Pitches and Presentations
How to Speak to a Group
If you make a lot of complex sales, you probably find yourself giving presentations to large groups instead of to single decision makers. Having a large audience changes the dynamic of your presentation dramatically.
Quick Tip: Pace Your Presentation
As you're making your sales pitch, keep an eye on your prospect's body language and alter your presentation accordingly.
Writing the Elevator Speech
If someone asks you about your job, it's a golden opportunity to spin a sale out of thin air. A good elevator speech is the perfect sales tool for this situation.
4 Classic Sales Techniques
Sales has borrowed heavily from social psychology to develop a few old but useful sales techniques. Do you ever use these approaches in your sales strategy?
The Benefits of Benefits Statements
Benefit statements are a simple way to tap into your prospect's emotions and sway them into buying. But without the proper groundwork, they're meaningless.
Getting Past the 'No-Men'
When you make a complex sale, it's unlikely that everyone on the decision team will support you. Some of them will do their best to block your sale for one of a variety of reasons. Here are some strategies for dealing with an obstructionist.
Making a Virtual Sales Presentation
Virtual sales presentations call for different approaches than in-person presentations. You have to compensate for the fact that you can't always see what the prospect is doing.
Diagnosing Your Prospects' Needs
When you first arrive at a sales appointment, you probably only have a vague understanding of the prospect's needs. Even worse, he may not fully understand his own needs. Until you know what the problem is, you can't propose a way to fix it.
Emotional Selling
Just about everybody buys based on emotion and then uses reason to justify their decision after the fact. Even hardened professional buyers aren't immune to emotional selling.
When Competitors Cheat
Not all your competitors are as ethical as you are. Here's how to handle the situation when you discover that another salesperson has been spreading lies.
Types of Sales Pitches
Sales pitches are not one-size-fits-all. The right type of pitch will vary depending on your circumstances.
Why You Should Give Prospects Homework
When we were in school we all dreaded homework assignments. Yet giving homework to your prospects is a great way to improve your chances of closing the sale.
The Power of Meeting In Person
Communications technology has advanced to the point that virtual meetings are almost as common as face-to-face ones, and phone, email, or even texting are all valid ways to talk business. But the physical meeting still offers the highest level of interaction.
Overcoming Prospect Inertia
People are afraid of change. If you want your prospects to change their lives by buying your product, you need to give them a pressing reason.
Telling a Sales Story
Telling a story is a time-honored way to sell, but not all salespeople are good storytellers. Here's a format that will help you to write a story that sells in just a few minutes.
Creating Prospect Urgency
If your prospect doesn't feel an urgent need for your product, she's not likely to buy from you. Creating urgency can be all you need to do to hurry a foot-dragging prospect through the sales process.
Consultative Selling Techniques
Consultative selling is a popular sales technique because it's less aggressive and more client-centric than traditional "hard-sell" methods. Here are some helpful consultative selling techniques to get you started.
Confronting Objections
Resolving objections without getting on your prospect's nerves can be tricky. Here are a few tips for handling objections in a non-confrontational way.
How to Upsell to a Prospect
Does your company sell additional products and services to complement your main product offerings? Then if you don't upsell those items, you're leaving money on the table. Follow these steps and you'll be upselling effectively.
26 Questions that Sell
Asking your prospect a series of open-ended questions during your presentation can get your prospects to sell themselves. These examples will help you get started.
Following Up with Prospects
Sales requires persistence. Often your level of urgency is a lot greater than your prospects', and so you'll need to take the burden of following up with them to keep the sale moving to the close.
Overcoming a Bad First Impression
The first impression sets the tone for the rest of the relationship with another person, so making a bad first impression is really unfortunate. It doesn't mean that you've blown the sale, though – it just means you'll have to do a little extra work to override the memory that awkward moment.
Turning Presentations Into Conversations
Make your presentation all about the prospect, and you'll catch and keep his interest far more effectively. You can put the focus on him by turning your presentation into a conversation.
Selling to Multiple Decision Makers
Selling to one person is tough enough. When two or more people have to sign off on the deal, selling becomes a lot more complicated.
Selling to Executives
Selling to executives is a whole other ballpark from regular B2B sales. If you don't want to be sent back to the minors, a few precautions are in order.
The Power of Testimonials
Testimonials are a powerful way to prove your product's worth. If you have a few testimonials in hand, you can show a prospect how “someone just like you” bought the same product they're considering, and benefited from it.
Selling to Salespeople
Do you dread selling to another salesperson? Then you're missing the possibilities. After all, you'll never get a more sympathetic audience.
Quick Tip: Questioning Prospects
Many salespeople have developed a set “pitch” they use to present the features and benefits of their product. While this simplifies the opening approach to new customers, it is often less effective than a more individualized approach.
7 Things You Should Never Say to a Prospect
As a salesperson your job is to convince people to do something (i.e. buy from you). Here are a few ways to put your foot in your mouth and make sales unlikely.
Selling to Small Businesses
Small business owners are far different as prospects from the decision makers you'll meet at large corporations. Understanding their goals and their fears is crucial to selling to this market.
17 Great Presentation Tips
According to psychologists, when most people are asked to rank their fears they put “fear of public speaking” above “fear of death.” In other words, if they're attending a funeral they'd rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy!
Any time you make a presentation – whether it's to a prospective customer, the local Chamber of Commerce, or...
Putting Together a Powerpoint Presentation
How many times have you walked into a presentation and cringed when you saw the presenter was setting up a projector? Beat the Powerpoint presentation stereotype by adopting these techniques.
Kicking the Jargon Habit
Don't make the mistake of filling your sales presentation (and your conversations) with jargon and corporate buzzwords. Here's how you can kick the jargon habit.
Sales Jargon to Avoid
Using jargon is almost always a bad idea. That goes double in a sales situation, where these phrases are likely to either annoy or puzzle your prospects.
Choose Your Words Carefully
People like to feel comfortable. And they usually feel comfortable around other people who are like them. So it follows that, as a salesperson who is trying to build rapport with prospects, you'll want to match your word choice to your prospects.
Build a Winning Sales Presentation
By the end of your sales pitch, how many of your prospects are still listening? If your presentation follows the typical pattern, where you open by talking about your company, move on to talking about your products and perhaps close with a story or two about yourself, the answer is “few to none.”