Increase Sales Blog

Posts Tagged ‘sales presentation’

In the sales process, sales presentations are part of earning the commitment to sign on the dotted line. Yet I believe a lot of salespersons confuse the purpose of a sales presentation with fact finding and thus fail to increase sales. This may happen because the potential customer or prospect was not truly qualified (shared within the marketing and selling phases of the sales process) or because there was poor fact finding (selling phase only of the sales process).

The reason I make this observation is I received one of those quick sales quizzes from a noted sales guru who essentially asked about the purpose of the sales presentation.  I personally did not like any of the responses because all of them should have been uncovered during the fact finding step. However, I choose one just to see if I was correct or incorrect.  The correct answer was about motivation.

Motivation is part of the qualifying criteria – urgency.  How quick will they be to take action specific to your solution?  Also when you have built a relationship with the potential customer, you should be having a better idea as to what motivates her or him to make this decision.  Not everyone relates to saving dollars even though price may be brought up as an obstacle.

Granted during a sales presentation, reading body language is important and helps for you to understand what trips the buying triggers (think mousetraps) especially if there are others at that sales presentation meeting beyond your direct contacts.

The sales presentation is the icing on the cake. If you have not presented your case well, have failed to uncover all known and unknown needs, do not have a solid relationship with the decision maker, lack understanding as to how the sales decision is made, then no presentation will save you from losing the commitment.  What happens is you become one of the many in the sales presentation or proposal writing business instead one of the few who actually increase sales.