Stop Slide Craziness And Grow Your Business

You may be delighted when a prospect calls to ask about your products or services. If you’re grabbing your dusty slide deck to get ready, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Instead, use 5-easy steps to stop slide craziness and grow your business. In presentation skills training, using slides is often given top priority. Presenting with slides is commonplace that…well, everyone does it. From a 50,000-foot view, it makes sense. Corporate folks decide the message, prepare the slides, and send to sales reps. Sales reps use the slide decks to carry the word out to the masses. There’s a bit of faulty logic here. Sure, it works for standardization. But does it truly work for your customers and prospects? If you’re looking to grow your business, take the rebellious approach. Do something different. Stop slide insanity. You’ll stand out head and shoulders above your competition. Use this 5-step plan to transform how you present your business to prospects and customers. Step 1. Identify Your Story No matter how long or how short you’ve been in business, you must identify your story. What is it that makes you unique? Why are you uniquely positioned to serve your customers? Why should prospects choose you over all others? If you’ve been in business for decades, start from scratch. Imagine for a moment this is your first day. Do you like your name, logo and colors? Do you feel your brand story is matched for today’s market? By taking a fresh look at your business, you’ll discover new keys for telling a successful story. If you’re just starting out, look around. Consider what other successful companies you are competing against. Look for the opening in your market where you can fill a neglected spot. You have fresh eyes to see opportunity. Jump on it and build your story on your energetic enthusiasm. Step 2. Simplify Your Message As much as you’re excited and on fire about your story, your primary goal is to keep it simple. Find ways to share your story in 20 seconds. Push yourself and your team to experiment with ways to engage customers. Practice storytelling without slides. Experiment with props, whiteboard sketches, and photomontages. Hint: test out your story on someone who represents your target buyer. If their eyes glaze over and they look bored…you must get simpler. Step 3. Train Your Repsr With the foundation of the previous steps, it’s time to get all your sales reps up to speed. Train them in interactive visual storytelling. Make sure that anyone on your sales team can show and tell your value message in any environment. At lunch. At the beach. At church. At work. Learning new skills for presenting at a whiteboard is easy and fast. Pick a reputable training firm who understands your sales needs. While many people are jumping on the bandwagon of slide-free presenting, not every firm has the experience to do this well. Pick a presentation skills training company with experience—and a willingness to customize the program to match your business objectives. Step 4. Coach For Performance As in sports and all performance arts, training is critical. But coaching is where individuals really get the full attention to specific issues. This is what your sales reps deserve. Investing in personal coaching is a smart approach if you’re serious about being highly tuned to individual needs, strengths and abilities. With new options for virtual coaching, it’s convenient, easy and extremely affordable to provide one-on-one coaching. In the past this was time intensive and costly because shoulder-to-shoulder coaching required in person travel. Step 5. Track and Measurer It’s not unusual for successful sales teams to go through challenges, adjustments and experimentation phases. That’s why it is critical to track and measure what works, and what can be improved. In addition to introducing crafting your story, simplifying with pictures, training, coaching and measuring, here’s a special ingredient for success. Challenge your reps to share best practices. Informal sharing is often the secret ingredient to build a whole new way to give extremely effective presentations…share your story…and grow your business.