TJ Walker argues salespeople should answer prospect questions instead of forcing a preset pitch. He tells a story about a salesman who kept demoing technology while the buyer wanted to know about price and revenue impact. Make the presentation about what they need, not what you planned to say.
Chapters
What is the secret to the ultimate sales presentation? The answer, of course, is answer the questions of your prospects. If you're focused on your sales presentation instead of what's going on in the prospects minds, you're in big, big trouble. Now, just the other day, I had a salesman call me, set up a time. I want to give you a pitch, TJ on our new online software to diagnose speech problems people have. I said, okay, I'm interested in that. That's a field I have spent a lot of time trying to develop myself and look at for the last 20 years. So I was keenly interested. But the second I got on the phone with the salesman, I would ask a question and I could tell he was sort of annoyed. I asked a second question. He's like, yeah, but if I could just give you my presentation. But I'm interested in this now. If I'm asking you something, you're now guaranteed whatever you say is keenly interesting to me. He kept on trying to tell me that he wanted give me the presentation on the technology. Let me show you the technology. Let me tell you about the technology. I kept on telling this salesman, I don't care about the technology. I want to know how will this actually help my clients make their speeches more memorable? How would I actually charge for this? How would I actually make more money from this? How do other people in my business make more money? He couldn't really answer any of those questions, or at least he didn't seem to try because he kept on going back to my sales presentation. Let me tell you something. If you are giving a sales presentation, it's not your sales presentation. It is your customer's presentation or it is your prospect's presentation. Now, obviously you had to prepare something. If you're giving a pitch to 200 people in a room, or 2,000 or even 20 people, you can't just start off Q and A. But if at any point someone interrupts you with a question, that's fantastic because here's the thing, they're not interrupting you, they're helping you when they ask you a question. They're now editing your speech to make it instantly more interesting to them. That's a fantastic thing. So don't make the mistake of saying, well, I'll get to that later, or that's in the present, to answer it right now. It's not about what's convenient to you, it's about what's interesting to your prospect. Now, a lot of people are good at this. One on one. Most salesmen are not like the one I mentioned to you earlier. But if there's something out of their comfort zone, if they're used to giving presentations one on one or one on two, but now they're talking to 10 people, they feel the need to stick to the established PowerPoint sales presentation that's been approved from corporate headquarters. Well, no. If you're talking to 10 insurance executives, their agency, and one of them wants to ask you a question, focus on answering that question right now. That's what's interesting to that person. And good chance that may be what's interesting to everyone else. So that's the big sales presentation tip. It's not your sales presentation. It is your customer's presentation. Listen to them, try to pull questions out of them. And for goodness sake, if they ask you a question, if they even have a look in their eye like they are thinking of a question, you need to stop whatever you're doing and do whatever it takes to pull that question out of them and then answer it in a way that satisfies them and helps you in the process. I'm T.J. walker.
