How to make your sales presentations work for you and your clients

Keep your message consistent and make your sales presentations work for you.

The B2B sales arena now demands a customised presentation for every meeting. There’s likely no buyer who would buy after only one meeting, so maintaining a consistent brand message is key to developing a positive impression on a prospect.

This consistency must exist from slide to slide within a presentation and between the different presentations that you will deliver.

By presenting a consistent brand, you reinforce the idea that you are a company that will provide consistent products and services.

However, sometimes that consistency gets lost.

Many salespeople are given standard company slides to use in their sales presentations, but they are given little guidance on how to use these slides. While using some standards slides are okay, the presentation still needs to be customised in the right way.

What usually happens is that the sales team modifies the standard company slides. This can create a problem with brand consistency without some guidance in how to modify the slides while maintaining the brand message.

The other approach companies take is to let the sales professionals have free rein to create slides. These companies provide some graphics to use, and hope that the brand will be maintained, but every presentation ends up looking completely different and (once again) with no brand consistency.

What is a company to do?

The key is to achieve customised consistency. Allow sales professionals to customise their slides for each presentation within boundaries that maintain the brand.

For this to work, the sales and marketing team needs to create a standard library of slides for the sales professionals to use.

This set contains well-designed slides that visually communicate key ideas that will commonly be used in presentations. Then, the sales professionals are trained on how to prepare presentations by drawing from the library to cover the common ideas and then adding slides to tailor the presentation.

It delivers a customised message while maintaining the brand look, feel, and message.

The result is a better presentation that closes more sales. As a bonus, the productivity gains from this will hit the bottom line immediately.

Remember everybody lives by selling something.

Sue Barrett is the founder and chief executive of the innovative and forward thinking sales advisory and education firm, Barrett and the online sales education and resource platform www.salesessentials.com. Striving to develop and deliver better sales standards and strategies to help people and businesses sell better, Sue is a sales philosopher, strategist, speaker, trainer, writer, adviser and selling better activist.