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Summary of

Preparing Your Team for a

Winning Pitch

Richard Goring

@BrightCarbon

www.BrightCarbon.com

Video summary of the entire session

www.brightcarbon.com/bettersales

Brief overview video

This session uses a highly visual, dynamic presentation. You can view a two minute overview video by clicking the link above, or a full summary as a video at www.brightcarbon.com/bettersales The rest of this deck provides a text-based summary of the key points.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ek585RN3xJg

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Better sales presentations

One major contributor to ‘death by PowerPoint’ is using slides that spell out what you’re trying to say. The problem is that words you see and words you hear are all processed in a single part of the brain, meaning that humans just can’t read and listen at the same time. Which leaves your audience confused. Not what you want in a presentation.

Better sales presentations

The problem is, that people can’t resist trying to understand what’s in front of them, so what happens is: • The audience tunes out the presenter and reads the text. • It’s not possible to read and listen at the same time. • So the speaker can’t make any impact until you’ve finished reading.

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So the speaker can’t

make any impact until

you’ve finished reading.

Better sales presentations

Once you’ve read the slide you just want to move on, not listen to the presenter talking about it some more. That means that the presenter is either being ignored, or being very irritating indeed.

Sales in region A were up almost 40% from last

year; $138,000

Product C stayed stable at $89,000

Region C also showed an increase in sales, up

22% from last year; $112,000

REGIONAL SALES FIGURES.

The answer is to reduce the use of text on the slides, and use pictures, diagrams and graphs that illustrate and reinforce your messages, but aren’t completely self-explanatory, and need a presenter to explain them. When the presenter’s narrative synchronizes with the visual sequences, audiences are motivated to pay attention, it’s easier to understand, more memorable, and more effective. Everyone’s happy.

Visuals not text

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The right objectives

The right objectives

Before sitting down to write a sales presentation, its first necessary to understand what kind of a change you want your prospects to make. To do this, you need to understand: • What are they doing now? • What you are asking them to do instead? • This involves having an understanding of

your own sales process and the prospects’ buying process:

• Have they decided to change, or do you need to persuade them?

• Do they know what category of solution they are looking for, or is that still open?

• Have they got established decision making criteria, or can you shape their thinking?

• Will they talk to other companies, or could you win this before anyone else notices?

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Key questions

The two key questions that you need to answer for your prospects are ‘Why Change?’ and ‘Why Us?’ ‘Why Change?’ is used when you’re selling a category of solution in which you need to convince the audience to change what they are currently doing and to adopt something completely new. ‘Why Us?’ is used when you’re selling a type of solution, in which the audience has already decided to do something new and you need to convince them that they should do it with us, rather than the competition.

Action plan

Once you have understood what kind of change you are asking your prospects to make, think about what you are asking them to do in a more immediate sense. What action do you want them to take as a result of your sales presentation? What’s your desired outcome? The answer isn’t always as simple as just “buy something”. There are dozens of things you might want en-route to a sale. Be very clear about what you are trying to achieve before you write your sales presentation.

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Making an impact

Making an impact

The introduction needs to make sure the audience is receptive to the key messages of the presentation – to make sure their minds are opened. When you start explaining why the prospect should change what they’re doing, or why they should be considering working with you, the audience has to be interested so they’ll be willing to follow your argument. The introduction should also make it very clear to them that you know something about their situation, the problems they’re facing or the issues they need to solve. Openings need to contain a number of key components:

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Making an impact

1 | Challenges State the problems the customer has, or key issues they face; if benchmarking data is available, even better. The aim is to demonstrate that you know of others with challenges that the prospect will recognize.

(Blame Someone Else) People can sometimes get a bit defensive, because they feel like they’re to blame for not dealing with these issues already, so give them the opportunity to blame it on something else.

Countdown

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Making an impact

2 | Key insight Provide a new way of looking at the problem that explains why current attempts to address it haven’t worked. Essentially arguing that current approaches won’t work because they focus on the wrong things or do things in the wrong way.

3 | Implications Explain how failure to solve the problem has a cost, in terms of morale, productivity, lost revenue, etc. Expand upon the challenges and ask “Why does this matter?”

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Making an impact

5 | Shape of the solution Once you’ve persuaded the prospect that they have a problem you need to agree what capabilities the solution needs to have. This is about framing the problem favorably. The shape of the solution you argue for ought to subtly point the prospect to what you’re offering.

4 | Story Tell a story about a customer that had the same problem, how the problem caused them pain, how change wasn’t easy, but how it was worth it. This helps break down rational resistance to change by targeting an emotional response.

Making an impact

7 | Solution overview If presenting a complex solution, consider brief overview towards the end of the introduction. This allows the value proposition to be introduced after the prospect already knows what it is that you are talking about, which is easier to understand.

8 | Value proposition Finally, introduce your value proposition. They key reasons why the prospect should choose over the competition. This forms the basis of the rest of the presentation.

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Challenges

Key insight

Implication

Solution Value

proposition

Benefit

Benefit

Benefit

Making an impact

At the end, what you’re left with is a great structure to make an impact and set up the rest of your presentation. Once you’ve got through the introduction, you’re into the main body of the presentation, which is built around the value proposition. If you got the introduction right, you’ll have made it clear why the topic is important, you’ll have demonstrated that you understand your audience’s situation and their needs, and shaped the way the prospect sees things, so that they’re receptive to the benefits and advantages that you provide.

Winning value propositions

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Winning value propositions

To be successful, a value proposition has to help you sell. It has to be persuasive, and therefore needs to be relevant – to offer something prospects want, or can be made to want. It also has to be differentiated, in the sense that it sets your offer apart. That can come from offering something different, or being able to deliver the same things more convincingly.

Why change? vs Why us?

Why us? When selling your solution, ‘why us?’ the value proposition should be made up of advantages, and even features. Things like ‘lightweight’, or ‘better predictivity’, ‘or ‘flexible’, or ‘BSI approved’. Advantages have an inherent positive quality, but need to be expanded upon if the benefit is to be understood – so, for example, better predictivity allows a laboratory to deliver better results to ensure satisfied customers. Features such as ‘BSI approved’ need to be elaborated upon – the presenter needs to tie each feature in the value proposition to a strong benefit verbally – so for example in this case approval might mean you can reduce insurance premiums to save money.

Why change? When selling the category, ‘why change?’ the value proposition will be made up of benefits – ‘increase turnover’, ‘reduce risk’, or ‘improve efficiency’. Some of these can expanded upon (e.g. efficiency reduces your costs), but there’s already no doubt that they are a good thing.

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Value proposition construction

Value propositions should be comprised of three to five statements about what your solution offers. Any more becomes harder to remember. Any less can fail to structure the presentation content effectively and memorably. In a short presentation, two statements can work. Value proposition statements work best if they are of similar length and format. The best way to get the phrasing right is to note a question that the value proposition answers, and format all items to work with that question. So, for example ‘you should change in this way because you’ll get ____’ means you can complete the statement and relate each of the benefits or advantages to your audience. Another approach is to use value propositions which feature verbs, as this promotes the idea of the

audience benefiting from a specific action that will help their situation, and so can be more powerful as they realize the real impact that your value proposition could have. What exactly the value proposition should be depends on what the objectives of the presentation are. That, in turn, will of course depend on the sales cycle and the desired next steps. If the aim is to be invited to respond to some future tender, the value proposition might be different to if it is to close the deal immediately.

Compelling Clear Persuasive

Benefit structured presentations

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Audience

Presenter

Solution

Close

Details

Value Context & Situation

Benefit structured presentations

The introduction ought to help your audience realize something new, and how it should do that is show: • You understand the

prospect’s challenges. • The standard ways of

meeting these challenges don’t work.

• Prospect needs to do things differently.

The intro should shape the prospect’s view of things so when they think about the capabilities they’re looking for, their thinking is aligned to your offering.

Benefit structured presentations

The value proposition slide should be used as an agenda that’s shown as you segue between sections in the presentation. It should be written to answer the key question around which the presentation revolves – ‘why change?’ or ‘why us?’ When talking about the category (‘why change?’), it will most likely be benefits. If answering ‘why us?’ expect to see advantages that are expanded into benefits verbally by the presenter.

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Benefit structured presentations

Why Change? Compelling Clear Persuasive

Compelling Clear Persuasive

By using the value proposition as an agenda, the advantages or benefits are stated early enough to be noticed, and ensure the agenda is audience-focused, not product focused. Create a clear hierarchy, and divide your presentation into 3-5 sections. Not too many to remember, few enough to remain persuasive. The close should summarize the value proposition, and then suggest specific next steps and easy actions to take.

Grabbing attention

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Grabbing attention

Attention spans are pretty important. They can influence a lot in a presentation. Often, people think that attention spans are really short, which is why audiences get bored and fall asleep more often that you’d like. You don’t get many people waving their arms about a whooping, do you?

Grabbing attention

Presentations that start with traditional mega-boring, ‘about us’ first few slides will cause your audience to switch off. Attention levels will fall as no one cares about this information, nor do they find it useful. Don’t let your presentation have a ‘boring bit’. If you think it does, you need to tighten the content. The best content in any presentation is that which has the most meaning and relevance for your audience. Don’t save your best stuff until the end. The audience might have stopped listening before you ever show it. Keep sections relatively short and reasonably spaced – to ensure that attention levels don’t drop off too fast. And how long a presentation should be? Probably “as short as it can be to work”.

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Who is your audience? Executives?

Think about who your audience is. High level execs have a pretty short attention span. They’ve trained themselves into that because they’re really time poor, so they generally like quick and punchy presentations that allow them to understand what’s important, make a decision, and move on. So, do a quick board room presentation that gets straight into what’s important and has little else.

Who is your audience? Details people?

If you’re speaking with analysts, or engineers, or accountants, then things are different. These people need lots of detail. They’re used to spending a long time collecting and reviewing information before acting upon it, and you can plan accordingly with more content. But even with the longest attention spans, you’ll come up against a fairly hard limit of around 20 minutes before people can start to switch off.

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Who is your audience? Details people?

You can reactivate it by: • Changing topic, or media, or presenter. • Asking questions, having a discussion, or looking at something else. That way people find it easy to reengage and you can have long and fruitful conversations with them, as long as it’s relevant, enjoyable, or motivating.

Thanks for taking part in the session.

Resources are on the next few slides

Phone +1 617 606 2431

Email richard.goring@brightcarbon.com

Web www.brightcarbon.com

Twitter @BrightCarbon

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www.brightcarbon.com/PPTTricks Videos of awesome PowerPoint tricks in action on the BrightCarbon website

www.brightcarbon.com/PPTToolkit Free PPT Toolkit to kickstart your efforts

4 Part Online

PowerPoint Course

Awesome

PowerPoint Tips

Weekly Online

Master Classes

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Phone +1 617 606 2431

Email richard.goring@brightcarbon.com

Web www.brightcarbon.com