High-Tech demos and presentations are often dry and boring. To make your sales call more interesting and effective–try these simple tips
1) Use quotations. Here is an example of how to use a quotation to establish the expertise of your companies’ engineers. This would be a great lead-in to a presentation on professional services and consulting:
Niles Bohr once said, An expert is a person who has made all the mistakes that can be made in a very narrow field.
–By that definition, our engineers are clearly experts in embedded systems development. We have walked the same path that you need to walk, we have made all the mistakes so we can save you valuable time by showing you how to avoid them.
2) Use a provocative or colorful statement. This allows you to grab your audience attention and to show them that you understand their world. For example:
Embedded systems development is the cold showers and root canals of software development.
–You guys are experts. This stuff is hard and you have to be sharp to do it right. We make the job easier by providing tools that help you find the toughest problems fast.
3) Use statistics to increase the impact of your message. For example, you could open a presentation to small business owners on increasing sales with:
Seven of ten small businesses fail in their first five years of operation. The most common cause of failure is lack of sales revenue!
4) Use props and showmanship. You could open a talk on computer back-up storage systems with a fake accident where you spill a soda into the systems hard drive. (You could use an old or damaged system as the prop.)
After some mock panic about the accident pause, smile and say that last year 250,000 businesses lost critical data due to lack of adequate back-up storage procedures.
5) Change your mode of delivery. Stop in the middle of your slide presentation and ask if you can go to the white board to explore a topic with the audience. This shows you are not afraid to go off script and causes the audience to refocus their attention on your topic. The key here is to avoid working in one mode for too long: Overall,keep your demo brief!
If you or your team need to create and deliver exceptional presentations and demonstrations that win more sales, our Power Presentations Edge and Demonstration Edge Skills programs may be just what you need. We’ll be happy to create a class that is specifically customized to your market, product and team. Please feel free to Contact us for a free consultation, you’ll be glad you did.
Pat Shaughnessy is Principal and Founder of Technology Sales Seminars (www.sales-training-lead-generation.com), a sales consulting and training company that helps companies dramatically increase their sales. He can be reached at 1-978-808-0626 or Contact us via online form.