The Presentation Trap:
Why Making Presentations Can Cost You the Sale
By Jeff Thull
 In
conversations with sales professionals, I am often surprised
that even the most sophisticated professionals get caught
in the presentation trap. They spend an inordinate amount
of time preparing for a razzle-dazzle presentation and lose
sight of the issues at hand.
Everything salespeople do before presentations—prospecting,
contacting, and qualifying of potential clients—seems
aimed at creating the opportunity to present their solutions.
Everything after—the downhill run to the sale itself
that includes overcoming objectives, negotiating, and closing—is
designed to support and reiterate the presentation.
Consequently, sales organizations devote a tremendous amount
of time and resources to creating compelling presentations
and proposals. The irony is that most of this effort is
lost on clients. Presentations that are too early in
complex decisions are largely a waste of time.
Conventional salespeople hate to hear this because the
presentation is usually the key weapon in their sales arsenal.
It is their security blanket, their comfort zone, and they
loath giving it up. They seem to be on a mission to relentlessly
educate clients because, after all, they will not buy what
they don’t understand.
Exactly right: clients will not buy what they don’t
understand. Although a presentation can take clients
to a higher level of understanding, it is one of the least
effective methods for accomplishing that goal. Here’s
why.
- A presentation—even one that includes advanced
multimedia elements—is, in its essence, a lecture.
The salesperson is the talking teacher and the client
is the listening student. The big problem with teaching
by telling is that little information is remembered. People
retain only about 30 percent of what they hear. The use
of visual aids (for example, a PowerPoint slide show)
boosts retention rates to 40 percent, but the generally
accepted rule of thumb among learning experts is that
more than half of even the most sophisticated presentation
can be lost.
- A typical sales presentation rarely devotes more than
10 to 20 percent of its focus on clients and their current
situations. Generally, 80 to 90 percent of a typical sales
presentation is devoted to describing the seller, its
solutions, and the rosy future if you buy. Therefore,
while a presentation may raise the client’s level
of understanding, that gain is usually centered on the
solution being offered. All too often, salespeople are
dealing with clients who are not sure of the exact nature
of their problems, how your products and services impact
other areas of their business, who would be concerned
about it, and the cost in absence of it. Nevertheless,
those salespeople spending most of their efforts focusing
on the solution and not the implications for the client’s
business. As a result, while clients may be greatly impressed
with the offering being presented, they still lack a compelling
understanding of how it applies to their situation and
they do not know why they should buy it.
- The third compelling reason that presentations are a
waste of time in complex sales is: Your competitors are
following the same strategy and are busy presenting, as
well. Unless you have no competition, your clients will
surely hear their story, too. They have meetings set up
with you and one, two, or even more of your competitors.
In each meeting, a sales team is presenting the best side
of its solutions. Your team is telling the clients that
they need the solutions that only your company offers,
and your competitors are making the same arguments about
their solutions. In every case, the presentations are
heavily skewed toward the seller and the solutions.
Look at this from clients’ perspective. It is highly
likely that two-thirds or more of the information they hear
falls outside their area of comprehension. Further, what
they do hear sounds very much the same. What does the client
understand? Price. As you may already expect, everyone is
now starting their downward spiral to commoditization—the
natural outcome of presenting too much, too soon and too
often.
To help you avoid falling victim to the Presentation Trap,
ask yourself these five critical questions:
- What percentage of your sales presentation/proposal
is devoted to describing your company and your solution?
- What percentage of your sales presentation/proposal
is devoted to describing your clients’ businesses,
their problems and objectives?
- How well do clients understand their own problems?
- How much of your presentation is focused on persuading
and convincing?
- How well can your clients connect your solutions to
their business situations?
How do clients respond to competing conventional presentations?
From my experience, they respond in several key ways. First,
they concentrate their efforts on the information that falls
inside their area of comprehension. Clients attempt to make
the complex understandable by weighing those elements that
vendors’ offers have in common and eliminating those
elements that do not fit neatly onto a comparison chart.
When this happens, salespeople’s ability to differentiate
their offering from the competition is subverted, and price,
the one common denominator of all offers, again raises its
ugly head and is likely to become the deciding factor in
the sale.
Second, clients may also respond by not responding. They
listen politely as you “educate” them, thank
you for your time, and promise to get back in touch when
they are ready to make a decision.
Finally, some clients may actively respond. They may ask
you to justify the information you have presented or challenge
the viability of your solution. This is the response that
every conventional salesperson is expecting. The client
objects and the salesperson works to overcome those objections.
When this happens, a disconnect becomes apparent along the
way, and back peddling is often the only way out.
Ultimately, sales presentations exacerbate communications
between buyers and sellers, leading to frustration, misunderstandings,
conflict, and adversarial relationships—all of which
impede the salesperson’s ability to create cooperative
and trust-based relationships with clients.
The advice I share with sales professionals wishing to
avoid the Presentation Trap is Don’t present.
Instead, use a diagnostic approach. Simply stated, conduct
a thorough diagnosis to uncover problems and expand the
client’s awareness of the situation.
Once the problem is clearly understood, and the client
perceives all the ramifications of that problem, then
the salesperson is justified in making recommendations,
and a presentation will not be necessary. When you guide
your clients through this process, you will be establishing
a high level of credibility and finding yourself jointly
developing optimal solutions, which will ultimately benefit
both you and your clients.
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Jeff Thull is President and CEO of Prime Resource Group,
and a thought leader in the area of sales and marketing
strategies for companies involved in complex sales. He’s
the author of the bestselling books Mastering
the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes
are High and The
Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and
Win the Complex Sale. Thull’s new
book, Exceptional Selling: How the Best Connect
and Win in High Stakes Sales, will be released
September 2006.
For more information contact: Prime Resource Group, support@primeresource.com,
www.primeresource.com.
Read our other articles by Jeff Thull, How
to Prevent Unpaid Consulting, The
Best Kept Secret of the Selling World, and Seven
Common Sales Challenges that Prevent Executive Level Access
Also, read two Management Consulting News
interviews with Jeff Thull:
Jeff Thull
discusses why solution selling fails
Jeff
Thull on the sales strategies of top-performing consultants.
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