4 Steps to a Persuasive Sales Presentation

The problem with most sales proposals is that they serve merely to convey data. The objective of every sales presentation is to persuade. Selling is about one thing: moving people’s emotions – and facts alone don’t do that. The presentation must do that, and YOU, the presenter, are the presentation!

Here are the four steps you need to follow in order to deliver a persuasive sales presentation.

1. Start Strong

The most important part of the sales pitch is the start. If you can’t grab their attention in the first few seconds, they will not engage later. The first words out of your mouth must reach out, grab your audience, and pull them into what you have to say.

Your opening gambit, the spark that sets the tone, can be a question, a statistic, a quote, or an aphorism:

• Question: “What is your close rate? Don’t know? Don’t care? Your competitors know their close rate!”
• Statistic: “78% of the prospects you visit buy from either you or one of your competitors.”
• Quote: “Zig Ziglar once said, ‘Nobody cares how much you know, until they know how much you care.'”
• Aphorism: “You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. The role of the salesperson is not to make them drink, rather to make them thirsty.”

2. Contrast Your Value

Now we must contrast our value. If you do not differentiate yourself, you are selling as much for the competition as you are for yourself. People are hard-wired to recoginize contrast; we decide by comparing the differences of our options. It is the role of the salesperson to frame the comparison. Differentiation is one of the principles of emotion that drives buyer’s decisions.

3. Prove It

We have boldly claimed our contrast and must now prove it! We should spend the majority of the presentation actually proving that which we claimed to be true by providing our own “fact-checker.” There are four ways to prove it, the most powerful of which is to use third party validation. This is the process of pointing out how your solution has worked with customers that have the same problem as the one you are currently dealing with. Third Party Validation is one of the 12 Triggers of Persuasion.

4. Your Delivery Style

Finally, you must deliver the message in a persuasive manner by moving the prospect’s emotion. Persuasion is the process of transferring emotion from the seller to the buyer.

The delivery should focus on the three “V”s: verbal, vocal, and visual.

• Verbal, the words you use, matter. Mark Twain said:

“The difference between the right word and almost the right word is the difference between a lightning bug and lightning.”

• Vocal, how you say what you say, involves your tone, volume, inflection, and the elimination of filler words.
• Visual, your body language, must be congruent with the rest of your message.

Your body language trumps both the verbal and vocal. The most powerful signal you can send is that you are genuinely happy to be here, that you are confident, and that they too will enjoy what you are about to say. You do all of this with a simple smile.