensures that audience gets the time to absorb your ideas completely, and build their understanding in gradual steps. It also allows you to use meaningful diagrams to convey your ideas visually.

So, crunching your entire sales presentation into 2 slides – is NOT a great idea.

Conclusion

When you follow these two suggestions, you will automatically come up with the right number of slides for your professional presentations. 

Remember what matters is whether you are able to influence your customers to make a purchase decision, by giving them sufficient information. It doesn’t matter how many slides you use.

Happy selling!

Are you asking your audience to throw you out?

Do you know that there is a label stuck on your forehead that only your audience can read? Your audience behave just the way you instructed them to behave. Let me explain that to you a bit more in detail. 

What is written on the label is ‘what you think about yourself’ at a given point of time. 

If you feel ‘confident’ inside – the label reads, ‘I have got something valuable to share. So, sit up and listen’.

If you feel ‘shaky’ inside – the label reads, ‘I am not sure if it is worth the while for you to listen to me’.

Naturally, the audience behaves as you instruct them. 

What is the solution?

Fake it till you make it.

Practice the first 90 seconds of your presentation thoroughly. I know of so many seasoned presenters who memorize their first few lines, so that they could focus their attention on engaging their audience with eye contact. Interestingly, it is these extensive rehearsals that make them look spontaneous on stage. 

Once you convey confidence in your first few minutes, audience will give you all the attention you need from thereon. When you find your audience enthusiastic, you will feel enthusiastic too, and the spiral continues.

So, when you take control of what is written on the label on your forehead, you will take control of your audience. Happy selling!

How to pitch in 2 minutes - BuyAPresentation

How to pitch in 2 minutes - BuyAPresentation

It happens too often to ignore. You spend hours working on your elaborate presentation. You spit and polish your pitch with colorful charts, testimonials and a project plan. When you reach the meeting room, your client says, “Bob! I have to rush for an urgent meeting. Show me what you’ve got in 2 minutes.”

What do you say in those 2 minutes to create the impact of a 20 minute presentation?

There is no point searching for words at that point in time. You need to be ready with that pitch - upfront, if you want to make it big as a sales presenter.

Here is my suggestion to make your 2 minute pitch. 

Take a sheet of paper and answers these three questions:

1. TANGIBLE BENEFIT: What is the one most important tangible benefit offered by your product? The benefit should be clearly measurable.
2. SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE: How is your offering significantly different from any other such offering? The difference should be an obvious one.
3. CLEAR PROOF: What is the proof for your claim? The proof should be credible enough for the customer to accept without question.

Your answers to these questions are the 2 minute pitch. 

There is a lot of science behind those 3 questions. They directly influence the decision making process of your customers.

Here is the caveat. Though the questions are simple and direct, the answers to those questions may not be easy to find.

 Take the time necessary to come up with the best answers. Call up your existing customers, visit your ‘Product’ department or interview the highest producing sales people to get the clues. The time spent on this is worth its weight in gold.

In fact, creating this pitch should be your first priority as a sales presenter. The process will give you a lot of clarity about your product or service, which in turn will reflect as conviction in your voice when you make your next sales presentation.

Happy selling!

How to create a pitch table - BuyAPresentation

How to create a pitch table - BuyAPresentation

Influencing customers is tough

If you have been in sales for a while, you would realize that, it is one thing to know a lot of information about your product, and completely another thing to know how to use that information to influence your customers.

What is a pitch table?

A pitch table enables you to see your information as an answer to the 4 critical questions in the minds of your customers. The 4 questions that a pitch table addresses are:

1. What concerns of your customers are solved by your product?
2. What features of your product solve those concerns?
3. What is unique about the features of your product compared to the alternatives available?
4. What is the proof for your claims?

Since these are the questions that a customer considers intuitively before making a purchasing decision, having the information available in one readily accessible table is extremely useful.

An Example

I have tried to construct a ‘Pitch table’, for our product - ‘Premium Animated Powerpoint templates for Sales and Marketing professionals’ as an example.

To give you a quick background about the product:

Our customers are sales and marketing professionals. They have excellent products and ideas that make a difference to their customers’ lives. But, they don’t have the time, or the design expertise to create professional looking POWERPOINT™ slides to convey those ideas powerfully, and make a lasting impression in their customers’ minds. With our premium, animated POWERPOINT™ templates, we help them win business. Now, they can spend their time to think and add value to their customers, instead of spending time on designing their slides, to get a professional look.

This is how the table looks:

What the various benefits of a ‘Pitch table’?

This table gives you all the information you need to convince your customers at a single glance, so it serves as your ready reference to address any type of customer objections. 

You can even arrange the points in the table to appeal to specific segments of your customers. That way, the information can be helpful to start a conversation with your customers.

You can use the information to write an email to your customers, like – ‘The 5 reasons why our service is different and better than any other alternative.

So, start making your pitch table. It is the starting point for all your sales presentations. Happy selling!

5 tips on handshake for sales professionals

5 tips on handshake for sales professionals - BuyAPresentation

The first impact we make

We interact with people at different levels. Starting from an email – where the connection between individuals is no more than a few electronic pixels, to a warm hug – where the connection is friendly and personal.

You would notice that the closer we get to an individual; the better is the level of engagement (of course, getting too close before knowing the person sufficiently well, invades the personal space of the other individual).

If we represent the distance between people, based on our different methods of engagement, this is how the continuum looks:

As you can see, a handshake is the closest you get in a business relationship. In trying to remember the tips on handshake etiquette, it is important not to forget this basic purpose. 

A good handshake sets the expectation for a presentation. So, how to shake hands to achieve the best level of engagement with your customers? Here are the 5 tips:

1. 1. Look into the eyes and smile before you shake hands:

Nothing builds a better engagement than a genuine smile and sincere eye contact. A handshake merely adds to the connection.

2. 2. Say your name and a greeting while you shake hands:

A good handshake lasts not more than 4 seconds. The time is just enough to say your name and convey your happiness in meeting your prospect. It is not the time to recite your bio data or your company’s history.

3. 3. Volunteer your hands by getting up and walking towards your prospect:

When your effort to engage with the prospect is genuine, the prospect always responds warmly. Do not wait for the prospect to extend hands. If in a rare case, the prospect doesn’t extend hands – lower your hands while keeping the smile and eye contact. The warmth is still conveyed.

4. 4. Use only one hand if it is your first meeting:

Adding your free hand to the shake conveys intimacy. If you use both your hands, you may look artificial and over eager.

5. 5. Let your handshake be a handshake:

Whether you are a woman or a man, the handshake should be firm, with your full hand (not just your fingers) and pumped 3 or 4 times. Be warm and be genuine. Everything else is just details.

I hope these tips help you make a better connection with your prospects, the next time you make your sales presentation. Happy selling!

Childhood habits that can kill presentations

Take a moment to travel back to your schooldays. What were some of the thumb rules you followed to score more marks in your school examinations?
Let me make a guess…

Rule 1: Write more
The more pages you filled the more marks you got in your exams. It made the evaluator feel that you knew a lot. So, you learn the habit of fluffing up your content in presentations as well.

Rule 2: Make it look beautiful
Decorating your answers with highlighters and sketch pens got you more marks. So, you learnt the habit of decorating your presentations.

Rule 3: Sound knowledgeable
Using jargon and acronyms made you look intelligent. By littering your answers with some technical words, you could impress your evaluators into give you more marks. So, you learnt the habit of using technical mumbo-jumbo as your weapon against objections.

Unfortunately, those very habits that got you more marks in your school might be killing your sales presentations.

The rules that your customers follow to evaluate your presentations are very different. Here are some of their rules:

Rule 1: More is bore
Your audience is allergic to long winding presentations. The moment you put up that bullet point slide with 6 points and 4 sub-points your audience take a walk mentally. You need to say it in a crisp and clear manner to score more with your audience.

Rule 2: Bling is cheap
Your audience won’t fall for that cool animation or a ‘Zen’ picture. Your slide should make your message memorable by explaining your ideas in a visual way. Concept diagrams are a very useful tool.

Rule 3: Jargon is rude
It is not about what you know; it is about what they learn. Jargon puts a distance between you and your audience. Always talk at their level to win them over.

So, play by the new rules and unlearn your old habits. You will score more in your sales presentations. Happy selling!

10 minutes to sales sucess

They say, “Experience is the best teacher”. 

Well, it most certainly is not! If only experience were to teach people, there would have been no repeat offenders of any kind.  The reality is – it is not the experience itself, but the time you take to reflect on the experience that teaches you valuable lessons.

This is one area where most sales and marketing professionals miss the boat. Most of them operate like talking bill boards, programmed to follow a certain routine like:

Present to prospect 1 – Fail – Present to prospect 2 – Fail – Present to prospect 3 and so on.

If they took just 10 minutes to analyze their calls, they would move up the learning curve much faster.

Let me show you a simple way to analyze your calls.

Step 1: Recall successful calls

Pick up a case where you have succeeded in getting business.

This might sound counter intuitive. Most people advise you to see ‘what went wrong’ in the cases where you failed. The danger is – you might find too many answers to that question. After all, there are a million ways to fail in a sales presentation. But, there are only a few predictable ways in which you can achieve consistent success. So, it makes sense to learn what worked and repeat it.

Step 2: Analyze the call in detail

The second step is to answer these questions, keeping the successful sale in mind:

Analyze product benefit: How has your product made the life better for the customer?

Was he able to minimize his errors? Was he able to save on his costs? Was he able to feel more confident about himself? The answers will tell you the key benefits to focus on – in your next presentation.

Analyze objections: What were the objections raised by him, before he said ‘Yes’ to your offer?

Did he compare your product with his existing option? Was he even aware of the impact of his problems? How did you overcome his objections? The answers will equip you for your next presentation.

Analyze the source: How did you find him in the first place?

Was he referred to you by your existing customer? Did you fix the appointment by cold calling? What was the database used to find the prospect? What was the script used to fix the appointment? This will help you find more prospects with higher chances of conversion.

This simple analysis takes no more than 10 minutes. But it will help you repeat your success consistently. Happy selling!

Dont trigger the SCAN IT button in your audience’s head

How do you read a newspaper?

Do you go through every word written out there? No.

As soon as you pick up the paper, you quickly scan through the headlines. If any of it attracts your attention, you read the first paragraph. If it still sustains your attention, you skim through the rest of the content.

You follow exactly the same method whether it is about reading the books in your library, articles on the net or to going through any detailed information.

Why is this information of how people read important to you as a sales presenter?

When you present a slide that looks like this…

 

Audience sees a lot of information presented at once. So, they automatically start scanning your slide. This is how their attention spans across the slide:

As you can see, the detailed graphs at the end, which were probably important are completely ignored.

How do you avoid this declining attention span, as a presenter?

Follow this simple rule – 1 slide: 1 thought i.e. ‘One slide should carry just one thought’. This reduces the material you put on your slides. Your audience therefore takes the time to understand and assimilate the information. Your message gets read and retained longer. 

Will you follow this simple tip? Happy selling!

How to create insightful diagrams for sales presentations

In my previous posts, I have shown you how ‘flea market’ slides and ‘zen’ slides can kill your presentations. In this post, I will answer the questions raised in those articles – that is – how to open up your audience’s mind using slides the right way.

The simple and most powerful way is to use diagrams. A presenter doesn’t require any specialized skill to draw insightful diagrams. In fact, you don’t even need to know how to draw a stick man to create good diagrams. 

Just pick up a piece of paper and a pencil. Learn a few fundamentals. You’ll be well on your way. In a series of posts from today, I wish to introduce you to this useful tool. 

Let us start by understanding what a concept diagram is. 

A concept diagram is nothing but a visual representation of objects and their relationships.

 

Let us understand this with an example. If asked to explain how an earthen pot is made, most presenters would use sentences like: 

 “Take some clay. Mix it with water till you get the desired consistency. Mould it into the shape of a pot”. 

Let us try to represent this idea as a diagram.

This is a simple representation of the images that pop up in my head, when I read the explanation above. As you could see, this simple diagram represents objects and their relationships in a natural way.

These rounded rectangles represent the objects in the idea: 

These circles in dotted line highlight the relationships:

Once we are clear with the relationship between objects, we can choose to represent the objects in the way we want, as long as we label them clearly. In the following case, I have not even used an image to represent the objects. It represents the idea just as well. 

So, the focus is not on the objects, but on the way relationships are represented. Of course, images or icons make the diagram look elegant. 

No matter how grand or complex your idea is, the underlying principle to represent it in diagrams, remains the same. But, the challenge is in identifying the objects correctly, and finding ways to representing the relationships accurately. 

More about this in later posts. Happy selling!

ZEN slides can kill your sales presentation

What do you think of these slides?

 

Aren’t they beautiful? Aren’t these poetic pictures taking you to you a whole new world? Aren’t you so absorbed by these images that you find it difficult to take your eyes off the slides?

That is exactly my point. Those are the very reasons why these ‘Zen’ slides will kill your marketing presentation. 

Let me explain…

When you project these slides to your customers, what kind of questions can you imagine popping up in their head? Here is my guess:

• “Is that sunrise or sunset? Those rocks look like bar graph. Wow!”
• “How are those rocks balancing so well? How are they connected to our software? Is he subtly hinting at modular development of software by using that image?”
• “Hey! This reminds of my trip to Mauritius. I really loved that vacation. I haven’t called Sandy for a long time. Let me note that in my diary.”

As you can see…

None of these questions are going to help them make a meaningful purchase decision. The amusement you see in your audience eyes is not because of the strength of your argument, but because of the beauty of those ‘Zen’ pictures.

Stop killing your chances of winning a deal, by using such pointless but beautiful pictures on your slides.

Instead, create slides that will make your audience ask questions like…

• “What kind of new opportunities have emerged in the market, to support the product launch?”
• “How will this software solve the issues which we currently face?”
• “How does this software compare to the competition? Why should I choose this software over any other?”

These questions when answered will help your customers make a purchase decision. 

I am not against using full bleed images in presentation slides. But, you need to be sure that the pictures add clarity to your message - in an obvious way. When your audience has to ‘think’ for two minutes about the second level meaning of the images you use – stop. When you feel that the images will divert your audience’s attention – save them for your son’s school project.

Remember! In your marketing presentation, YOU are the hero. Your slides are your support. Don’t let your slides dominate YOU for any reason.

Happy selling!

Are you making ‘Flea market’ slides?

Ever wondered what differentiates a flea market display from a showroom display? 

Why is it that one feels noisy and exhausting, whereas the other feels organized and reassuring? 

Why do you feel compelled to bargain in a flea market, whereas you happily give more for the same item in a showroom? 

Why does it feel that a flea marketer cares only about your wallet whereas a good salesperson in a showroom cares about YOU?

The reason is – these two visual formats give you very different psychological cues.

Forcing a decision versus building a relation:

A flea market display says, “This is all I have got. Make a decision quickly and get out. I don’t care about you enough, to customize my display to match your needs”.

A showroom says, “I want to build a relationship with you, so I will take the time to show you what you want to see”

Spreading the attention versus focusing the attention:

A flea marketer spreads the attention of the audience over all his items equally. So, the customer doesn’t have the time to consider any single option long enough to appreciate its value.

A showroom salesperson focuses the attention of the audience on a few items that interests him. He helps the customer to make his decision by providing the necessary information.

Naturally, the results these two formats achieve are in line with the visual cues they provide. For sales and marketing presenters like you, there are some valuable lessons hidden in these two formats.  

Whether you like it or not, the slides that you create for your presentations leave certain cues about your approach to customers. These cues determine the results you achieve.

Let us see the slides equivalent of the two formats:

I call the first - ‘Flea market’ slide format and the second as the ‘Showroom’ slide format. 

Take a minute to see the cues these slides give. 

• One is about ‘My wares’ and the other is about ‘Your needs’
• One spreads and diffuses the audience attention, and the other focuses the attention
• One makes you close your eyes and the other opens your mind

So, choose the right format to sell your value by understanding the cues given by your slides. Let your slides be your ally, not your enemy. 

Happy selling!