Sales Communication: Do You Have Perfect Pitch?
I’ve experienced the sales game from both sides of the table: making hundreds of presentations to sell our services, and hearing hundreds more from those trying to sell me something. If the parade of presentations goes on for a few hours, buyers grow weary. What can you do to your presentation to overcome your buyer’s sense of frustration?
These 10 suggestions deal with the finer points of sales presentations:
1. Influence, don’t just inform. Your role is to make your information actionable for your buyers.
2. Act against your own self-interest to build trust. If you know an extended warranty doesn’t make sense for a customer, let them know it’s available but advise against it.
3. Use the experience factor. Buyers can refute your facts and figures, but your experience in your area of expertise is irrefutable.
4. Tell failure stories. Buyers can learn from a case history involving one of your clients that didn’t find success with your product—as long as the failure was due to the client’s decision-making and not your product or service.
5. Prefer understatement to overstatement. Use a range of actual results you’ve recorded rather than making promises that appear too good to be believable.
6. Know when to use exact numbers and when to round them. Exact numbers are easier to verify, while rounded numbers are more easily remembered.
7. Make statistics and facts experiential. Raw bits of data are not easily digested, so involve buyers in a discussion of how your statistics apply to their project.
8. Never shy away from underdog positioning. Because some people can’t help but cheer for the underdog, acknowledge that you’re the lesser-known brand.
9. Plant questions you’d like competitors to address. While noting your key areas of strength, drop in issues that may be problems for the competition.
10. Never walk through your proposal—give a guided tour. The buyer can either read or listen, but not both at the same time. Don’t let the written proposal compete with your oral presentation.
>
Review the full article, "Do You Have Perfect Pitch?" in the August issue of Sales and Service Excellence magazine. You’ll find many quality articles in this publication from leading experts in sales and marketing like Patricia Fripp, Nido Qubein, Tony Alessandra, Bill Brooks, Harvey Mackay, Jim Cathcart, Thomas Winninger, and Bill Bachrach.
You may download the pdf version of the article from my website (Booher.com) by clicking on this link. Open the PDF Version (allow a minute or two for the download).
Have you made a sales presentation that brought surprising results—good or bad? Send me a comment.
Share and Enjoy
No related posts.
Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.
Discussion Area - Leave a Comment