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!

Converting verbose slides into simple diagrams - BuyAPresentation

Converting verbose slides into simple diagrams - BuyAPresentation

  A few months back I met up with one of my friends who sells mission critical software to financial institutions.  His pet peeve is that in his industry sales cycles are very long and the competition is tough. It is difficult to get the decision makers to sit through a presentation.

As my company is into presentations, he discussed his problems with me.

 He said, “These sales presentations are killing me. I just don’t have the time to sit and make ‘good looking’ slides.”

He is quite an expert in his field and knows his banking and software inside out. But his problem is in translating that knowledge to slides that convince his audience.

This is what I told him. 

 

First off, most presenters don’t realize that, creating apresentation involves two very different types of activities that demand two different skill sets: 
1.      Ideating the content for your presentation

•  Ideating effectively requires a strategic bent ofmind, a thorough understanding of the situation at hand, practical ideas tosuggest alternatives, and a clear vision to drive execution.

2.      Translating the content into effective slides

• Slides need to hold your audience’s attention and influence their purchasing decision.

• To translate effectively, you need visual thinking,design sense, knowledge of the presentation software and loads of time

As you can see, the two are very different skill sets, and itis not fair to expect a presenter excel in both.

But, unfortunately – the market doesn’t care about that reality. A lot of wonderful ideas get completely ignored by the audience, just because the presenter could not translate his ideas into an effective presentation. On the other hand, beautiful ‘Zen slides’ may entertain theaudience, but not deliver the results.
Let us try to address this problem.
If I look at the above two skills – ideating and translating, it seems your job is more to do with ideating than translating. You are paid to think about the strategies that work, anticipate the moves of your competition and devise plans to counter their attack.
The second part of the work, is about translating and requires specialized technical skills and time.Unless you have years of specialized experience, it is not possible to createprofessional and clear slides in a short time.
My friend agreed to this and said, “I realized the issue, so I hired a graphic designer to rework my slides. But, it didn’t really work out. The slides looked good, but the message was lost. “
For which I said:
There are 2 ways in which presenters try to address this translation issue:
1.     Hire graphic designers: There are 2 issues with this.

• They are expensive and time-consuming
• There is always a huge gap between what you have in mind, and what a graphic designer comes up with on his slides.  Though the slides look ‘beautiful’, they do not help you make your point effectively. This is because most graphic designers specialize in print media. The rules that apply to print are very different from the rules that apply to slides.

2.  Get free presentation templates: The issues here are different:

• These free templatesare in reality just some gaudy backgrounds. The designs are not veryprofessional.
• They add verylittle in terms of providing clarity to your message

My recommendation to him and to you is to visit our site www.buyapresentation.com and take a look at the concepts and diagrams templates. They offer value to you because:
1.      Created by professionals, for professionals:The templates are created by professionals with years of corporate experience and a flair for design. They understand what you need as sales and marketing professionals to make your presentations effective.
2.      Unique templates with diagrams and concepts to help add clarity: There is a whole range of templates to help you explain all the concepts in your presentations. Each template is professionally animated and is editable to save you time.
3.      Reasonably priced: They are very reasonably priced at a $1 or less per template.
When you make a one time investment on the Mega Pack and download the folder to your desktop, you can create insightful presentations quickly and for years to come.

Isn’t that a smart thing to do as a sales and marketing presenter - use someone else’s technical expertise with your ideas? Go try it. 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!