The third step in the sales process is the Presentation, and this is where you will go into more detail on what you have to offer the prospect. For many situations, this may be an actual presentation of slides and possibly a demonstration of the product. But there are also many products where there is not much to show or demonstrate, and this step could simply be presenting a proposal, quotation, or list of options.
Length of Time for the Presentation
The Presentation could be as long as one to two hours for products that require a formal presentation or demonstration. If it is more of a presentation of pricing or options, it could be a ten-to-thirty-minute conversation.
Goals for the Presentation
The Presentation is basically your opportunity to tell the prospect what you have to offer and why they should buy from you. Here are some of the key things you should try to accomplish:
- Show how you can help: Hopefully, by this point, you have figured out what the prospect wants, needs, or is having challenges with. Spend this time explaining how you match up with that.
- Continue to qualify the prospect: Going into the Presentation sales step, you should have a pretty good idea of how qualified the prospect is. But you can use some of this time to learn more about the prospect in order to qualify him or her even further.
- Build interest in your product: The Presentation is your main opportunity to build the prospect’s interest in purchasing your product. This is where you need to communicate what you have to offer, how it can help the prospect, and why the prospect should purchase from you.
- Close the prospect on the sale: This is where you should try to close the prospect on moving forward with the purchase of your product. Even if there are more sales process steps after the Presentation, this is where you want to get some sort of close or validation in terms of the pros- pect’s interest and intent to move forward.
Distribution of Attention
In the Presentation, we will flip the distribution of attention from what it was in the Initial Contact of 80 percent on the prospect and 20 percent on you and change it to 20 percent on the prospect and 80 percent on you. What that might look like is that if you schedule a sixty-minute meeting with the prospect, you can spend the first five to ten minutes summarizing what you learned about the prospect, you can then spend forty to fifty minutes talking about what you have to offer and how you can help, and then end the meeting with five to ten minutes back on the prospect as you try to close and identify the path forward.
Questions to Ask
If you are going through these sales steps in order, you may have already asked a lot of questions prior to this step, so there could be a situation where you do not have any questions to ask. But you should try to take advantage of every meeting and conversation that you have with the prospect to learn more. With that, you can certainly ask any of your pain questions, current environment questions, or qualifying questions at any point during the Presentation.
Toward the end of the Presentation step, you should most likely begin to try to close the prospect on his or her level of interest and intent to purchase your product. As part of that, you should ask some of your qualifying and closing questions.