Presenting Your Sales Materials Remotely
Sitting in that tight, too cosy meeting room, opposite a throng of buyers, is now a figment of our fevered salespeople’s imaginations. We were able to whip out our brochures, flyers, catalogues, corporate propaganda with frivolous abandon. Today we are sitting at home or the client is sitting at home and now this is a one to one conversation. We have been geared up for in person client meetings, where our physical marketing assets were chosen for their maximum impact. Beautiful four colour pages, sharp photographs, compelling diagrams and graphs, carefully manicured text. I know it is hilarious, but I am sure you have seen webinars, where some rather ambitious person is holding up their paper document in their hand in front of the camera, to make their point. Remarkable stuff really, although pretty delusional at the same time.
There is no certainty that we will still be able to just flourish our flyers in the buyer’s face and get the deal done. We may find that time spent with buyers remains an online experience, as companies ban outsider visits or individuals stay closeted at home from fear of contagion. Even if we do get to meet them, the time allotted may be curtailed to a stringent fifteen minutes. In this case, all the propaganda has either been delivered across to the buyer, or we are required to send the soft copies well in advance of the meeting, for the buyer to be able to survey our goods.
Remember our Rule Number One is never give the buyer your flyer, catalogue, brochure or whatever. You hold that baby firm, arranged upside down to you, so that the buyer can easily read it. Using your expensive pen as a pointer, you scrupulously guide them to where you want them to look. All of this is now out the window, many of the rules of sales have been trashed and the buyer is looking all over the place and at no place in particular, because it is all gobbledegook to them.
In the online situation, we need to be guiding them to the page and the section where we want them to look. That may mean loading up everything that might possibly be needed before the meeting, on to the platform we will be employing. We should then open the soft copy of the relevant document, and we should be controlling the page advancement and the document selection. Once we get to the place on the page we want to highlight, we should be placing our pointer, circling, drawing or underlining where we want them to note. With the technology available today this is easy. Two popular platforms - WebEx and Zoom - both allow the uploading of documents and we can transform any on-screen document into a virtual whiteboard, allowing us to scribble all over it. This requires you master the medium and be competent to wield the on-line tools with flair and confidence.
If we make the most of the tech and we draw some procurement interest, the buyer may ask us for a proposal. Remember Rule Number Two. Never send the proposal in advance. This advance document reconnoitre by the buyer usually leads to no sales taking place, as they are zeroing in on the money and remain contemptuous of the value. Typically, the buyer will go straight to the last page, chasing the cash flow killer imposts. They simply ignore the carefully crafted value statements spilling over the edges, inside the rest of the proposal. That sale’s rule is out the window too. Today, we have no choice, we have to show them the document, but please take careful note - we don’t have to send it in advance. We should arrange the online meeting, and reveal the document page by page, as we walk them through it. We can send the whole thing over later as an email attachment, but critically we must control the explanation of what the proposal says. We write the proposal with complete knowledge of what we are saying. Often, however, the reader cannot grasp the meaning as we intended it. That is why we need to be there, supervising their understanding. Normally we would do that face to face in the meeting room. We still need to do it, if we want a sale and now we just move across to the virtual room. By walking them through the document, we can highlight the key points. They can read the screen for themselves, but our job is to highlight key attributes, justifying the price tag at the end. The value is poured on first and then like a wizard, we enfold the pricing in the context of our explanation. A piece de resistance of copy writing, logic, emotion and logistics.
In the vaccine deprived world of Covid-19, actually being in the same room as the buyer may not be a possibility anymore, so we must adjust. Darwin didn’t talk about the survival of the strongest. He talked about the triumph of those species which can best adapt to survive. The salesperson species must adapt or many of us won’t survive.
