Your Other Customers. The Sales Team.
I hesitated before writing this post.
So much that I called a trusted friend who is a marketing professional and explained what I wanted to write and asked if he felt the material was too elementary. His response was, “Yes, it is elementary but what you are talking about still happens. Frequently.”
So I forged ahead.
Picture yourself at a national meeting running through the slides of your marketing presentation. You are doing your best to inform the sales representatives in the audience about the features and benefits of your product line. As your seemingly endless PowerPoint presentation trudges along, you see the sales reps begin to fidget.
You panic. Your face turns red. What has gone wrong?
Over the years, I have lived through the good and the bad of marketing presentations. Here are a few tips to help you escape your next presentation unscathed. The tips are somewhat obvious, but, as my former colleague and friend said, it still happens. Frequently.
- Educate the reps on your product(s); however, remember that you are actually selling those reps on your products. In this situation, they are your customers.
- You are selling to salespeople. Unconsciously, the salespeople are evaluating your presentation as a sales presentation.
- Sales reps know that data dumps do not work with their customers. A 50-slide presentation on the features and benefits of your products is not going to work with your reps either.
- Most outside sales reps are not used to sitting for long periods of time. They like their jobs because they do not have to sit in a cubicle all day. For many reps, national sales meetings are excruciating. Keep this in mind.
- Sales reps want the confidence (from you) to go into the field and sell your product. They want to be knowledgeable but (more importantly) they want to be confident.
- Streamline your presentation to the most important points. Keep deleting slides even if you feel physical pain.
- Let the sales reps know where to find more information. This is where they will gain confidence in your product.
- Those 50-slide presentations? Never again. The reps will not remember 95% of the slides anyway.
- Trust your sales management to hire good reps. Good reps will educate themselves if they know where to find the product information.
- Consider briefly telling the story of the branding as well as the messaging behind the products. You spent a lot of time and energy developing those ideas. It helps the reps to know some of the history of those ideas to put the product(s) into context.
These tips should help you make the most of your time in front of the sales team and keep your presentation on track.
