6 Sales Presentation Techniques That Will Inspire Your Audience

In the world of business and sales, in particular, an outstanding set of communication skills and presentation skills can be vital to your success.

For sales leaders, the right presentation skills can be used to motivate and inspire sales teams to win more deals and increase sales.

For account managers and business development professionals, presentation skills are a crucial part of creating interest and building rapport with senior decision makers.

Here we provide 6 presentation techniques that will help you to refine your presentation skills and inspire your audience.

1. Keep the audience engaged and be passionate

High impact sales leaders and sales executives engage with their audience with conviction. They adapt their presentation skills to use a style and language that is familiar to their audience. This involves knowing your audience well and speaking with an energetic (but measured) tone and pace throughout the presentation.

By keeping your presentation enthusiastic and punchy, your proposal will come across as far more compelling. You will come across as ‘someone they can do business with’. Showing passion about your subject will make your audience think that you truly believe in what you are saying. Whatever stage of your career you are at, this will gain you credibility and the trust of your audience.

By putting your heart and mind into your presentation, you will win the hearts and minds of those who listen. This approach, along with using the language of your audience, is essential to creating an immediate impact with your prospective clients.

2. Be focused

By planning for your presentation you will also be able to keep focused on the point at hand. Long presentations that waver from the point and are all over the place will quickly lose the audience’s interest. You will lose credibility and the audience’s faith in your own competence.

To stay focused during your presentation, decide your objectives beforehand and make sure that everything you say aligns back to that objective. In turn, this will help keep the presentation shorter. Some of the best speeches and presentations get to the point straightaway and don’t leave their best material until last.

3. Make sure the benefits are tailored, tangible and impressive

When selling through a presentation you need to communicate a compelling message to your audience that acknowledges the external pressures they are facing. You should then communicate the implications that these pressures will cause, and where they audience needs to get to to avoid these pressures. This will create a compelling even in the audience’s mind, creating greater interest in your proposal.

You then need to follow up with a set of tailored (and financially quantified) benefits that your solution will provide them with before specifying the unique features of your solution that will deliver these benefits. We call this process ‘Selling from the Left®’.

Most presentations do this the other way round. They start with the features and work up to the benefits while completely neglecting to create a compelling. Clients hate it!

4. Keep it short and use less slides

Nobody enjoys a long, drawn out presentation. Long presentations result in the audience losing their concentration. They might also overwhelm the audience with so much information that they will have trouble piecing it all together at the end. If your plan well for your presentation and practice your presentation skills thoroughly you should be able to get your point across and inspire your audience with a short presentation.

Some of the best presentations don’t need any fancy equipment or Powerpoint slides to impress the audience. The communication and presentation skills of the speaker are enough to captivate those listening. Powerpoint slides can have a negative impact as they take attention away from the person who is presenting and potentially cause the minds in the audience drift from the real point at hand. But sometimes they are essential. It is much easier to summarise facts and figures in a slide than bewilder the audience by verbally communicating all of the statistics.

If you do need slides, just make sure you don’t go overboard. Although every presentation has its different requirements, 10 slides over half an hour should be the maximum.

5. Keep it simple, coordinated and provide a ‘new perspective’

Never underestimate the importance of keeping the key messages of your presentation simple. If you can break everything down into less than six key messages with a principal theme that links them all together, you’re on to a winner.

A simple graphical model that brings everything together and makes your memorable and compelling will captivate your audience as you make your concluding statement. Underpin that with numbers that make the purchase a no-brainer and you will be one step ahead of your competition.

6. Be funny or controversial

All of the best presentations you will have heard use humour or controversy (and often both) to captivate their audiences. Even if this involves just two or three ‘funny moments’, it can be enough to make you stand out from the crowd. Think about adding humorous quotes and short stories into your presentation. Funny examples and analogies work well with senior clients.

Being funny enables you to engage with the audience and makes you a more likeable character. But make sure that the humour is not misplaced and relevant to the subject at hand. Even if nobody laughs you will have underlined an important point that keeps the audience involved in the presentation.

Controversy is also a very powerful for grabbing the audience’s. I recently heard a presenter say to the board of a big company that considered itself to be successful: ‘Most companies in your industry are failing and they don’t even know it!’. This instantly grabbed their attention as they waited to see whether they were about to be insulted or complemented. The speaker followed up by saying ‘I’m about to present a solution that could give you a real edge and grab 10% extra market share within 12 months.’

By shocking or creating a ‘wow’ factor early on in your presentation you will have your audience eating out of your hand for the rest of the show.

Written by: Steve Eungblut, Managing Director of Sterling Chase

Contact Sterling Chase for a free consultation.