How Relevant is Your Presentation?

One of the things I think matters significantly about improving the quality sales experience is that you are presenting something, a solution, a product or the service that you are providing is something that you think is fantastic. There’s a big difference between trying to sell something that you only half believe in. There’s a big difference in trying to force yourself to believe in something you only half believe in and actually selecting something and actually having something that you think that this will literally make people’s lives better if they were able to introduce this. And so I think it’s selectivity in what kind of things you’re actually pursuing and trying to persuade people about and then it’s caring about the people enough to make a fit and then it’s making sure that they’re actually in that interaction with you. You’re not forcing it you’re just introducing it. In fact, you’re not really selling at all. You should almost have that as a rule: not selling, not forcing it. What I’m going to do is provide the opportunity for a conversation to see and just explore a potential fit and if there is then they’ll know and you’ll know.

The question is not how good your presentation is, the question is how relevant your presentation is and so everything has to be designed in such a way that the person listening to the presentation says, “yes that is exactly the issue I am dealing with.” In order to do that I think you have to understand what and where they're coming from almost more deeply than they do. So you can just share those few things that they need to hear right out of the gate. I found in fact the difference between having a message accepted or to have organ rejection can be as much as 30 words in the first 60 seconds when it is most important to share your side and make your case. To have those be righ is almost an entire function of how well you appreciate what is critical to the person you are working with and what is trivial. The avergae sales person simply has no sense of that - They've prepared their message independant of what the other person actually needs and so they can't produce the connective tissue to be able to actually make the connection they want to make.