Every sales representative must know the art of making presentations that get results. Excellent presentations are designed to anchor all the crucial points that you want in your presentation to influence your listener. An effective presentation is always the one that grabs your listener’s attention and leads him or her to take some kind of action. Often presenters make some of the common mistakes like creating a slide shows with piles of information and a mishmash of communication. Here are some tips for independent sales representatives to develop the right set of presentation skills:
Two Sales Goals to Achieve
When you are making a presentation, your sole aim should be to accomplish two important goals. First, it is of paramount importance that all your audience’s focus should be in your presentation so that you can communicate with them completely. Second, compel your audience to take an immediate or future action. Any presentation is incomplete without an outcome and action steps for your audience to take. Your presentation should be able to enthrall and hold their attention and clear out any outside distractions that would compete with your presentation and desired outcome.
Key Elements for Your Sales Presentation
Before making any presentation, the thing that every sales representative should remember is that human beings are visually-oriented to a greater or lesser extent. Some people taken in information best from a visual format; other prefer to hear your pitch. See if you can determine if your prospect is predominantly influenced in one of these ways, and slant your pitch accordingly.
People have limited attention spans and information processing capabilities. We remember images more than words. Therefore, as a presenter it is your responsibility to simplify the communication and get hold of the thinking of your audience.
You can use these simple steps to make your visual presentation effective:
- Reduce the number of sentences of your presentation and rather use pictures; reduce the number of words down into bullet points or eliminate words altogether if possible.
- Use pictures as anchors to support the key points that you want your audience to remember.
- Use active language instead of passive.
- Make sure that the visuals or pictures you are using are in some way or other related to the key points you are emphasizing, so that your audience can connect and retain the information, you are trying to give.
- Always try to support the key points you are covering in your presentation with a story.
- Do not read your slides! Instead communicate.
- Never end your presentation abruptly; before the presentation ends, summarize all the key points you have covered.
- If you are inexperienced in creating presentations, beware of the common pitfall of not making the type large enough. What looks good on your computer screen will not be legible from the audience, so the text size needed will be much larger than the inexperienced author might expect.
Remember, thorough preparation can take you a long way. Before any important presentation, take some time out to relax! This will increase your confidence while you present. Remember: your confidence does almost half of your work.
RepHunter has over sixteen years of helping companies find professional, qualified sales representatives for a wide variety of industries. With RepHunter’s unique matching process, companies are quickly finding and contacting sales representative, manufacturers’ representatives and independent sales representatives to promote their products and services in North America and internationally.