“If you can follow these six steps, I guarantee you’ll nail the presentation.” – Abel Lomas in today’s Tip 537
How do you deliver a great presentation?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Abel Lomas. Back in tip 451 Abel shared his 3 Steps for Getting Hired After a Layoff and talked about what he did to land a new gig back in March. Well, thanks to the pandemic, Abel got laid off again from that job, but he’s a rockstar who does what he says and starts his next new opportunity on Monday. Here he is:
Abel Lomas: Hi, this is Abel Lomas. If you’re in the middle of a recruiting process for your next sales role, there’s a good chance the company that’s courting you will ask you to deliver a presentation to a panel of sales leaders and peers. I want to share my process on how to nail the presentation to help you land your next sales gig.
1. Understand the objective and success criteria.
Just like walking into a sales call, I’d want to know who will be in the room. What’s their primary objective, how will they score the presentation? The more I know, the better I’ll be able to strategize for the meeting.
2. I do my homework.
Based on the objective and success criteria, it’s time to get a plan together. Am I presenting the recruiting company’s solution to a mock customer? This is often the case, and here are the two pieces of homework I’d do:
A. First is homework on the company’s solution. What types of problems do they solve? What have I learned from the interview process about their approach, sales process, and positioning? My notes will come in handy so it’s important to be a good student and note-taker during the interviews and ask questions about their sales process, ICP, and unique differentiators.
B. The other piece of homework is on the mock company I’ll be presenting to. Bonus points if I can find public evidence that they could benefit from the solution I’ll be presenting. It’s important to get creative with google searches for news articles, quotes from people, and look at the company’s risk profile in their 10k if they’re a public company.
The outcome of the homework is to come up with a STRONG HYPOTHESIS of how the solution can help the mock company. With this, I’m ready for the next step.
3. I build a storyboard.
I usually do this in PowerPoint with no more than one slide per topic. This saves a ton of time in building the presentation. What’s the story arc that I want to tell?
Personally, I do have a general story arc, but I’ll adjust as needed based on the situation and company. My general story arc is as follows:
A. Set up: Since I know who’s in the meeting, what roles do I want to assign to each person in the meeting? These should be a typical persona that would buy the company’s solution.
B. Summary of the discovery call. This is a mock presentation, so I can make this up, but it needs to be concise and address the types of issues a typical customer may have.
C. Ratchet up the pain!! What else can I present about the industry, current events, the personas, or anything else that elevates the pain? What did I find in the media or their 10k that I can add? Research really pays off.
D. A Customer Story: What relevant customer story can I tell that addresses this problem? The story needs to include the pain, the solution, and the business result.
E. Describe the solution. It’s important to keep it simple and relate to the pain points because I’m not an expert in this solution yet. If I’ve captured the company’s unique differentiators, it’ll be important for me to hammer them home.
F. Timeline to value – how quickly can the customer see value from an implementation? This is the best guess, but the point is to show I’m thinking about the customer and how we’ll help them realize value quickly.
G. Business justification – What are the pillars of value that relate back to the mock customer? What customer evidence can I provide as support?
H. Next steps – If I’ve gotten insights about their sales process, it’ll be easy to create relevant next steps that align with their process.
4. Build your deck
If we don’t see another PowerPoint for 100 years, it’ll still be too soon. So, how will I differentiate the experience? If the storyboard includes good stories and anecdotes, that’s half the battle. The other half is making the presentation visually appealing without making it distracting. That can be a hard balance to strike.
If I’m given a template, I’ll use the template. But then I’d still add visuals to make stronger points and engage the audience.
Here are a couple of resources I’ve used recently to help make visually appealing presentations:
https://unsplash.com/ offers beautiful royalty-free images.
https://thenounproject.com/ offers a huge library of royalty-free icons.
Once I’ve built a beautiful presentation with a great story arc, it’s time for Step 5:
5. Practice.
Here are some of the ways that I practice:
A. I use a video conferencing solution like zoom and watch myself present.
B. I ask a friend who is ideally familiar with the industry or technology I’m presenting to listen to the presentation. I’ll want their feedback
C. If I can, I find someone in the industry to present to.
My last tip is:
6. Be Ready for Audibles
As you think about this exercise, here are a couple of other things to prepare for:
A. Objection handling – for example, how will I handle a question about pricing if I don’t know how the vendor prices? It may be an unfair question, but I should expect questions that test my salesmanship and integrity. If I don’t know, that’s okay. I have to be ready to take a note and in my close recap the asks as part of the next steps.
B. Close for the job – it’s important for me to ask for feedback on how I did and if appropriate, be ready to ask for the job.
If you can follow these six steps, I guarantee you’ll nail the presentation. If you’d like a sample of a presentation I’ve done, hit me up on LinkedIn.
Best of luck, you’re going to deliver a great presentation and land the job!
Scott Ingram: To connect with Abel on LinkedIn so you can see where he starts on Monday just click over to DailySales.Tips/537. We’ll also have links to his episode on Sales Success Stories and his previous tip there as well.
Once you’ve done that, be sure to come back tomorrow as Jack Wilson continues his series on Ikigai. Thanks for listening!