Sales Training Blog

Does your website “show up and throw up?”

In the sales trade, a salesperson who “shows up and throws up” pushes his agenda at customers with no concern for their needs or pain points. His canned presentation is all about his products and company. This approach bores customers to tears.

Better salespeople realize that selling is about motivating customers, which rarely happens by dumping product information on them. These salespeople work to understand the customer’s point of view and to put their product into the context of the customers world. Before talking product they might ask questions to find out... 
• What are the problems or pain points unique to the customer?
• How does this customer fit into his or her competitive market?
• Are there technical, regulatory, or financial trends that will affect their needs?
• Which applications or best practices might affect this company's purchasing decisions?

Better salespeople focus on solving customer problems first, product information follows. They collect information and advice helpful to the customer not just with a purchase, but in using the product successfully.    

Now, let’s get back to your website.  Which of these two approaches describes the content on it?  Is your content just about your company and products, or do you also have information helpful to solving customer problems? 

Problem solving content can... 

• Motivate registration (for a newsletter or webinar etc.) and capture early stage sales leads.
• Help your customers feel like you are committed to their success. Don’t you think this is more meaningful than just telling your customers how committed you are?
• Your customers become familiar with your website. Wouldn’t it be better if they were familiar with your website before they head into their next product purchase?

In a recent blog post, Junta 42 founder Joe Pulizzi shared a great example of this this on the Monster.com website. Pulizzi noted that the needs of Monster's customers, as they look for jobs in the recession, were addressed directly on the site:

 "Let's take a look at challenges faced by those people looking for or trying to keep their job:

• What jobs will be readily available with the passage of the stimulus bill?
• If I'm downsized, what do I need to do now to protect my career?
• How much am I worth in a downturn?
• How do I protect my job in a tough economy?
• Can I still get a raise in a recession?

Those five questions that employees are struggling with are actually the first five articles on the Monster.com site."

Sure, Monster.com provides a job search service, but the content on the site does not hype their service, instead it services the customers.  

What content is on your website? Hopefully, a balance of product and company information, combined with content that helps your customers solve problems. If it's all about you...your customers will not be frequent visitors.

Are “consultative style” presentations killing your business?

About 15 years ago I interviewed Mack Hanan, who wrote the book, Consultative Selling, and pioneered the sales movement by the same name. At the time, Hanan was disturbed by sales organizations who borrowed the style and semantics of consultative selling while not investing in the content needed to provide a true consultative selling service. He was particularly upset with media sales organizations, most of which he felt, had embraced consultative selling in name only.

Today, that same activity that upset Hanan is alive and well. How many sales presentations begin by appearing to take the side of the customer, imply that great and helpful content useful to increase business and profitability is coming, only to have the presentation deteriorate into a product pitch. Presentations like this are consultative in style only. Customers nod politely through them and five minutes after you leave the room have forgotten everything you said.
Content that fuels consultative selling feels different. It is…
• About their business, not about your products
• About their profitability, not your sales terms
• About their customers, not your customers
• About a new market opportunity
• New information about your customer’s customers they didn't know before

The real damage for using consultative style presentations comes when it marks the end of deeper inquiry into your customer's needs. When organizations believe they are delivering a consultative approach by stylistically shaping their product pitch, a deeper understanding of the customer, and all the opportunities that come with it, are lost. Over time this can kill a company.  

Start your next sales presentation with a story not a joke

 For those of us making persuasive presentations, there is nothing funny about the cliché that says you should start every presentation with a joke.

Stories, both funny and serious, are the way to begin a persuasive presentation because they engage an audience and invite an empathetic response. When you tell a story about the most embarrassing moment in your life, audience members either start thinking about a similar event in their lives or imagine being put into your story’s situation.

I'm not telling  you to avoid jokes, humor is one of the most powerful persuasive tools a presenter has. It's a matter of choosing the right tool for the time and task. Humor has the power to invite an audience to like you, and lighten an audience’s critical thinking and thus resistance to change. Powerful things.

But as you start a persuasive presentation your priorities should be different. You MUST get your audience INVOLVED right from the start. This is where stories are just more powerful.

I did a survey about this for my book, "Presentations That Change Minds."

In the survey, 41.8% of presenters said they begin their business presentations with a humorous story, and 37.8% with a serious story. Only 19.3% begin presentations with a joke and only 14 % of presenters  jump right into their content without any opening.

A you plan your next presentation, look for a story that get your audience involved with your subject matter.    

Click on the chart to see the survey results.

Link to the press release from PR Web

A dating game presentation w/Steve Jobs and Bill Gates!

Now that Steve Jobs is back at Apple I look forward to seeing the master presenter back in action. Looking back, it's fun to see Jobs using a tried and true presentation approach many salespeople use when their content is not enough to hold an audiences attention of pouring your content into the format of a popular TV game show. These days Jeopardy! is a favorite. Here is a great video clip from 1983 where we see a young Jobs as the host of "The Dating Game" with a young Bill Gates as a contestant!  

 

Jobs vs Gates. How Jobs puts his idea in your mind, not just the screen

There's a great post contrasting the graphic presentation styles of Bill Gates and Steven Jobs on the Presentation Zen blog. Blogger Garr Reynolds roots for Jobs' use of minimal graphics over Gates' slides with more complex information.

While the graphic contrast is striking, I'd like to add a bit about how the content strategy is very different. Jobs uses his slides in a sequence to involve his audience.

Take the challenge of selling a new idea that emerges when three or four elements combine. The common approach that Bill Gates (as well as 90% of presenters I have seen) is using above is to show all elements on the screen with arrows linking them and then explain how each comes together to form the new idea.
.

Steve Jobs took this same "several elements create a new idea" challenge, but instead, used a sequence of slides to get the audience more involved during his recent presentation that introduced the iPhone.

.

As Jobs returned to the stage at MacWorld, possibly to introduce a new product, he surprised the audience by announcing that Apple was introducing not one, but three revolutionary new products.
.

He went on to list all three (shown left 1 to 3) calling each "revolutionary" as he did.
.

.

.

.

Then as the screen (4) showed the three new products just named, Jobs repeated those product names with a chant like pacing, "An iPod, a phone, and an Internet communicator."

As he did, the graphics representing the three products morphed into a single 3D shape (5) which started to slowly rotate in the center of the screen.
.

Mid way through Job's third repetition of the new products, ("...an iPod, a phone...") he stopped and looked knowingly at the audience. The audience laughed appreciatively. Jobs paused and asked, "Are you getting it?
.

Jobs held up a single finger (6) and said,”These are not three separate devices this is one device, and we are calling it iPhone. Today Apple is going to re-invent the phone, and here it is!"
.

Bill Gates showed the relationship between the elements of his idea by displaying them on a screen graphically linked with arrows.

Steven Jobs used a series of simple slides to surprise and involve the audience and ultimately to let them "see" the idea in their minds. Jobs never actually displayed an "elements with linking arrows" graphic to explain his idea, instead the idea was build in the collective minds of his audience, one slide at a time.

Watch Steve Jobs introduce the iPhone