Consider for a moment that you are presenting to a potential prospect. You have thought long enough about their business, have asked your marketing to develop a very sophisticated animated power point, and you are sure that your prospect is going to love what he sees.
You present for more than half an hour, after you are done, the prospect tells you “Thanks for the presentation, we are really impressed, we will get back to you next week”.
Everything is fine. However you don’t hear from the prospect. After a couple of week, you finally get hold of him, and he tells you “sorry, we have purchased it from the x company”.
So what went wrong?
It was your presentation which screwed your reputation. During the presentation, you never tried to stop to ask “any question here?”, “are we clear on this?”, “This is what we think, but what is YOUR opinion” and so forth.
Asking questions is the key in sales, not only in the presentation stage, but in all sales stages.
Larry Hendrick in his recent article How To Increase Sales, emphasizes on asking questions.
His article is a must read for those who don’t understand that listening is more important than talking.
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1 comment:
Problem is most sales people know that they are supposed to listen. But faced with a client, they:
1. Try to fill up silence.
2. Don't know how to get the customer talking.
Then there are the arrogant ones who just think they can wow the customer. Powerpoint is one way to do this.
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