Putting Sizzle in Your Sales Presentations

The other night my husband and I enjoyed a delicious meal at our favourite restaurant, the Terra Cotta Inn.  I ordered a steak and it was amazing. Here’s why: a yummy steak is a combination of good quality meat, careful preparation and beautiful presentation. It’s like that with our sales presentations.

I was recently providing coaching feedback on the pilot of a new high stakes product presentation that was being launched for a client. The observers in the room commented that the presentation felt dry and needed more ‘sizzle.’ Here’s what we did to accomplish that:

1. Reworked the content – made the key points tighter, slashed content that added little value and reordered it to create a more logical flow.
2.  Wove in Persuasion Elements to bring the content to life – added stories, analogies, examples and evidence throughout the fabric of the presentation to transform the content from dull and boring black and white to brilliant technicolor.
3.  Coached the presenter on his delivery – voice modulation, energy, inflection and pauses all put the icing on the cake. Because this was to be a webinar, we focused primarily on vocal attributes. Had it been a face-to-face presentation, we would have also focused on how eyes, hands and body would come into play.
4. Reviewed the quality of the slides – The slides that were developed for this presentation were clear and well designed and no changes were needed.  This is usually not the case and slide makeovers are often in order.

If you want to put more sizzle in your sales presentations, remember that you have to be firing on all 4 cylinders: Content, Persuasion Elements, Delivery Skills and Slides.

Are you consistently creating the impact and results you want with your presentations? Is it worth investing the time and resources to up the quality of your presentations?

I can’t imagine doing anything else that would deliver the same ROI. If you’d like to deliver a sizzling presentation, here’s what I suggest:

Learn more about our upcoming presentation skills training, UPFRONT Persuasion Through Presentation on June 1^9th and 20^th in Toronto.