1. Priority: The audience.

The most important thing to remember in any presentation is that the audience should be your main focus. Audience members are only interested in what they want to hear, not what you want to say. What will most help you to stress the importance of your message upon them? Yes, you have points to get across – but they need to be done in a way that the audience will want to hear them. Engage with them, and clearly demonstrate how your message is relevant to them.

2. Benefits, not features.

This mistake is one that many presenters make unknowingly. The prospect seeks a solution to a problem – and the presenter lists all the features his product or service has to offer. The sale is not made, and the presenter wonders how the audience failed to ‘get it’.

Customers buy solutions, not products. Stressing the benefit of each feature will make its usefulness far more apparent to the audience, meaning that the presentation is far more likely to result in a sale.

3. Keep them guessing.

Even with relevant content, not all audience members will be able to stay engaged. Keep the audience wanting to hear more, by using mystery and posing questions or puzzles. For example, present a problem, and ask the audience to solve it, before revealing the answer. For maximum effect, presenters can use Visual Cognitive Dissonance™ on their slides, whereby the visual does not make sense until the presenter explains it. The brain automatically seeks a solution to puzzles, so using these techniques ensures that your audience are listening to your every word.

4. Practise out loud.

Reading through your slides is not sufficient practice when preparing for a presentation. Unless you practise out loud, the first time you actually speak the words will be in front of an audience. You will notice things when you speak your patter out loud that you never would have noticed just reading silently. Actually stand up and deliver your talk using the voice and gestures that you would naturally when in front of an audience. The most important reason to practise out loud is to ensure that you get your timing right – nothing is more irritating to an audience than a presenter who overruns.

5. Use positive vocabulary.

Think about the words you are using. Weak words and phrases such as, “we think” and “we should be able to” will do a presenter no favours. If the presenter does not project any faith in his message, how can he expect his audience to believe it? You’re there to convince your audience. Use positive, definite phrases such as “this will lower your expenditures by half” or “this method is proven to be effective”.

6. Use ‘you’, not ‘we’.

People don’t like to hear other people talk about themselves. It is not interesting, and it is rarely relevant. What audiences like to listen to is a presenter speak about them. Don’t talk about yourself, your company, and your beliefs; instead, talk about your audience, their company, and their beliefs. Use ‘you’ throughout. This makes it easier for you to drive home benefits, and to demonstrate relevancy. And directly addressing your audience leaves you far more likely to keep them engaged.

7. Address your audience by name.

If you are presenting to a small audience and you know their names – use them. Of course, make sure you have permission to do so, and be sure not to leave anyone out; in this situation, it is easy to offend. Don’t overdo this, either; nothing can sound more grating in a small setting than one name being repeated over and over.

8. Don’t be afraid to interact with your slides.

A lot of presentation training coaches recommend that presenters should never turn their back on the audience. This is a reasonable piece of advice; no one wants to attempt to listen to the back of someone’s head. Yet, when visual aids are truly engaging, it can create a seamless and engaging effect if the presenter interacts with his slides. This could be looking back when something significant changes or appears on the screen; pointing to sections of a graph; or gesturing as icons move across the slide. Engaging with your content in this way will help your audience to absorb the information via dual channels, thus absorbing and retaining more information.

9. But don’t lose their attention.

Sometimes, you just want your audience to pay attention to you – but you have a really interesting slide on the screen behind you. How can you talk to them and ensure that they are really listening, while the diagram is behind you, bigger and more visually engaging than you are? Hitting the ‘B’ key will render the screen temporarily black, ensuring that your audience have nothing else to distract them, and that their attention will be specifically focused on you. When you are ready to return to your visuals, hitting any key will bring the screen back to life.

10. Keep it focused.

Yes, keep the presentation relevant to your audience – but make sure that you stay on track with your message. Ensure that everything you say and every visual you use is tailored to your presentation objectives. How does that sentence enforce your message? How does that phrase support your benefit statement? Any word that doesn’t work towards your objectives is wasted, and with a limited attention span, you want to make sure that your audience absorb as much relevant information as you can impart to them. Make sure you stay on track, and every minute of your presentation will be working in your favour towards your ultimate goal.

How to Obtain the Opportunity to Deliver a Sales Presentation

At m62, we believe that effective communication in a sales pitch is key to success. A presentation can make the difference between winning or losing a million dollar contract, and each presentation is an opportunity.

How do you secure these kinds of meetings in the first place? It is not always easy. It can be difficult to know who to approach and when, and what is the best way to form a relationship.

There are many different pieces of advice to be found on selling to top level executives, but how many of these are truly effective? The following are a few examples:

• “Never doubt that senior executives are involved in the initiation and approval of a sale.”
• “Spread like a virus so that all the powerful people, directly or indirectly, know you and you know their thinking and motivations.”
• “Speak their language.”
• “Show each executive that you know what he/she values.”
• “Network your way through the doors to the low level and then to the C-level offices.”
• “Use your Golden Network to promote your capabilities and introduce you.”

These tips may have been given by experienced salesmen, but how can you be sure they work every time?

Selling to the C-Suite by Dr. Steve Bistritz and Nicholas A. C. Read contains tips and advice given not by salespeople, but by the executives themselves.

Selling to the C-Suite – Book Summary

Every salesperson wants to gain access to senior client executives – the C-Level decision makers responsible for approving top-dollar deals.  Selling to the C-Suite reveals how to achieve those career-making sales in the words of CEOs themselves.

The authors couldn’t find any books written on this topic that held anything more than personal anecdotes of what the writers of those books did in their glory days as a salesperson.  So they commissioned research of their own, and joined other projects where executive buying habits were the focus of study. Their efforts were joined by Hewlett Packard in North America, the Hewlett Packard Business School in Beijing China, Target Marketing Systems, the Kenan-Flagler School of Business at the University of North Carolina, and the Center for Business & Industrial Marketing at Georgia State University. After ten years of asking CXO-level executives about their relationships with professional salespeople, this book now reveals what C-Suite leaders in 500 diverse companies and government bodies said in response to those interviews and surveys.

One of the most surprising things learnt was that leaders at the highest corporate levels don’t always avoid sales pitches; in fact, they welcome them – provided the salesperson approaches them the right way and then delivers high quality presentations that specifically address their key business issues.  Executives are looking for presentations that are meaningful and offer provocative insights and solutions that even their own employees couldn’t develop.  Inside this book, these CEOs reveal which sales techniques they react best to, as well as those that you should avoid.

In addition, one of the key concepts discussed in the book is the identification of the relevant executive for the sales opportunity.  The relevant client executive is defined as the executive who stands to gain the most or lose the most as a result of the application or project associated with the sales opportunity.  The need to align with the relevant executive is another of the key concepts disclosed.

Selling to the C-Suite provides tips on how to:

• Gain access to senior-level client executives
• Establish trust and credibility, so that you get return access
• Leverage relationships with senior-level client executives
• Create and communicate value at the executive level

It also reveals at which points executives enter the buying process and explains the role they play at crucial steps in that process.

The book is focused on answering the following questions:

• When and why do executives get involved in the decision process for major purchases?
• How do salespeople gain access to senior executives?
• How can salespeople establish credibility with executives?
• How can salespeople create value at the executive level?
• Is executive buying behavior consistent across cultures?

“It’s our observation that most traditional wisdom about selling to executives is actually at odds with what executives themselves tell us works,” write Read and Bistritz.  Using field-tested techniques, Selling to the C-Suite advises salespeople where to start to get ahead of the competition when it comes to making high end sales.

Combining extensive research with years of street-level experience, Read and Bistritz have approached this challenge from a different angle.

About the Authors

Dr. Steve Bistritz has more than 40 years of high-tech sales, sales management and training management experience. He is a published author and lecturer in the field of sales, sales management and selling to executives. Steve holds a doctorate in human resource development from Vanderbilt University, which he received in 1995, and is currently president of his own sales training and consulting firm, based in Atlanta. Visit his website at www.sellxl.com

Nicholas A.C. Read is president of SalesLabs, which helps companies drive predictable and repeatable revenue growth through the application of improved process, measurement, and skills. In 2005, he was awarded Winner of the Best Sales Trainer category in the International Business Awards, an annual awards show that has been dubbed “the business world’s own Oscars” by the New York Post. He splits his time between North America, Asia, and Europe.

And of course, once you have managed to obtain this opportunity, it is important not to waste it. Make sure that your presentation is the best it could possibly be. Why not submit some slides for our designers, or view a demonstration.

Happily, like any other trade there are secrets.

To keep your audience’s eyes off their Blackberrys and on you, here are a number of simple, psychological techniques that will work whatever your natural level of confidence or propensity for anecdotes and standup. Assuming your audience is human (not always the case with annual financial reviews), these fundamental principles will have them nestling in the palm of your hand for the full twenty-five minutes. Amateurs ignore them at their peril.

Multi-sensory Presentations

The temptation to litter a presentation with bullet points is strong, so strong it has dominated presentation strategies for over a decade. Creating neat cue cards gives the presenter a quick fix to presentation jitters, a reason to avoid rehearsing, and the deluded belief that the presentation is somehow more clean or succinct for all those neat headings. Not only are bullet points self-explanatory (which, unhappily, reduces the presenter’s role to ‘irritant’), they are also processed by the same element of working memory that processes the presenter’s narrative – the Phonetic Loop. This is what is commonly misunderstood about bullets – they are not a visual medium.

The presenter who uses bullets is essentially delivering two streams of information to the same cognitive faculty in the listener’s brain, and it is hard work to separate the information in the bullet point from the information in the narrative. In the face of this confusion, the listener disengages or, if really motivated, has to choose one or the other. It’s like trying to read the Yahoo news headlines about Michael Jackson while the CNN coverage is blaring away on TV – even though the ‘message’ behind both streams is the same, neither can be properly absorbed.

The alternative is to build slides that don’t work as cue cards at all, but provide visual cues for the information. Slides that use images and diagrams which truly complement (rather than repeat) the presenter’s narrative allow dual-encoding – simultaneous neurological stimulation of the Phonetic Loop (which processes sound) along with the Visuo-Spatial Scratchpad (which processes imagery). The result? Heightened attention levels, quicker understanding of the information, and more of the message passing into long-term memory.

Incomplete Sequences

Creating a slide that shows an incomplete or unfinished sequence of information strongly motivates an audience to pay attention to the presenter. The audience is initially intrigued by an incomplete picture or sequence, and then captivated when the presenter uses animation (to build up the slide and gradually resolve the picture) and narrative (to further explain the changes the audience is seeing on the screen).

This is a psychological technique called Visual Cognitive Dissonance. It commands attention by exploiting the Reticular Activating System (RAS) in the brain, the cognitive agent that searches for resolution to incomplete sequences. RAS has a particular appetite for puzzles like Sudoku and crosswords, and becomes hyperactive (not altogether unpleasantly) when confronted by certain types of abstract art. But savvy presenters can use VCD to their advantage, to over-stimulate RAS and force attention levels up, subsequently increasing the amount of information that is assimilated and that can be recalled long-term.

Neurology Vs Culture

The power of activating and stimulating these core neurological aspects or subconscious impulses can clearly be seen with human reactions to colour. Use of colour can create strong neurological reactions – for example red is consciously and subconsciously associated with danger, creating associations with blood, whilst green, located on the opposite side of the colour spectrum is recognised as a complimentary colour. In presentations therefore, both colours can have a simple yet powerful impact on the attention and understanding of an audience; the meanings of green ticks and red crosses are easily recognised and easily distinguished from long distances.

But beware of cultural differences; in the Far East red is considered a colour of prosperity and good fortune; most banks and financial institutions have red logos (and red PowerPoint templates!). Black, often used elegantly in Western designs, is strongly associated with misfortune and death. Know your audience before committing to the use of colour to evoke specific emotional responses.

Understanding basic subconscious principles of perception, and working with them, can yield a high impact without a huge amount of additional effort. Something as simple as standing on the correct side of the screen when delivering a presentation can also determine how effectively you engage with your audience. In the Western world, where we are used to writing and reading horizontally from left to right, the human eye moves in a natural Z formation, from left to right, then in ‘carriage return’ action down and left, and right along the next line. Therefore if the presenter stands to the left of the screen or projection, the audience’s eye will move very naturally from the presenter, to the screen and back to the presenter before returning to the screen for clarification.

Again, make sure you know your audience. Arabic speakers will find it more comfortable to move their eyes from right to left, so the presenter should stand to their right of the screen. Similarly, a Japanese audience used to reading Kanji will find it more comfortable if the presenter is on the right. This simple consideration allows the audience to engage visually with the presenter before and in tandem with each slide without effort or distraction.

So, whether you are the smooth experienced marketer or the nervous novice, mastering these most basic of techniques are an important first hurdle in delivering a killer presentation. They are not about content, they are not about style and they are not about confidence. They are about understanding basic human nature and arming yourself to control your audience’s focus, maximise their attention level and ensure that your presentation is recalled. It may be science, but it’s definitely not rocket science.

By Richard John, Consultant Magazine

At a recent international exhibition I spoke at a conference and received great feedback. The reason was that I managed to make myself a star in terms of presentation. At this point I’d normally thank my parents and friends, teachers and colleagues, and try not to cry with pride.

However, I can’t take all the credit (although, being a consultant I’m going to have a damn good try). My motivation was a book called Killer Presentations, by Nicholas Oulton, who runs the M62 group and who probably knows more about PowerPoint than anyone else in the universe.

I had the pleasure of meeting him recently and we chewed the fat about the success, or otherwise, of events where PowerPoint is used without control. Now, I have read many books on how to present, and often their messages are the same. Nicholas’ approach is different, as he is a man with a mission to make our presentations interesting, rather than boring already jaded audiences.

I’m not going to steal too much of his thunder. If you get the chance, go along to one of his presentations and see him use PowerPoint the way a stunt driver handles a performance car.

Us ordinary mortals could never achieve any similar level of performance, and yet he makes it seem so easy. And his book is well worth reading.

But here are a couple of useful tips for use in day to day presentation. Firstly, imagine you’ve been asked to speak for 30 minutes, and you’ve prepared your PowerPoint presentation accordingly. But just before you walk on to the stage, your host whispers that lunch is almost ready, so can you cut it to 15 minutes.

Options? Well, you could carry on as planned and see lunch go cold. You could talk faster, and whiz through your slides, leaving your delegates feeling short changed. Or you could jump through some of the slides without going through them all. Most people when asked how to do this would take the approach of pressing the ‘escape’ key to leave the presentation, click on the ‘slide sorter’ option, highlight the slide you’d like to move onto, and click the ‘presentation’ option to start again. Not exactly slick.

Alternatively, if you know you want to go from slide 12 to slide 22, you could tap 22 on the keyboard and press ‘return’. And that’s it. Your audience will never know what you’ve missed. Clever, eh?

Or, you have a graph on screen and you need to focus your audience on a particular area. Well, laser pointers often upset health and safety politicos, and you can end up feeling like an extra from Star Wars.

Instead, remember that CTRL P and CTRL A will give you on-screen pointer options that work perfectly.

Most of us assume we can use PowerPoint, and Bill Gates helpfully provides templates on most PCs – which is why most presentations are so similar, and uniformly boring. If you want something different, check out Nick’s book.

Oh, and a final point. Presentations are ‘visual support’; look closely at those two words. PowerPoint isn’t the star of your session as a speaker, you are.So remember the secret of the B or W keys. Press them, and the screen goes black (or white). Press them again, and back comes your presentation. And in those seconds, where there are no pretty pictures on the screen, that’s where the audience gets to see you. After all, isn’t that why they came?

Download Consultants View: Pressing all the right buttons, UK, Conference News – September 2006