Every time you pitch to a prospective customer or partner you crave that successful outcome – unlocking the lifetime value (LTV) of the customer or partner, with all the future cash flows that deal comes with.
If you fail, however, the time, marketing and sales investment in getting the appointment to pitch go down the drain.
So does any potential LTV, your chance to pitch for the business in the near future, along with your confidence.
The sales presentation is the crucial point at which the individual customer acquisition cost is at its highest, while the time-to-close the deal is at its shortest.
Essentially, cost and opportunity are both at their maximum. Yet we often focus on the delivery of a pitch, but not the presentation itself – which is often treated as a prop rather than a tool to supercharge our success rate.
The stakes are high – no doubt about it. So why doesn’t anyone fix their presentation?
1) Inertia – the status quo.
More often than not, it is simply an oversight. We just inherit a process and go with it. Knowing how to sell something and understanding how to present to a prospect can be two very different things.
2) No budget
For larger organizations there is often no budget for a proper presentation – either from the marketing or sales departments. Or maybe some myopic policy promotes the use of a generic presentation that isn’t fit for purpose.
3) The endowment effect
Building your own presentation can sometimes create a strong attachment and pride, resulting in the endowment effect – a situation where individuals are reluctant to part with their creations despite having more effective options.
What can you do to improve your sales presentation’s effectiveness?
Here’s where the value of a great presentation lies. A great presentation will support your pitch by:
- Visually reinforcing your verbal pitch
- Establishing credibility and building trust while exuding professionalism
- Clarifying your brand positioning and making your offering relevant
- Bringing clarity and brevity to your pitch, improving delivery and flow
- Appealing to the mind: making a compelling, logical, solid case
- Appealing to the heart: stimulating the right emotions
- Incentivizing prospects to take action
How do we get there?
Each pitch should be tailored to a specific client’s situation.
Templates are good for many uses, but you must tailor your presentation for each pitch. At Pitchsmart we can help you get the right foundations in place, but it’s up to you to do the fine-tuning for each sales pitch.
1. Go back to the basics
Set a primary objective for the presentation and build the presentation around it.
You can achieve secondary goals too, but the presentation must almost exclusively focus on achieving the primary objective.
A pitch for closing the sale of a presented solution is very different to a background presentation or a project brief.
The objective should really define the presentation. This could be to get short-listed for a follow-up pitch, to convince a prospect by making a compelling case, to resolve client concerns with a Q&A, to get a prospect to place an order and so on.
2. Begin with the specific CTA in mind
The action you want your prospects to take must be known before putting the presentation together. This could be to get an audience to place an order, to establish a follow-up call, to get an email with answers to your questions etc.
3. No more than 10-12 slides
Twelve slides are more than you need. On rare occasions, I’ve seen presentations with 4 or 5 slides do really well, and it’s for a reason. Having an extensive pitch deck to pick and choose slides (like a library) is OK for your workflow and consistency, but only present what is necessary.
4. Don’t pitch yet
Your first sales presentation may be the gateway to a second one, where the actual pitch will take place. Take the opportunity to learn as much as possible by asking the right questions to make your second pitch the most compelling one of all.
Try to gauge your prospect’s concerns and hop over to relevant slides in your library that specifically support your response.
A first in a series of pitches may need to be more flexible, gain trust, establish your positioning, relevance and credibility while answering basic questions. The following presentation may need to be more precise, focus on the prospect’s needs and be extremely relevant. You will also need to field more advanced questions.
5. Revisit the pain
This is common knowledge but I still see this mistake happen all the time. Don’t start talking about your products and solutions without having discussed their pain first. Only then can you make your pitch relevant to solving an existing, burning need.
6. Tap into emotion
Logic will win your prospect’s mind over, but emotion is what will get them to take action. This isn’t a consumer “thing”; it’s how most B2B deals close at one level or another.
Greed, enthusiasm, curiosity, hope, fear – these are all powerful motivators that can sometimes even defy logic.
7. Visualize
A picture is worth a thousand words – (which, if read aloud, would approximate to a whopping 7 minutes of non-stop talking!).
By the way, slower-speaking presenters and salespeople are often more effective. Most people will grasp your points better this way.
A visual presentation is easier to grasp, more memorable, and can also support your brand positioning when properly designed.
Design tells part of your story, so it is important to be on point and to create a trustworthy image that embodies your positioning.
8. Provide perspective
No doubt, you will be presenting many figures and logical arguments. These will often mean less to your audience without the relevant background context.
Harness the visual power of infographics to bring perspective to both the problem you are trying to solve and the solution you offer.
9. Hire professionals to design your PowerPoint presentation
You can hire us to help you create the ideal presentation optimized for your objectives. It will blow the competition away, solidify the relevance of your solution, and demonstrate the unmatched value that only you can provide.
Reach out for a quick call to see how we can help you make your next presentation a great success.
