According to a recent survey by the CMO Council, sales thinks presentations created by marketing are less than useful, with salespeople spending approximately 40% of their time preparing customer-facing deliverables while leveraging less than 50% of the materials created by marketing. Why? They feel they’re too generic, not relevant for specific prospects, don’t tell compelling stories or clearly show how their products differ from their competitors.
Salespeople waste precious time re-creating presentations which leads to everyone in the field saying something different to prospects, diluting a company’s brand messaging or muddying a prospect’s buying experience, which could cost you a sale. Whether you’re selling a network appliance, medical device or telecom equipment, it’s critical to deliver cutting-edge compelling presentations that tell your product story right the first time.
Here are four tips on how to create a killer product presentation that that your entire sales force will use to close business:
1) Make real-time product presentation updates: Sales tools that allow for immediate content updates give your sales guys a competitive advantage and arm them with consistent up-to-the-minute product information, which they are much more likely to use as it is not stale or outdated. By instantly disseminating this product presentation content to your entire sales and channel partner teams, (e.g. by downloading it from the iTunes or Google Play store onto your mobile device,) sales teams have immediate access to the latest and greatest product information.
2) Use mobile devices to give your presentation: DON’T deliver the same static marketing materials. iPads, Smartphones and tablets are designed for a very different type of customer encounter – less of a presentation format and more of an engaging personalized interactive dialogue between the salesperson (or marketer) and the prospect. By using dynamic interactive content that capitalizes on the touch-screen capabilities of tablets and smartphones, you can have a much more captivating sales experience as users engage directly with the products and can more clearly understand what makes your specific product unique. Also, sales can bring this content to literally every customer venue—from trade shows, to offsite sales meetings, impromptu encounters, briefing centers and more.
3) Put prospects in the ‘driver’s seat’: Cognitive studies have shown that when people are presented with information (either via a video or by a verbal lecture), they retain a very small portion of the message (anywhere from 5 to 20%). However, when a person is actively involved in the process and learns by doing with hands-on experiences, they remember dramatically more (anywhere from 66 – 75% for the same time period.) What’s unique about this type of sales encounter is that even though the interactive presentation content is the same for every user, each prospect can initiate their own sales experience and retains the product information most pertinent to them.
4) Create a TRULY interactive presentation that can be uniquely tailored to multiple audiences: Above and beyond just personalizing a demonstration for a particular prospect, any good sales presentation should allow your team to immediately address ANY audience with the same interactive product content and messaging. If you’re in a room with a marketer, an engineer and an IT professional, they’re all going to be looking at your products from different levels, from 100 feet to down to the details. Sales guys need the flexibility to show each person their products at his or her level. Avoid the pitfall of “one-size-fits-all” marketing by creating interactive non-sequential sales presentation with the ability to uniquely tailor information for each customer and tell a compelling story.
