The good news is that m62 is here to help. We know sales presentations – after all, we’ve created 1000s of them. Here, we bring you great tips from our own consultants, as well as other sales, marketing, and presentation experts. We’ve reproduced all of these tips for you in a series of articles split into five different aspects: content; planning and process; format and structure; design; delivery and technique.

The first part of our series contains tips on messaging and content.

Concrete Details

Make sure that your presentation brings your points to life, rather than simply presenting abstract concepts. If making a sales presentation, make sure that you offer proof. As Chip and Dan Heath note in their pamphlet ‘Making Presentations that Stick‘ – “The number one mistake we’ve observed in presentations – and there is no close second – is that the message is too abstract. The presenter offers concepts and conclusions but not evidence. He talks at a high level about the big picture, but gives no concrete details that might make the big picture understandable and plausible.”

Focus on Solutions

In a credentials presentation, says author Joey Asher, don’t talk directly about credentials, or too much about your own company. “Instead, your credentials will be apparent as you talk about your solution, and how you’ve implemented similar solutions for other clients. You focus your presentation solely on what the client really cares about – a solution to her business problem.”

Value Proposition for Structure

Less is more. At m62 we advise our clients to structure their sales presentations into five parts or fewer. Use benefit statements to form a value proposition, and use the value proposition for structure. Giving five strong answers to the question ‘Why Us?’ is far more powerful, and memorable, than listing 100s of benefits that nobody can prioritise or remember.

Bring Solution to Life

In Fire Them Up, best-selling author Carmine Gallo suggests focusing on the solution that your service delivers, and recommends bringing to life how this solution will help – “Tell your listeners why you’re excited about your product, share a vivid vision of the future that your product makes possible, and be specific about how your product will help them succeed in business”. He reminds us of the well-known adage that ‘nobody wants a quarter-inch drill; they want a quarter-inch hole’ – that is, in B2B sales, people want solutions, not just products.

Memorable Moments

Duarte Design in California (the folks behind Slide:ology) teach presenters to use ‘S.T.A.R Moments™. S.T.A.R. stands for “Something They’ll Always Remember” and S.T.A.R. Moments refer to the memorable moments in a presentation that stick in the minds of your audience long after the presentation is over.’ We’ve mentioned it before on this website, because we love the clip, but a great example of this is Bill Gates releasing a jar of mosquitoes into a crowded auditorium while talking about Malaria. People remember that kind of stunt, and if it’s connected to your message, they remember your message too.

Benefits not Features

Remember that successful sales presentations can’t simply list product features, but must make the connection to benefits that actually help the audience. As Jerry Weissman writes in Presenting to Win ‘A feature is a fact or quality about you or your company, the products you sell, or the idea you’re advocating. By contrast, a Benefit is how that fact or quality will help your audience. When you seek to persuade, it’s never enough to present the Features of what you’re selling; every Feature must always be translated into a Benefit.’

Stories and Emotion

‘People buy on emotion, and justify with fact’ says Bert Decker, CEO of Decker Communications. Stories are ‘emotionally connecting’, ‘move people’, ‘give third party credibility, and are memorable. Sales people should make use of stories in presentations, because stories help presenters to connect, and ‘connection trumps everything’.

Allude to Competitor Weaknesses

Many companies feel uncomfortable in directly attacking competitors in their sales presentations. The alternative is to use a technique called ghosting. In ghosting, the aim is to allude to the weaknesses of competitors without specifically mentioning them. Explain why a certain feature is important, allude to the risk of not having that feature (without openly mentioning a competitor), and then present your own strengths in that area.

Clear Objectives

Many presentations are prepared and delivered with no clear objectives in mind. Yet, if a presentation isn’t trying to achieve anything in particular, it risks achieving nothing. Andrew Abela, author of Advanced Presentations by Design, suggests creating a table, and listing what the audience think now, and what the presenter wants them to think after the presentation; and what the audience do now, and what the presenter wants them to do after the presentation. This framework ensures that presentations are given for a purpose.

Handouts for Detail

Sales people need to convince emotionally and rationally, and some of the rational sale can be achieved using detailed handouts, as Seth Godin argues – ‘the presentation is to make an emotional sale. The document is the proof that helps the intellectuals in your audience accept the idea that you’ve sold them on emotionally.’

Case Studies for Social Proof

As Chris Atherton, writer of the blog Finite Attention, affirms, sales people really need to use case studies. Show your audience how other clients have benefited from your product or service. This immediately poses the question, “What would this do for me?” This approach is interesting, affirming, and involves your audience.

Understand Prospects

And finally, an audience needs to feel important. As recommend by Sue Hershowitz, whose blog SpeakerSue provides resources for sales skills, you should ‘Love your prospects.’ Take the time to get to know them. Do the research. Most importantly, let them know that you appreciate them. Show them that you understand; that their problems matter to you; and that you offer a solution that is tailored to helping them in the best way possible.

When writing a sales presentation, sales presenters and those in marketing who support them need to choose their messages carefully and understand that the real value and return lies in being a great editor, rather than a prodigious publisher.

Many companies spend considerable time and effort on marketing activities and lead generation to actually get sales people face-to-face with prospective customers. Yet, this investment is often rendered useless by the failure of the sales presentation to deliver clear and succinct messages that convey value to the audience. Poor sales presentations are two-a-penny; the common denominating perception that they are boring, irrelevant, and forgettable.  However, the good news is if everyone else is writing and delivering awful sales presentations, you have the opportunity to shine and stand out, by writing a sales presentation that does exactly what it ought to; to write a sales presentation that is succinct, visaul, and that is recalled.

Focus on the Audience

Capitalising on these opportunities to get your foot in the door requires writing a presentation that is audience-focussed and not presenter focussed. Narcissus was only ever truly popular with himself.  Writing a sales presentation that is audience-focussed necessitates understanding your prospect. In some sales processes, this can mean using a first visit or phone call to fact-find, and only then presenting. For others, a meeting can be used to question first and present later.

Where prospects expect some sort of a presentation before they will open up and answer questions, then consider presenting opening slides to build credibility, stop to ask questions, and then present the rest of a sales presentation, emphasising those parts that will be of most interest.

Write Analogue, Not Digital

Start writing a sales presentation in ‘analogue’ form. Don’t open PowerPoint, don’t even open your laptop. Paper and pencil work fine; many people writing a sales presentation use Post-It notes to capture each key argument, and then move these around until sections of the presentation, and a good flow, are settled.

Lose the Script

m62 would not recommend using a script when delivering a sales presentation. Use of scripts can ruin spontaneity, and make presenters seem less ‘human’. Where certain sections of the presentation are given more focus (the introduction, the value proposition), it can make sense when writing the sales presentation to write a script for those slides. But writing the script is useful here not because it will be used (it shouldn’t), but because the process of writing  can help the presenter rehearse what they should say (even though they aren’t going to read aloud from a script).

Less is More

It is important to realise your audience is limited in the amount of information they can actually take in. However enlightening, witty or entertaining your presentation, the message remains that too much is too much – it’s just wasted information and wasted time.

A great many presentations will contain numerous slides of bullet points. However, bullet points do not actually equate to succinctness – and shorter bullet points are not easy to process. If your presentation has 30 slides with five bullet points on each, that is 150 pieces of information that you are asking your audience to remember. With all the will in the world, that is simply not going to happen. Far from being superhuman, the average working memory of a human is seven +/- two quanta. If your audience is particularly interested, they will hopefully write things down from your presentation, improving their memory recall further. Even so, your audience are not going to take in 150 pieces of information, let alone remember them.

Value Proposition for Structure

It is critical when writing a sales presentation to create a hierarchy of information, with your value proposition at the top. The value proposition should be used to structure your sales presentation, and should be repeated as a content slide – so that at least this core message can be remembered.

Leave Behinds aren’t Memorable

Whilst the temptation to leave a written version of the presentation behind has merit, the bad news is that few, if any of your audience will read it. A leave-behind cannot replace the need for a memorable presentation in the first place. A sales presenter has one real shot at being remembered – and that is when delivering the sales presentation. A better leave-behind that printed slides or a document is a recording of the presentation being delivered, viewable on demand from the web.

Eliminate Weak Points

Under the value proposition, further information can be used as proof – but even then, more information does not necessarily make for a stronger proof. The key to writing a strong sales presentation is to pay attention to raising the impact of the ‘weakest’ messages; if a presentation has obvious holes in it, the audience will start to wonder where else sales messages are not as powerful as they first appear.

Editor not Publisher

The best way to write a sales presentation is to think like an editor rather than a publisher; to play devil’s advocate with your own messaging and to be brutally honest, deleting as much information as possible. Your audience has a limited capacity to recall and identifying no more than five key reasons that your audience should buy from you rather than a competitor will provide a far greater return than bombarding your audience with dozens of sales messages. In the world of writing sales presentations, it is the editor, not the publisher, who is king.

Value Propositions, Proof, and the Winning Sales Presentation

There has been much written and much debate about what makes a winning sales presentation. From the measurement of sales effectiveness, to outlining the sales process, distinguishing between sales messages and marketing messages, developing consistent messaging, and using appropriate slides – many elements must come together to create a winning sales presentation. As important as all of these, however, is creating a winning value proposition.

Value Proposition

A value proposition sets out the benefits that a vendor offers in return for payment; the greater the benefits at a given price point, the greater the value offered. Identifying and communicating value is key to crafting a winning sales presentation. As presentation coach Jerry Weisman writes in Presenting to Win:

“A feature is a fact or quality about you or your company, the products you sell, or the idea you’re advocating. By contrast, a Benefit is how that fact or quality will help your audience. When you seek to persuade, it’s never enough to present the Features of what you’re selling; every Feature must always be translated into a Benefit.”

The temptation for presenters looking to put together an effective sales presentation can be to simply list dozens and dozens of possible benefits – hoping that if enough bets are made, some will be on the winning horse. Yet here, less is more. In communicating 100s of benefits, few will be remembered – and each audience member will take away something different from the sales presentation. Without a clear value proposition, when the audience evaluate your presentation afterwards, there will be no agreement on what you offer.

Fundamentally, the strength of the value proposition in a sales presentation can be determined by three key factors:

• How important the benefits you offer are to the client,
• How these benefits fare in comparison to your competitors’ value propositions, and
• The extent to which you justify the claims that you make about being able to deliver benefits.

Benefits

As the starting point in developing a winning sales presentation, development of your value proposition is of paramount importance. First, brainstorm a list of the benefits that you offer to your clients.  Some people find it hard to express ideas in terms of benefits rather than features – but at this stage this doesn’t matter; in fact, at m62, we often build a value proposition using features or advantages, and allow the presenter to explain the benefit that the feature offers verbally. This is to avoid allowing the audience to disengage if they feel like they fully understand what the presenter is going to say by reading the benefit listed on a slide.

Having established a list of features and benefits that might be of interest to clients, the question of how important they really are to the client must be addressed. There are a number of ways of evaluating items on a list – the idea is to focus on things that you offer that your potential customers care about. This increases your chances of winning – if prospects don’t care about the benefits you offer, they aren’t really benefits for those customers. Many companies are happy to make educated guesses as to what customers care about – where a research budget exists, it’s possible to get pretty scientific.

Competitive Advantage

Offering benefits that your audience care about isn’t always enough for a winning sales presentation – you also need to consider competitive position. If your company can offer benefits, but your competitors can offer the same benefits for less money, or the same benefits but more of them – then your presentation will not win. Rank ideas for your value proposition in terms of both importance to the customer, and the extent of competitive advantage that your company has. These elements – taken together – make up the competitive value proposition.

It is the competitive value proposition that should be the framework of any winning sales presentation. In identifying what is of importance to your client and where you are better than your competitors lies the arsenal behind a winning presentation. The value proposition can be made memorable through passive mnemonic processing, and should be used to structure the sales presentation.

Proof and Justification

With the opportunity to get in front of your target audience at a premium, especially during difficult economic times, this opportunity simply cannot be wasted. The presenter must be able to demonstrate delivery or back up their claims with hard evidence. The simple claim of value with no supportive substance simply will not wash, even if trust can go a long way. If prospective purchasing decision makers simply don’t believe that you can execute, then they will not believe you, however much you beg for a chance. And importantly, they are not going to buy something they do not believe. A winning sales presentation depends upon having a value proposition that appeals to the audience, and in successfully justifying this value proposition.

m62 often recommend a straightforward approach to gathering proof points for sales presentations. This process can be boiled down to four key points of justification: testimonial, process, technical or logical.

Testimonials should be self explanatory. They are the positive things that have been said about your company, product or service by your customers, partners, or those with influence in your industry. This is the testimonial hierarchy; third person testimonials are perceived as objective and independent and therefore trustworthy, the most powerful of testimonials. Second person testimonials can be sourced from customer feedback following a job well done and can be the fastest route to generating content.

A process justification explains how a product or service will work to deliver value. If the value proposition claims that a product will enable faster manufacturing times, the process justification will explain how.

A technical justification relies upon the existence of proprietary technology or intellectual property to deliver a benefit. For example, a client who has developed a unique method for separating oils from water has a competitive advantage in the oil-clean up industry.

A logical justification relies on proof delivered through reasoned argument. If you claim to offer value because you source materials more cheaply than competitors, showing the prices that you pay against those your competitors pay will prove this point logically and unquestionably. Explaining how you manage to pay less will be a process justification.

The Winning Sales Presentation

There are indeed a great many aspects that must go into a winning sales presentation – including visualisation, structure, and design. At the heart of every winning sales presentation, however, is the value proposition. The method is a less-is-more approach, boiling down your key USP’s and making sure that they are presented and supported appropriately.

Subscribe to article62 to receive a monthly presentation update straight to your inbox. Existing subscribers can easily manage article62 subscriptions from this site.

Is The Audience Deciding Whether To Buy – Or Which Version to Buy?

Every presenter should ask themselves a simple question during preparation – is the presentation going to address whether the audience should buy at all, or has the need been identified and is the audience considering whether to buy from me versus the competition? In other words, whether the audience’s ‘need to purchase’ has been established is a critical determining factor in choosing which messages to convey.

For example, if ‘outsourcing’ is one of a presenter’s core value propositions, then the appropriate message if this audience were considering whether to buy might be: ‘Why outsource?’ Alternatively, the appropriate message for an audience which is considering which supplier to buy from would consequently be: ‘Why outsource to us?’. The two questions are fundamentally different, in terms of the resulting discussion – although each is potentially relevant and appropriate, depending upon the audience’s requirements and, potentially, the stage of the sales cycle at the point of presentation.

Using the above questions, two possible answers might be ‘cost savings’ and ‘an improvement in service levels’ respectively, for example. The first answer is relevant to all outsourcing offerings and so plays an essential role in establishing why the audience needs such a service – but the second offers a key point of competitive differentiation.

In differing circumstances it is conceivably possible that either the ‘whether’ or ‘which’ messages may be relevant and appropriate during either the marketing or sales phases of the overall sales cycle. However, it’s worth noting that when these two points are presented concurrently in the sales phase for example, they can be significantly more powerful than when presented independently, effectively re-establishing the audience’s overall need to buy, before then delivering the presenter’s specific value proposition to confirm why the audience must buy from them. In other words, sales messages concerning ‘whether’ to buy can help to shape the audience’s understanding of how to choose ‘which’ to buy.

When preparing to deliver a sales presentation, it is highly worth considering whether the audience is likely to be thinking either: “Do I need this solution?” or “Can this presenter provide me with the solution I need” respectively. If the former, then the presenter should aim to make the audience want to buy, ideally without going out to market, but at the very least with a view of what to look for that is tailored to the presenter’s own offering. If the latter, the opportunity is clearly to convey why the presenter is the best placed to offer the service that the audience has already identified is required, via a more compelling and benefit-led sales presentation than the competition.

By considering where the presentation sits within the sales cycle based on whether the audience is considering the merits of a purchase or whether the audience is sold on making the purchase but considering where to spend their money, the smart presenter optimises the chances of achieving the desired positive outcome.

Undoubtedly, producing the correct message for the given audience to assure the best possible outcome is one of the most difficult aspects of creating a great presentation. This article is intended to offer guidance on how to correctly identify whether a presentation is to support either the presenter’s marketing function or sales function – and therefore how to optimise the message and approach accordingly. Recognising the key differences between marketing and sales messages may also be useful to guide wider marketing campaigns, ensuring that these support sales, rather than undermine them.

Marketing as Lead Generation

Simply put, much of business-to-business marketing is a lead generation exercise. Then, sales people are used to close the deal, often with the support of a sales presentation.

Marketing messages should establish or generate interest. Marketing presentations may be given at trade shows, conferences, online, or at product launches – typically, to large audiences. Marketing presentations, and wider marketing campaigns, should compel the audience to find out more, thereby moving from the marketing phase into the sales phase of the overall cycle.

If a marketing presentation or marketing campaign inspires the audience to contact the presenter with questions, such as “Could you?”, “Will you?” or “Do you?” then the presentation exercise has clearly succeeded. Once a company representative is sitting face-to-face with a single prospective customer, sales messages are more appropriate.

Marketing Undermining Sales Presentations?

In terms of the overall sales objective, it is potentially counter-productive for a presenter to reveal too much at the marketing stage. Marketing messages should be sufficiently compelling to encourage the audience to pursue the required call to action – e.g. to pick up the phone. Full product descriptions and feature lists revealed at the marketing stage can prevent further dialogue, by allowing prospects to assume that they know all there is to know about a company’s offering. Instead, by providing a sufficient level of relevant intrigue at the marketing phase, this acts as the basis for discussion during the sales phase, presenting an ideal sales opportunity.

For example, a business might choose to convey relevant successes that have been previously achieved for existing customers in a marketing message or presentation, whereas a full description of how this was achieved and also how this could be applicable might best be held back until the appropriate time to deliver a sales message.

Setting up Sales Presentations

The role of a marketing message is to convey the achievability of some core benefits in relation to the audience’s specific requirement, yet without explaining the exact means of delivering these. Consequently a well conceived and delivered marketing presentation, and indeed marketing campaign, should set up the sales opportunity. The sales presentation should deliver the relevant punchline that enables the audience to understand not only exactly what’s on offer but how it can help address their particular need.

If marketing deliver sales messages to all, sales presentations will seem unavoidably boring and repetitive – everything has been said already. As a presenter, it’s vital to understand which messages are sufficient to make the phone ring. If handled correctly, these messages also provide the ammunition for the commercial sales pitch to be delivered in answer to a prospect’s inevitable questions.

Subscribe to article62 to receive a monthly presentation update straight to your inbox. Existing subscribers can easily manage article62 subscriptions from this site.

Second in a series of four episodes of the Killer Presentation Series, this edition focuses on finding the right message for your presentation.

Passive mnemonic processes utilise an understanding of how people remember information to ensure that presentation messages are presented in a way that makes them stick in the memory.Clearly the purpose of a presentation is to impart knowledge and clearly this involves memory, the audience’s and not the presenter’s.

We all learn from a very early age certain Active Mnemonic Techniques: Rehearsal, Association, Visualisation, Chunking and Relevance. We all use these techniques (perhaps subconsciously) to remember all sorts of information every day. Our brains continuously filter and sort information that we see and hear, selectively processing the information we wish to recall and choosing to forget the information we do not need to recall. For example: What did you do for your 18th birthday? And what did you have for lunch on 1st July 2006?

At m62 we take these techniques and employ them passively by embedding them into your presentation: The presentation message, structure, appearance, behaviour and how you eventually interact with it are all carefully orchestrated to ensure the audience recall the maximum amount of information. We call this technique Passive Mnemonic Processing.

UK, Salesforce – May 2006

Presentations are only persuasive if claims are believed. This article explains how to present benefits in a PowerPoint presentation, and then justify the claims made.

Talk is cheap”, the saying goes, and most audiences implicitly understand this. In sales presentations, the value proposition – which claims benefits for the customer – must be justified. It is essential to back up claims – “Reduce costs” – “How?” , “Ability to deliver” – “Why should we believe that?”, “Accurate results” – “Who says so?”

Crafting a powerful and relevant sales proposition. Is the first and pivotal step towards creating a winning presentation. But while it’s one thing to claim value, it’s quite another for buyers to believe you. A common shortfall of many presentations is to prove beyond a shadow of a doubt, and with crystal clarity, the ability to deliver the promise.

And if buyers don’t believe that you can execute, then they won’t believe you. And they will only buy what they believe.

But there is a way to create compelling  belief in your capabilities, and to justify why they should believe you – to really prove your value proposition, and for it to be valued. After writing umpteen B2B sales presentations we have found that there are four types of justification: testimonial, process, technical and logical.

Testimonial

Testimonials are the things that have been said or documented about your company or product. They may have been said by you or your company (first person testimonial), by your customers or partners (second person testimonial), and by people or organisations who have no commercial relationship with your company (third person testimonial). Third person is the most powerful, as it is seen as independent and objective. Examples can be found in press coverage, award schemes and analyst assessments. Second person can be gained from customer feedback. This naturally comes after a job well done. Testimonials can be solicited either directly or by sending out feedback forms or customer satisfaction surveys. Well crafted questions (such as, “What did we do well?”) can ensure a steady supply of testimonial. But generally the fastest way of getting what you need can be to ask a client directly for a quote. First person comes from you or your company. Data makes very powerful first person testimonial – surveys, benchmarks you have performed, cost of ownership forecasts, and so on.

Process

A process justification explains how a product or service will work to deliver value. If the value proposition claims that a product will enable faster manufacturing times, the process justification will explain how, perhaps by cutting down lengthy testing. For example: a value proposition claim for quality can often be supported by showing a flow chart of the QA process.

Technical

A technical justification relies on the existence of proprietary technology or intellectual property (IP) to deliver a benefit. For example: “We have a client who has developed a unique method for separating oil from water – this gives  him competitive advantage in the oil clean up industry.”

Logical

A logical justification is where the proof comes from a reasoned argument. For example: “We have 75% of the FT100 as regular clients,” will add weight to an argument about being a “low risk supplier”. The trick is to find an indisputable data point and use it to show credibility for something else.

The search for proof

I am often surprised about this – we can find proof of value for our customers when they are convinced none exists. It usually does, but the people who know about it are sometimes unaware of the need and therefore don’t volunteer it. For example, customer service personnel may have quotes from clients, R&D engineers may know of intellectual property, and HR may have internal statistics that are useful. But how often do salespeople take time to talk to these people?

So, revisiting the types of justification:

Testimonial – This is almost certainly in your sales or delivery executive’s emails. A client will have emailed to say thank you or well done and we have a tendency to smile and press delete; at best we email it internally. We find that sending out requests for any positive stories usually provides more than enough material.

Process – QA departments often have this type of proof captured as part of ISO quality control systems.

Technical – R&D or delivery departments are a great source for this kind of argument. The issue often becomes translating it into English.

Logical – This is an intellectual pursuit and probably best left to the brightest in the organisation.

Building justification into your sales presentation will encourage belief in your ability to execute the promise of your value proposition. And it will help you win more business.

Download PDF

A self-confessed food-porn addict, I was in thrall to Nigella Lawson last Sunday afternoon on her cookery show, rhapsodising as only she can about the thrills, and inevitable spills, of creating the perfect chocolate pudding. “It really doesn’t matter how many cocoa nibs you put in…” she oozed, folding together the kind of ingredients that are only readily available if you live next to Fortnum’s, “…what’s important is that the ones you put in get toasted just right.” In the kind of stupor that only this particular genre of info-tainment can engender, my mind wandered off to Monday morning business, carrying that last morsel of advice with it.

The proof of Nigella’s pudding is in the tasting, a delicate balance between sweetness and sharpness. The proof of the marketing recipes that businesses put together to improve top-line performance is in the annual return on investment (ROI), an equally delicate balance between marketing expenditure and revenue. The main difference between Nigella and a CFO is that most of us do not have unlimited budget for ingredients.

In the current business climate, deciding how to apportion marketing budget is harder than ever before. An intimidating menu of advertising platforms, strategies, viral and non-viral initiatives and subliminal media offers increasingly ingenious ways to tempt your prospects, yet your budget does not inflate in line with this multiplicity of options. In this state, managers of marketing budgets have to carefully assign budget to their choice of strategies, devise feedback mechanisms to benchmark effectiveness, and then decide how to fine-tune the campaigns to maximise top-line performance. Articulating your company’s value and finding ways to communicate it to your prospects is the purpose of marketing, but if the next step in the cycle – namely sales – is underperforming, your best marketing efforts will collapse. The trick is to ensure that however you acquire your leads, the ones you have “get toasted just right”.

What are your ingredients?

It is often helpful to conceptualise the sales cycle as a funnel: assuming that a campaign brings in 100 leads per month, if your sales conversion rate is around 10 per cent, you will close 10. Given this relatively simple equation, the obvious solution is to establish a sales target and retro-engineer your marketing initiatives to increase the number of leads generated. So we invest most of our budget into brochures, promotional CD-ROMS, commercials, print ads and the like, thereby increasing the number of leads that enter the funnel. But the equation is not nearly so simple. Acquiring more leads puts increasing pressure on the sales team, which will increase sales costs and start to eat away at the return.

For the CFO there is probably not much that can be done to mitigate the cost of sale, but one assumption has gone unexamined – namely that the conversion rate of your sales team is a constant. Increasing the number of prospects into your sales cycle is a good idea, but once you have them there, improving the conversion rate of your sales team is a far more efficient route to a better ROI.

The question is how can you achieve a step-change in sales performance without breaking the bank?

One key difference between marketing and sales is directness. Almost by definition, any form of marketing is indirect, in that it seeks to communicate without any actual contact between you and the prospect. Sales, however, is about personal direct communication. In both activities, we are aiming to convey a value message to a prospect, and we spend a lot of time and effort on advertising and promotion just to get our foot in the prospect’s door. What most companies fail to do, often quite spectacularly, is capitalise on the face-to-face business of selling that will ultimately win or lose the business.

Why does my marketing soufflé collapse?

On a recent plane trip back to the UK from San Diego, where I had spent the best part of a week attending a conference for a major client, my attention was drawn away from the latest small-screen blockbuster by the desultory sighing and humming of the gentleman sitting next to me, interposed with the frustrated laptop-tapping that typifies a familiar and ubiquitous form of modern torture. A glance at his screen confirmed it – endless 12pt bullet points against a garish background design. After breaking the ice, I discovered that my companion was a salesman for a software company, on his way to London to deliver a presentation that could close a deal worth $3m. Although I can’t name the company, I’m confident you will have seen their TV commercials and magazine ads, and possibly a few of the promotional brochures and CDs that littered my companion’s meal-tray (I use the word ‘littered’ advisedly, because all too often that is precisely what such materials become).

As we spoke, the poor guy was looking for a way to reduce the text size so he could cram yet more bullet points onto the slide. The other slides he flicked through had exactly the same format. I may have seen a pie chart in there somewhere; I certainly saw a lot of photographs, which seemed to serve as some kind of apology for the relentless text-tsunami that would soon be engulfing the audience.

It was clear that this salesman’s audience was destined to get roasted, not toasted – to be sedated by yet another presentation that failed to effectively communicate the value on offer. It seemed heartbreaking that the millions of dollars that had been spent on brand positioning, arousing interest and creating the opportunity was about to be undone by a dull and disengaging instance of Death by PowerPoint.

PowerPoint™ has had more than its fair share of bad press in recent years; in fact, if PowerPoint were a celebrity it would be Britney Spears – hailed as the best thing since sliced bread, soon becoming part of everyday life, and now something destructive and dangerous that you should keep your children away from. The truth is that PowerPoint is an extremely powerful tool when used properly, and by transforming the way salespeople use it, businesses can make a real difference to sales effectiveness and top-line results.

Reading a list of bullet points to the audience is an ineffective way of communicating value. We have all sat through this kind of presentation; indeed the situation is now so ubiquitous that a PowerPoint presentation is expected to be dull and boring. We are currently on the verge of a tipping-point in how PowerPoint is being used in sales, where an audience-focused, effective presentation can give your salespeople an immense competitive advantage.

How do you bake an irresistible presentation?

The reality is this: the most successful marketing initiative will only get your salesperson’s foot in the door. At best, it will get you a captive audience, a hugely valuable opportunity to get your message across and influence buying behaviour. At this stage the success of the sale depends on a few key factors:

• Does the presentation clearly articulate the benefits of buying from you and not the competition?
• Does the presentation engage the audience and hold their attention?
• Do the key messages pass into the audience’s long-term memory, so that they can influence buying behaviour when the decision is finally made?

Getting these things right takes time and practice, and a paradigm shift in how we think about presentations, but the rewards are considerable. Businesses that have put an audience-centric presentation approach into practice, addressing the three key points above, convert up to 40 per cent more leads into sales. That’s utilising their existing sales force, and sometimes even cutting back on marketing budget. Doesn’t halving your marketing expenditure and doubling your sales sound like a recipe for success?

Whichever way you look at it, diverting a small percentage of the marketing budget away from more brochures or extra airtime, and into a tool that will increase your sales effectiveness, could make all the difference to your top-line performance. Focusing less on lead generation and more on sales conversion means efficiently using the resources you already have, and ‘toasting’ the leads you bring in to perfection. Maybe only Nigella can make a chocolate soufflé rise, but with an effective, engaging, impressive and memorable presentation in your list of ingredients, you should be able to make your sales rise – and serve up something irresistible to your shareholders.

An understanding of sales psychology helps ensure sales presentations are more effective.

Any sales person will have heard, at some point, a discussion of the difference between features and benefits. At times, the discussions can become somewhat obscure. The basic point to take away is that if a feature is presented, but the audience don’t understand the benefit that this feature will deliver, they have no reason to buy. This is particularly true in complex business-to-business sales.

Once the audience recognise that a feature will bring them a benefit, they need to be persauded that the selling organisation can actually deliver. I can promise the world, but if I’m not going to deliver anything, buying from me would be a bad idea.

Sales presentations should evolve in a way that outlines features, sets out benefits clearly, and then tries to persuade the audience that these benefits can be delivered.

This online PowerPoint presentation with video talks through this material in more detail. The presentation will launch in full screen mode.

Topics covered include why memorable messages are important to sales presentations, how many benefits audience members can typically remember, when to present features and when to present benefits, when to sell the category (‘whether’) and when to sell the particular solution (‘which’), and finally why using a single value proposition slide and using it as an agenda for a presentation makes sense.