Are your sales presentations falling flat? Is your audience often unengaged and distracted? Do prospects drop off or decline after your presentations at a surprising frequency? If so, then you may need to make some adjustments. We asked sales experts their advice on creating and presenting sales presentations that wow.
Whether you’ve done sales presentations before or are brand-new and want to get a leg-up before you start, you’re in the right place. Read on for sales presentation tips – straight from the experts’ mouths – to help you shine in your next sales pitch.
Sales presentation tips: Advice from the experts
We asked some of our favorite sales experts to give us their best advice for making tired presentations more engaging, relevant, and effective. Put these 19 simple sales presentation tips into action and watch your close rate explode.
Stop presenting so soon. Just because a prospect wants a demo or presentation doesn’t make it the right time to do it. If you haven’t done good discovery work to uncover their issues—desired outcomes, frustrations, specific challenges, initiatives, etc.—then you have no right to be doing a presentation.
My second tip is a bit contrarian. Nowhere is it written that a presentation must be a monologue. Put up a slide titled “Our Understanding of Your Situation” listing several of the prospect’s key issues and turn the “presentation” into a dialogue. You’ll be amazed how much the prospect will appreciate you making the meeting about them and not your offerings.
Mike Weinberg, Sales consultant, coach, and speaker; author of Sales Management. Simplified.
Use your prospect’s language
Every industry has its own specific language, terminology, or jargon. Your industry does too. Too bad your prospects don’t generally use or understand that language.
Improve your sales presentations by speaking about the #1 challenge your prospects face, using the language they use to describe that challenge. When you do this, your prospects will “get it.” More importantly, they will think that you “get it” as well.
Start with the right mindset / Create a mental model
“Selling is a transference of feeling.”—Zig Ziglar
Because of this simple truth, you need to create the right mindset before your presentation and the best way to do this is to invest time at the start of each day listening to or reading inspirational and educational material that will help you transfer the right feelings to the prospect.
Once you have your thinking right, invest 60 seconds creating a Mental Model of how your sales presentation will go. Create a picture in your mind of what you are going to say, the questions you will ask, the responses the prospect will have, and the questions you need to answer. Do this simple routine and your clarity and confidence will help you meet the prospect’s needs and win the business.
Prospective clients care most about their particular situation. Research the company and industry first and then hold an initial meeting to verify facts so that you may accurately tailor the presentation to their needs and interests. One size never fits all.
Most sales reps kill the sale due to providing the same presentation to everyone without prior knowledge of needs and interests, and they incessantly talk without listening to input provided from those in the room.
Use a shared agenda / Focus on the slides that matter
The #1 thing in the world that everyone loves talking about is themselves, which is also the #1 problem in Sales—we all love talking about ourselves and clients don’t care. This is why I recommend using a shared agenda to guide your presentations or demos, starting with a quick intro from everyone that includes what their priorities are and what they want to get out of the presentation.
Then, don’t dive immediately into your background, history, client list, and awards. Instead, focus on what you know about them and try to get clarity on their priorities. After that, take the 20+ slides you have in your demo or presentation and focus on the 5–10 that are most relevant to them based on what they told you their priorities were.
Invest in your training / Don’t read off the PowerPoint / Keep it open-ended
1) Take an online course on presenting PowerPoints. If you aren’t going to invest in yourself to get better, why should anyone else? It’s OK to ask your company to pay for it, but if they won’t, you still want the skills, right?
2)Stop reading the PowerPoint—people can read. What you say should not be on the PowerPoint.
3) Stop asking “Does that make sense?” It’s the dumbest question ever to ask during your presentation. Instead, engage your prospects with open-ended invitations like: – “Hey, I have been talking for a while. I’d like to shut up and hear what you are thinking.” – “I’d like to stop here and see what use-cases you may be envisioning as you think about all of this.”
Richard Harris, Founder of The Harris Consulting Group; Director of Sales Consulting and Training for GTMnow
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Lead with questions to discover your prospect’s pain points
The biggest mistake any sales rep can make is walking into the client presentation and immediately flipping open their PowerPoint. Not only is this an intrinsically boring approach for both you and your potential client, it doesn’t give you a chance to learn anything about them. So when you get to the end of your presentation and they say, “Well thanks for coming in …,” you have no response other than to thank them and walk out, without an order or a next step.
The alternative is to begin the appointment by asking probing questions about what they’re struggling with. Be listening for the ways in which their problems are specifically addressed by individual slides within your presentation. So when they’re done talking, you can say, “I heard you say that your biggest problem is ___. We hear that from a lot of our clients, which is why we’ve developed ___, which addresses that problem in these three unique ways. Allow me to show you some of the data here on this slide.”
Sales reps need to focus more on being relevant than consultative. The consultative sale means you spend more time asking questions which most often you can find the answers to online or if you study their competition.
You need to show up with case studies, ideas, and research. Your clients do not have time for needs assessments and hundreds of questions. Use the tools at your fingertips and come to your next presentation ready to prove that you are an expert in your field and you are prepared for the meeting.
Know your audience and the answers to any possible questions or objections they can pose. Your team should share the questions previously asked and have an internal knowledge base for the answers that you can study.
If you’re presenting to an organization that’s not that evolved yet, practice it on 10 different allies in the space and record their questions.
Max Altschuler, CEO of Sales Hacker and Revenue Summit, author of Hacking Sales
It’s not a “presentation” / Sell them what they want
Stop thinking about it like it’s a presentation—that encourages salespeople to think it’s all about them when, in reality, it’s all about your prospect! Ask questions and get your prospect to talk to you first.
After you finish listening to them, make sure you tailor your presentation to focus on what they tell you they want to hear about. Stop selling your personal favorite benefits and sell them theirs.
Start drawing your solution, and let the buyer finish it
As many of the other contributors have discussed, the ideal presentation should be a dialogue, not a monologue. You want to engage the buyer’s energy and attention. They don’t have it all figured out yet. The point of the presentation is not just to confirm what they need to buy. A presentation should also continue the discovery process.
To make that happen, ditch your slide deck. Trust me, no one wants to see it. Or hear you present it.
Instead, use a whiteboard for your presentation. Start drawing out a flowchart or system diagram for your proposed solution. But don’t draw out the entire diagram. Map out maybe 10% of it. Then, to paraphrase Dan Roam’s recommendation in his great book Draw to Win, invite the buyer up to the board to take over from you and draw out the rest of the solution as they see it. The level of engagement with your “presentation” will go through the roof.
The net result will be a jointly created solution in which the buyer has a feeling of ownership. Through this collaboration you’ll have delivered value to the buyer in terms of helping them clarify their needs and objectives and how you will help the buyer satisfy them.
Tell your story to allow your audience to connect with you on another level. Think of the presentation the same way you think of your content. Don’t fill it with self-promotion or product reviews.
Know your audience so you can meet their needs with quality, in-depth analysis no one else can. Be authentic and honest to build trust with your audience.
Bonus strategies to improve your sales presentation skills
Want some more advice on upgrading your sales presentation skills and results? Below are some tried-and-true strategies for growing in your ability to conduct an effective sales presentation.
Optimize your presentation’s structure
While memorable sales presentations are unique, all of the good ones rely on a skeleton – a basic formula – that helps the audience follow along and know what to expect as they listen.
Much like a three-act novel or movie, you want to make sure you’re hitting the right beats in your presentation at the right time.
The general flow of a sales presentation hits the following beats in this order, with space to add your own unique beats and creative flair:
Grab attention: Make your audience curious about what you have to say, a hint of what they can anticipate for listening to your presentation. Try surprising statistics, relevant questions, or compelling stories to hook listeners in the beginning.
Define the problem: Here is where you want to paint a picture of what your audience is going through without your solution. Highlight the pain points and negative emotions, so your audience is immersed and ready to learn how to solve their problem.
Present your solution: After you’ve described the problem, you want to present your solution as the ideal fix to help your audience solve their pain points.
Prove the results: At this point, your listener is probably wondering how you can make such bold claims in your presentation. Now you want to rely on the truth of your customers’ experience. Utilize short case studies and testimonials to prove that your solution works for clients your audience can relate to.
Summarize: Conclude by restating the main points of your presentation to keep it fresh in the listener’s mind.
Call to action (CTA) and close: End your presentation with a goal for your audience to complete. Make a single, clear call to action (CTA), so your listener knows what to do after the presentation. This is also the space to answer any questions. Make sure to repeat the CTA as needed, and especially to the end of your presentation, so it’s the last thing they hear.
Let your visuals work with you and not against you
You want to strike the right balance between plain black-and-white PowerPoint slides, and GIF-heavy, distracting visuals for your sales presentation.
Your slides and visuals should support and enhance your presentation. Use a maximum of three to four shades in your slides. Use pictures and GIFs only to emphasize a point, and sparingly. And try not to copy and paste your entire script to the slides.
Otherwise, have fun with it. Let the visuals complement your presentation style and personality. If using GIFs is “so you,” then go for it. Just make sure it enhances your talking points without distracting from them.
Practice your delivery
Just like actors rehearse for their plays and movies, you want to rehearse your sales presentation to get it just right. You don’t want to read off a script as your present – it makes you sound inauthentic, and your audience can pick up on it, even if you’re presenting online and your camera’s off.
Create your script and practice until you have the words down, then incorporate movement, body language, and emphasis. Even if your face isn’t being shown, using your expressions while speaking enhances your delivery and captivates your audience.
Prepare for questions and objections
As you practice your presentation, try to imagine how your audience is feeling as they listen. Take note of any questions you think would come up. Then prepare responses or add objection-handling sections to your presentation. Ask your team members or manager for feedback and to give you any perspectives you might be missing.
You also want to list the common sales objections and prepare responses for those – something like a FAQ sheet. As you do more presentations, you’ll encounter commonly asked questions which you can add to your FAQ sheet.
Make the most of post-presentation follow-up
After you’ve made your sales presentation, the key to closing the sale is to time your follow-up as it’s still fresh in the mind of your prospect.
With a CRM, you can automate your follow-up via email or SMS to send at a predetermined time after your presentation. Plus, you can make use of email templates to craft effective messages to maximize the chance of your prospect reaching out.
Even in the case that you don’t get the sale, it’s helpful to follow up with a request for feedback on the presentation itself, to get insight on how you can improve.
Nutshell—a CRM that supports you from lead to presentation to close
Everything that leads up to the sales presentation and the actions that come after – all of these need precise timing and intuition to increase your chances of making the sale.
With Nutshell, you can take advantage of our pipeline management and automation features to put the necessary but mundane tasks on autopilot while you and your sales team focus on perfecting your presentations and building great customer relationships that last well beyond the first sale.
