How persuasive and effective are your team’s presentations to your distributors and dealer’s sales meetings?

Do you sell through distributors or dealers? Do your reps make presentations to distributor or dealer sales team meetings to talk about the value and uniqueness of your products? If this is a part of your selling environment, then please join me on this video to learn how you can strengthen your presentations so they make a difference to the dealer and distributor reps you want selling your products...so they can sell even more!

Transcript

Could your sales reps improve their presentations to your dealers or down line people that you support within your sales organization? Hi, I'm Jim Pancero, helping you become a stronger leader of your sales team. And the reality is a lot of businesses and distribution and equipment sales sell through dealer networks or through distributor networks, where your salesperson needs to go out and present to these resellers. Whether they're distributors or dealers, but to present to these resellers how and why your products are so great and how to sell you. I've sat through a lot of these presentations around my sales training, and most of them are pretty bad. The sales rep shows slides that you can't read, only talks about themselves and their products, doesn't put it in any kind of competitive perspective and just talks about how great they are in this vacuum like this was the only thing available to sell.

What are you doing? And what can you do to increase the quality of these presentations? Because they're going to have a direct impact on your down line people, your support people. The dealer is in the distributor's ability to sell your stuff. So the first suggestion is please don't just copy your brochures. Too many times I see these presentations that from 10 feet away, I can't even read what's on the slide. Because the type is so small, because all they did was photocopy and include their literature into this document, into the PowerPoint slides. The second thing is there's an easy rule, you should be able to stand 20 feet away from any screen showing the slides and still be able to read all the copy on it. If you can do that, then your point size is okay. If you notice from all of my slides, I don't use anything on PowerPoint smaller than 40 point type because I found even in a small or large room presenting, people just couldn't see my slides if I went to any smaller type than that.

And the other idea is stop loading all these things. Sometimes there'll be five or six major ideas on one slide and the sales rep just clicks through them, talking about them. One of the realities of persuasion is your slides are supposed to support your message, not deliver it. So one of the ideas is we only want to have one idea, one major concept per slide. So if you got three reasons why this product is so great, it needs to be three separate slides. And the final ideas are to make sure that you also include some relative competitive information. Too many times, I watch a manufacturer presenting to their distributor and all they do is talk about how great their product is, but not within the competitive landscape. In a lot of cases, the stuff they're bragging about, their competitors can offer too. So the distributor has no idea now how to really differentiate you because of the competitive pressures they're getting.

It'd be really great sometime if your sales reps, when they presented, talked about how... And you compare to the competition and where you're strongest and where you're neutral so that they know where to focus their attention as a salesperson, to really differentiate and be able to sell your stuff. And the final is when you're doing this, your people are talking to a lot of different salespeople, offer a sales idea that can help and make them more money and improve things for them. Show them that your sales rep is interested in their distributors people's skills and becoming better so they can make more money.

The reality of these presentations is so many of them are such a missed opportunity because a sales rep only talks about themselves, show slides that nobody can see, and really doesn't talk about the valuable information the distributors and the dealers need, which is now how do I sell your stuff? Again, some pretty tough competition. Would love to know what you've done to improve your presentations, would love to offer any help to do that as well. Thanks for checking out my podcast. I'm posting two new podcasts each week, all aimed at helping you and your team increase your selling competitive advantage. I hope you check them out.