This is the first episode of a new series I am starting here… It is called Quora Question of the day.
If you don’t know Quora… it’s a social platform where you can put up your questions and they will be answered by the community. You can find all the questions, that I have answered in the past on https://www.quora.com/profile/Michael-Sinnhuber
Today’s question is:
“What benefit would it be
if your company’s sales people did not have
to prepare their own presentation materials?“
And this is my answer to it – live from the PRESENTER.WORLD facebook group:
You have a question
regarding
Presentation, Communication, Storytelling, Visualisation or Public Speaking?
Transcprition of the video for those who prefer reading over watching…
Hi guys. Good morning, this is Michael.
As some of you might know, I’ve started answering questions on Quora regarding presentation, public speaking and all that kind of stuff, like three or four months ago.
And when you are very active on Quora, what happens is that people request you to answer their questions. So it’s not only that you go in there actively and say like, “I’m looking for questions that I could answer”, but people come to you and say they request an answer for you for certain questions.
And as typing, I’m not really the typing guy, as this always takes me too much time, what I thought is, in the future or starting right now, I will answer Quora questions right here in this group.
And so I’m starting today with a question that just popped up in my email inbox, and this is this one. It says,
What benefit would it be if your company’s sales people did not have to prepare their own presentation materials?
So I guess this is a problem that many companies actually have. That somebody will kind of prepare some customer company presentations or product presentations. And then they give it out to the sales team and say, “Okay, here you are, have fun. This is what we have to tell.”
What typically happens is, that those presentations are like what I call “feature fucking”. So they say, “we have that, and that, and that, and that, and this is what we have, and we are the best, and buy it”.
So what happens?
People say like, “no, we’re not gonna buy it”.
Why not?
Because you’re not thinking about what’s in it for the audience! What’s in it for your client? What problems actually do you solve for your client?
So what would be the benefit if your company sales people did not have to prepare their own sales presentation?
The major benefit would be, they would all save time! Because actually what happens is, that people take that, say like, “Okay, this is not good. I have to change that, do it my way”. And this is what takes them a lot of time.
So, first off all, what you would do is, it would save a lot of time, but to make that work, you have to do two things. Two very, very, very important things.
1. First of all, you have to prepare the sales presentation with your client in mind and put a story around that.
So what does it mean to have your client in mind?
Your client in mind means, what are the challenges that your client is facing? So what are their problems? And on the other hand, what is the solution that you can offer them?
But you always start with the challenge in mind and say something like, “Dear client, I know that you have issue and challenge XYZ, and then you kind of tell a story on how you can solve that.
The main advantage for you, if you’re the marketing or sales leader, or the CEO even, is that you are in the drivers seat on what story is going out from your company, from your service, from your product, and the story would not be changed by the sales guys out there.
So this is number one, you have to make it unboring and you have to keep your client in mind.
2. And the second one is, that if you want to stay in the drivers seat of how the story’s delivered, you would have to train them. Teach them on how to tell the story.
This might sound a little strange at first, but what you do is that you build a story. And you tell people how to tell this story and how to manage to get this story across. Because a story’s always better, it’s always more engaging, it’s always better to be remembered on your client side. Compared to just go there and say like, “Okay, this is our product, this is kind of what we have to offer, this is our product’s range. We have five different product categories, this is it. What do you want? Buy it.”
Nobody wants to buy that. We are in the 21st century, it’s like you need to get them from an emotional level. And if you want to get them on an emotional level, you need to build a story around the challenge that they have, the solution that you have, put it all together in one story. If done right, then you can grab them by the hand and move them from their challenge to the solution, and to the result that they are getting.
So you’re talking about the result that they’re getting, and if you do that, all together, then it would be a big benefit if you do that centrally.
Wrap up
So to sum it up, the question was “What benefit would it be if your company’s sales people did not have to prepare their own presentation materials?”
So first of all, if you do it the right way, like if you make it unboring, you create a story, you have your client in mind. If you do that right, then you are in the driver’s seat and the big benefit would be that you have one story that is shared all across the sales team.
And the second big thing would be, you have to train your people. You have to train the people on what is the story, how you want the story to be told, and how to get the client involved in all of this. Then it would be a win for you, a win for the sales team, and a win for the client. And everybody in that case would save a lot of time. But you have to do that right, it’s not only like you do it centrally and everything’s good. You have to do it the right way.
Whenever you have questions regarding this, if this did not really answer what you were asking and you have some other questions around presentation, about storytelling, communications, public speaking, whatever, just put it in the comments or send a question directly to me, and I will try to answer that in the next session.
So this was it for today. Wish you a pleasant day and see you soon. Bye.
