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5 tips for better sales and marketing presentations

In my experience, presentations are the moment of truth when working in sales and marketing. It’s the time where reps get to have extremely in-depth conversations with their prospect to understand their needs further and, ideally, bring them closer to buying their product.

As a result, a great sales presentation can make or break a deal. Here are five tips for sales and marketing to create better presentations:

1. Customize for your prospect.

By the time you get to a sales presentation you should have had discovery calls with your prospect, researched their company and checked out their social profiles. So there is no excuse for walking into the meeting and pulling up a generic sales deck. Your presentation content should be customized to your prospect’s pain points, focusing on what is most important to them about their situation and your product.

2. Focus on your discussion, not your sales deck.

I can’t tell you the number of hours I’ve seen sales reps waste laboring over the perfect sales presentation, only to show up to the meeting completely unprepared to have a strong, challenging discussion about the prospect’s needs. Yes, you need a polished, professional and customized sales deck, but you cannot sacrifice time preparing for a great discussion in order to assemble a PowerPoint presentation. To get around this, get in the habit of using a pre-built master sales deck where you can easily choose the slides you want to present, ideally with easy-to-use online presentation software. Thus, you can spend less time creating the perfect deck and more time preparing for your discussion.

3. Share your presentation with a personalized URL.

With so much of the sales process being completed by prospects on their own, or with their internal team, it’s critical to share your presentation with them post-meeting. However, long gone are the days where sending a bulky PDF file or uploading to a zip drive is acceptable. Instead, send a personalized URL where your prospects can easily review and navigate through your presentation.

4. Use analytics for smart post-meeting follow-up.

Assuming you follow tip No. 3 above, once you’ve shared the URL with your prospect, you’ll be able to see when they’ve opened it, what slides they’ve viewed and for how long. This is valuable information, so be sure to use this with your follow-up. If you know someone has spent most of their time on a slide about a particular feature, you can follow-up with more information specific to that feature.

5. Don’t use a boring, dull, PowerPoint template.

In my experience, 90 percent of firms are using PowerPoint presentations and about 99 percent of those are tired of them. Everyone has been using this same technology for close to 20 years now. They bottom line is everyone is using PowerPoint so if you want your presentation to stand out you need to use another type of software to make your presentation stand out from the competition. You don’t just want to conduct your presentation, you want to wow your prospect.

The bottom line? When it comes to having a conversation with a prospect put yourself in the shoes of your audience. Would you want to sit through your presentation? What would find most interesting or engaging? What information would you not want to hear? Remember, always practice and adjust your presentation to make sure it is appealing to your audience.

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by Ryan Gruening
source: SiteProNews