Hard truth: It’s impossible to get sales people to present with a uniform style across a large company. Glimmer of hope: You can insist on some guidelines to unify the basics.Tragic reality: Most big businesses translate this to mean: “Everyone must use the same PowerPoint font.” Yeesh! It’s the stuff that gives public speaking coaches fluttery bat-wing dreams.
Presentations are one of the most direct, intimate and personal extensions of your brand. They are the heart and soul of all sales pitches and the foundations of excellent leadership. To truly do your brand justice; to have your organisation represented in the market by confident, competent speakers; these are the guidelines to prioritise:
1. No mission statement, no presentation
Write down, in one clear sentence, the goal you hope to achieve with your presentation. If the entire talk boils down to, ‘Make my prospect see that dealing with us would be better than dealing with the competitor,’ then that is your mission statement.
Until you’ve done this, you’re not ready to begin work; what exactly would you be working on?
This guideline also minimises your workload by keeping you from developing extraneous content (See the Oxford Concise, under ‘Waffle’). If you’re focused on your mission statement from the outset, your presentation will be tighter, more professional and in line with your objectives.
2. Do the ‘who cares?’ test, then perform surgery
One of the most common errors in corporate presenting, and one which is particularly endemic to sales presenters, is giving all of the facts. Dating back to the dawn of time. One grand data dump. Kaboom!
They are not necessary. Facts are merely there to support your message; nothing more. Present all of them and your speech will become a litany of squiggly lines and incomprehensible graphs, or even worse: a history lesson on your company. Audiences and prospects don’t need every dreary dot and dash. History lessons don’t sell products.
Audiences need to be told what it all means and then persuaded that your ideas for action represent their best option. Informing is only one part of your job. Persuasion is the balance. Think of information as your tool-kit. Think of messages as the structure you’re trying to build. They don’t need to see your tools; they want to play on the completed jungle-gym. That’s the interesting part.
3. Turn it into a conversation
You’ve prepared your presentation. Now prepare the delivery, because that is what your audiences and prospects will ultimately experience. A lecturing style is out. A conversational style is in. And always ensure that you’re on their side. Replace, ‘You must,’ with ‘We will.’ You don’t want your presentation to degenerate into a ‘me versus the audience’ dynamic.
Also, remember that if you haven’t delivered it out loud, it’s not yet ready for a live audience. Ever tried to tell a joke, reached the three-quarter point, then realised you’d ruined the set-up? The same can happen in a boardroom pitch with your critical point… unless you’ve practiced delivering it out loud a few times.
4. Make it shorter
Your presentation is sitting at thirty minutes? Great. Now try to get it down to twenty. The more you can condense your ideas, the more succinctly you can express them, the clearer they will be. Draw them out and their impact will be dissipated by the ‘fat’ surrounding the ‘meat.’ With effort, you can always make a presentation shorter, and it will almost invariably be stronger for it. Persuasion happens swiftly, not by the weight of a thousand words.
5. Prepare the least number of visuals possible
Think about this logically. If you were shown 35 charts in a presentation, would you remember them? What if you were shown one single, emotive image of, say, an atomic explosion, or an extreme close-up of an orange being squeezed and the juices squirting out? Think you’d remember that?
Charts and graphs are great for creating seat-zombies. Emotive visuals, which illustrate a point, are the way to go when you want them to stay awake and buy from you. And the less visuals you have, the more each image will stand out and be memorable.
