Using Presentation Skills to Close a Sale
How do you measure whether a presentation is successful? This is not a riddle, because the answer is obvious. A successful presentation leads to a customer sale. The words “closed sale†hold a certain magic in the business world, because they mean a person or business has decided a product or service your company sells will meet a particular need.
But for the sales person there is also a personal success element that makes the words “closed sale†even more spectacular. But it can be a long difficult road from initial contact to the final agreement if the presentation is not handled correctly.
A sales presentation is obviously a method used to convince a prospective customer to become a buying customer. But presentation skills are used in a variety of circumstances.
• Telephone sales presentation
• Group presentation
• One on one personal selling
A sales presentation should not be considered as something that is always elaborate and time consuming. It may be a simple 3 minute conversation in a call centre with a customer trying to decide if a particular product will meet his or her needs. If the sales representative says the right things, the customer will purchase what is being offered. But if the representative is unprepared or uninformative, the prospect will probably go to a competitor to buy what is needed.
Customer Rapport
Developing presentation skills to close a sale is best achieved through sales training led by a qualified professional. By accessing specialised training using work-specific situations including workshops and even role playing, it is possible to develop presentation skills which teach staff how to successfully close sales at a higher rate.
Effective sales presentations require a lot more than reading prepared telephone scripts or flashing computerised displays on a wall. The presentation must have certain characteristics which are adaptive to the situation. The presentation should have the following features:
* Informative
* Offers customer based solutions to a need
* Adaptive to situation
* Establishes rapport with customer
* Well prepared without looking or sounding as if it is a recording
* Contains information consistent with company mission
* Tailored to audience
Of course, presentation skills training includes more than presentation content preparation. The information in the material must be conveyed in a way that leads to a closed sale, conflict resolution, or meets any other intention. An excellent presentation requires the development of techniques which lead to audience commitment.
Coaching staff in how to use presentation skills to close a sale is a marketing strategy for increasing sales and profits, but it also gives staff the confidence to do their job well. With each closed sale comes renewed confidence leading to improved on-the-job performance and morale.
The Beginning to End of Presentations
Presentation skills are tools employees and managers can use in a variety of situations. Closing a sale often requires much more than just describing a product or service.
* Being able to respond authoritatively to customer questions in a way that resolves concerns
* Satisfying difficult customers
* Creating an environment which promotes customer satisfaction with the company
* Providing effective personal contact or telephone service
* Developing listening skills in order to better understand customer needs
* Developing questioning and responding techniques
Closing a sale is often the most difficult step in the selling process. Presentation skills include developing all the abilities needed to take initial contact with a customer through to the final sale.
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Have you been offered a free holiday? Want to hear our experience?
We were offered a free holiday but couldn't identify the catch early enough to stop us wasting our time. And I want to share the horrible experience with you so maybe you won't waste your time.
1) There was a silly short telephone survey, they said they were East Devon Marketing.
2) A few weeks later they called back to say that for answering the survey we had won a free holiday. I said no thanks, that if it sounds too good to be true then it is too good to be true. However they insisted that it was not time share, it was a genuine offer, that the company believe it better to spend their marketing budget on cheap holidays (to buy market share) and word of mouth than TV adverts. All we had to do was give them 2.5 hours of our time, no obligation to buy anything and we'd get the free holiday. They said it was going to be with The Holiday Group but then I didn’t hear that name again. They said they'd give us shopping vouchers to cover the travel cost. We could take 2 years to decide where to go so long as we gave 10 weeks booking notice.
3) East Devon Marketing called us again and said it wasn't free but £49 each to cover admin, seems a bit more reasonable than free eh? I was concerned that we'd have to make 50 phone calls or something and they promised there was none of that either. Why not sit through the presentation and get the free holiday?
4) We went along and the whole thing WAS set up to sell us time share – we were lied to. The sales people were pretty unpleasant to us, however I consoled myself that we half expected this and would get a free-ish holiday for listening to him. We found that the name of the company turned out to be Interval World. Their web site is open about that being a time share, hence they didn't give that name earlier. So we stuck it out for the free holiday. They used hard sell techniques and tried subtle things to make us feel bad about not buying into their time share but fortunately we were firm about it. It would have cost maybe £15k plus about £500 per year.
5) We said no. We were given our travel vouchers and leaflet to claim the cheap holiday. I asked how much the travel vouchers were for and they said about £40 for how far we had come – it turned out to be £10 on the card we were given SO THEY LIED TO US TWICE ABOUT THIS.
The leaflet about the holiday was from The Sugar Reef Travel club and it was stamped by St Frances Marketing. At this point we found out that you had to be in gainful employment and:
a) unless we bought our own flights we had no choice about where we could go, they would specify the destination
b) we had to be ready to fly from ANY UK airport!!!
c) we had to specify 4 different weeks when we could go over the next 2 years (there were further restrictions on this). THEY WOULD TELL US UP TO 15 DAYS BEFORE THE ACTUAL DATE THAT WE HAD THE HOLIDAY COMING UP – COMPLETELY IMPRACTICAL.
d) actually we had to apply within 14 days for any of the overseas holidays
e) we had to pay the airport taxes, not mentioned until then
f) only one of our choices of weeks could be in peak time – but we are limited by school holidays
g) we would have to agree to sit through another presentation once at the holiday (so actually in the initial phone marketing they should have said you have to sit through TWO presentations)
I believe they rely on it being too impractical for people to take the cheap holiday that they offer and so they can offer it at the start. THE RIGHT QUESTION AT THE START WOULD HAVE BEEN TO ASK FOR THE TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF THE HOLIDAY UP FRONT, OR WE WON'T GO. If they are hiding something then they won't share that. I felt that I had been misled many times already, that the conditions were too difficult to practically work and I didn't trust any of the people in the process so the leaflet for the "free" holiday went in the recycling.
If you want a time share then maybe it's good for you, but surely it's better to take the time to buy one after having time to consider it carefully; and would you trust a set up where they mislead you about so many things?
If Interval World get to see this then: guys I'm sorry to blow your cover but I'm being honest about my experience.
About Author
academy is a Registered Training Organisation, accredited to deliver nationally recognized corporate and traineeship training to a range of high profile and blue chip corporate clients. For more information, visit Sales Training.
although this better not be spiderweb related tons of these “free” businesses are spiderweb connected and are NEVER “free” theres some costs somewhere, so if there is some costs, spill the beans quickly
Below are several links on cold calls. Hope this helps !!!