Tweet

Stop Slide Craziness And Grow Your Business

Guest post by: Milly Sonneman

Article Overview: You may be delighted when a prospect calls to ask about your products or services. If you’re grabbing your dusty slide deck to get ready, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Instead, use 5-easy steps to stop slide craziness and grow your business.

Stop Slide Craziness And Grow Your Business

You may be delighted when a prospect calls to ask about your products or services. If you’re grabbing your dusty slide deck to get ready, you’re shooting yourself in the foot. Instead, use 5-easy steps to stop slide craziness and grow your business.

In presentation skills training, using slides is often given top priority. Presenting with slides is commonplace that…well, everyone does it. From a 50,000-foot view, it makes sense. Corporate folks decide the message, prepare the slides, and send to sales reps. Sales reps use the slide decks to carry the word out to the masses.

There’s a bit of faulty logic here. Sure, it works for standardization. But does it truly work for your customers and prospects?

If you’re looking to grow your business, take the rebellious approach. Do something different. Stop slide insanity. You’ll stand out head and shoulders above your competition.

Use this 5-step plan to transform how you present your business to prospects and customers.

Step 1. Identify Your Story

No matter how long or how short you’ve been in business, you must identify your story. What is it that makes you unique? Why are you uniquely positioned to serve your customers? Why should prospects choose you over all others?

If you’ve been in business for decades, start from scratch. Imagine for a moment this is your first day. Do you like your name, logo and colors? Do you feel your brand story is matched for today’s market?

By taking a fresh look at your business, you’ll discover new keys for telling a successful story.

If you’re just starting out, look around. Consider what other successful companies you are competing against. Look for the opening in your market where you can fill a neglected spot. You have fresh eyes to see opportunity. Jump on it and build your story on your energetic enthusiasm.

Step 2. Simplify Your Message

As much as you’re excited and on fire about your story, your primary goal is to keep it simple. Find ways to share your story in 20 seconds. Push yourself and your team to experiment with ways to engage customers. Practice storytelling without slides. Experiment with props, whiteboard sketches, and photomontages.

Hint: test out your story on someone who represents your target buyer. If their eyes glaze over and they look bored…you must get simpler.

Step 3. Train Your Reps

With the foundation of the previous steps, it’s time to get all your sales reps up to speed. Train them in interactive visual storytelling. Make sure that anyone on your sales team can show and tell your value message in any environment.

At lunch. At the beach. At church. At work. Learning new skills for presenting at a whiteboard is easy and fast. Pick a reputable training firm who understands your sales needs. While many people are jumping on the bandwagon of slide-free presenting, not every firm has the experience to do this well.

Pick a presentation skills training company with experience—and a willingness to customize the program to match your business objectives.

Step 4. Coach For Performance

As in sports and all performance arts, training is critical. But coaching is where individuals really get the full attention to specific issues. This is what your sales reps deserve.

Investing in personal coaching is a smart approach if you’re serious about being highly tuned to individual needs, strengths and abilities.

With new options for virtual coaching, it’s convenient, easy and extremely affordable to provide one-on-one coaching. In the past this was time intensive and costly because shoulder-to-shoulder coaching required in person travel.

Step 5. Track and Measure

It’s not unusual for successful sales teams to go through challenges, adjustments and experimentation phases. That’s why it is critical to track and measure what works, and what can be improved.

In addition to introducing crafting your story, simplifying with pictures, training, coaching and measuring, here’s a special ingredient for success. Challenge your reps to share best practices. Informal sharing is often the secret ingredient to build a whole new way to give extremely effective presentations…share your story…and grow your business.

Related Articles
  Content Marketing: 7 Steps to Creating an Irresistible Slidecast Presentation
  How to Create a Slick Narrated Slideshare Presentation
  Business Presentation Tips - How To Command Attention
  Fine Tuning Your Presentation Skills
  Learn the Latest Best Practices in Business Presenting
  What is the Ideal Number of Slides for a Webinar?
  Improving employee performance
  Today's rant - email
  Repurpose Your WordPress Blog Posts on YouTube
  The Fireman's Pole First, Kindergarten Next.
  Prepare Better - And Faster - Webinar Slides
  How To Use PowerPoint During Sales Presentations
  It's Time To Bring An End To... Everything!
  Webinar Tools For Creating The Perfect Webinar!
  Picture Perfect PowerPoint: Presentations that Sell
  The Top 5 Slide-Free Challenges You Face
  Proposal and Presentation Tips
  \"Canned Sales Presentations\" Just Dont Work Today
  Change your PowerPoint Habits
  PowerPoint for Educators: How to Make Multiple-choice Quizzes with PowerPoint via VBA

Article Tags: business presentation skills, online presentation skills training, online presentation training, presentation skills, presentation skills online, presentation skills training, total presentation skills training, total training, whiteboard presentation skills online, whiteboard selling, whiteboard selling online



Related Forum Posts
Re: Business Coaching Resources - You're fortunate when you can find a Business Coach who has experience beyond where you've been and even where you are going. When your budget is slim and even after, it's good to have a mentor. Several of various backgrounds are very useful. They can be teachers, professors, pastors, business people, family members, bosses and former bosses. You have to be clear on what you want and what you desire to achieve, be able to convey it as simply as possible. Stop and listen and don't over tax their time. You should always expect results whether from a Business Coach or Mentors. If you're not gtting results, you're either not focused or you need to upgrade the quality of your mentors/coaches. Always surround yourself by people smarter than you.
Re: On taking Action - [quote="jvprosperity":1hd0zjku]I was surprised to not see the words along the lines of taking deliberate action within the article. Do yo think it's an important part of the 6 points Evan summarized from the article or is it implied?[/quote:1hd0zjku] Hi Andy, I think taking deliberate action is implied in the six points. For instance, I interpret them as follows: 1. Set your sights on where you’re going - Write your goals down on paper. 2. Educate yourself - Read everyday about your field and even take courses on it. 3. Passion pays off - Enjoy what you're doing. 4. Grow your money - Invest your money. 5. No guts, no glory - Go out and sell your product/service/self everyday as if it were last. 6. The Biggest Secret? Stop spending. - Put aside as much money as you can into savings your account/retirement fund.
My entry - 1. The Best Business Books Ever: The 100 Most Influential Business Books You'll Never Have Time to Read - this is a fascinating book about the history of Business theory, and I'd recommend it to anybody. 2. The Big Book of Small Business: You Don't Have to Run Your Business by the Seat of Your Pants, by Tom Gegax. Ditto. 3. PADI: The Business of Diving Book Okay, so this book won't be of use to anyone who doesn't want to start a scuba store, but I did, and this book was of course invaluable to me in reaching that goal.
Re: My 3 best business books - 1. Think and Grow Rich - Napoleon Hill 2. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People - Stephen R. Covey 3. Permission Marketing - Seth Godin Think and Grow Rich seems more powerful each time I read it or dip into it. The 7 Habits not only offers some very effective ways to organize your life (which I have yet to master!), but also some great quotations and thought provoking statements including this by Nazi concentration camp survivor, Viktor Frankl: [i:2naxzsom]Between stimulus and response, man has the freedom to choose.[/i:2naxzsom] Seth Godin's Permission Marketing is a good read for anybody seeking to understand how to approach doing business on the Internet in the right way with regard to winning people's trust.
Decide your market first - Stop for a second and decide exactly who it is that you want to sell your product to. Once you've done this you'll have a far better idea of where to find them and what it is that they're interested in Cheers


Share this article with your friends. Fund someone's dream.

Leave a comment below or share on the left and you'll help support entrepreneurs in Africa through our partnership with Kiva. Over $50,000 raised and counting - Please keep sharing! Learn more.

Newsletter

Get advice & tips from famous business
owners, new articles by entrepreneur
experts, my latest website updates, &
special sneak peaks at what's to come!

Name:
Email:

Popular Articles

RULE YOUR BUSINESS LIKE A SHINE STAR

Selling On Ebay The Good The Bad And The Ugly

ROSI Return on SUNK Investment

Suggestions

Email us your ideas on how to make our
website more valuable! Thank you Sharon
from Toronto Salsa Lessons / Classes for
your suggestions to make the newsletter
look like the website and profile younger
entrepreneurs like Jennifer Lopez.