How to Give a Sales Presentation That Isn’t a Sales Pitch
One of the challenges I have is that I am often giving a presentation as an evangelist for my company Tigerpaw Software. The simple fact is, that no one wants to listen to a vendor give a sales pitch in a presentation – including and especially me!What I’ve learned to do is provide value to the audience in the form of education – while highlighting my product in the process. If you take the role of teacher rather than “sales guy”, people pay attention! When you see heads vigorously bobbing up and down and people quickly reaching for their notepads, your presentation is resonating with the group and you are doing something right! When you get off the stage and people earnestly thank you for your presentation, you nailed it!
My wife likes to tell the story of how her prom date, in the middle of a very nice expensive dinner, proceeded to lick his knife clean. My wife was horrified, and that first date became the last. The poor guy probably had no idea why he never got another date, as she certainly didn’t tell him. Many businesses treat their prospects as dates during the sales process, and if they don’t “lick the knife”, they might get them as customers. However, as with marriage, you have to continue to “date” your customer. This means you have to be thinking about making the customer happy, and treating them the way they want and need to be treated. If you fail to do so, your customer will leave you and probably won’t say why.