Why Making Presentations Can Cost You the Sale
By Jeff Thull, CEO of Prime Resource Group
Too many sales professionals spend an inordinate amount of time preparing for a razzle-dazzle presentation and often lose sight of the issues at hand. Everything that salespeople do beforehand, like prospecting, contacting and qualifying potential customers—seems to be aimed at creating the opportunity to present their solutions.
Everything salespeople do after the presentation—overcoming objectives, negotiating and closing—is designed to support and reiterate the presentation. Consequently, sales organizations devote a tremendous amount of time and resources to creating compelling presentations and proposals.
The irony is that most of this effort is lost on customers. Presentations that are too early in complex decisions are largely a waste of time.
Conventional salespeople hate to hear this because the presentation is usually the key weapon in their sales arsenal. They seem to be on a mission to educate the customer relentlessly because, after all, they will not buy what they don’t understand.
A presentation—even one that includes advanced multimedia elements—is, in its essence, a lecture. The salesperson is the talking teacher and the customer is the listening student. The big problem with teaching by telling is that little information is remembered.
A typical sales presentation rarely devotes more than 10 to 20 percent of its focus on customers and their current situations. Generally, 80 to 90 percent of a typical sales presentation is devoted to describing the seller, its solutions and the rosy future if you buy. Therefore, while a presentation may raise the customer’s level of understanding, that gain usually is centered on the solution being offered and not the implications in the customer’s business. As a result, customers still lack a compelling understanding of how it applies to their situation and why they should buy it.
Your competitors are following your same strategy and are busy presenting. Your team is telling the customers that they need the solution that only your company offers, and your competitors are making the same arguments about their solutions. In every case, the presentations are heavily skewed toward the seller and the solutions.
It is highly likely that two-thirds or more of the information that customers hear falls outside their area of comprehension. Furthermore, what they do hear sounds very much the same. What does the customer understand? Price. As you may already expect, everyone is now starting their downward spiral to commoditization…the natural outcome of presenting too much, too soon and too often.
To help you avoid falling victim to the Presentation Trap, ask yourself these five critical questions:
The advice I share with sales professionals wishing to avoid the Presentation Trap is “Don’t present.” Instead, use a diagnostic approach—simply stated, conduct a thorough diagnosis to uncover problems and expand the customer’s awareness of their situation. Once the problem is clearly understood, and the customer perceives all the ramifications of that problem, then the salesperson is justified in making recommendations and a presentation will not be necessary. When you guide your customers through this process, you will establish a high level of credibility and find yourself jointly developing optimal solutions, which will ultimately benefit both you and your customers.
Jeff Thull is president and CEO of Prime Resource Group and has designed programs for clients including Shell Global Solutions, 3M, Microsoft, Citicorp, IBM and Georgia-Pacific. He also is the author of the best-selling book Mastering the Complex Sale—How to Compete and Win When the Stakes Are High.