Last month, at our Presentation Excellence Training Workshop, we focused on understanding what competitors may be saying to participant firms’ prospects, and how powerfully they are delivering their messages, leading them to close deals that “should have been outs”. When you design presentations and practice delivery – do you think about this?
Presentation Excellence is celebrating its 15 year of providing training, coaching, and consulting services to help clients win deals (for their companies and/or for the presenters, personally. As you can read on our “About Us” page, the firm was started when a multi-billion dollar company that was already winning 93% of its deals, wanted help to increase that by even 1%!
In this workshop, we had several people in sales and business development roles. As often happens, they felt their messages weren’t as compelling as they could be and wanted help. One of the most important lessons was that they failed to take into account the other options that their prospects have! Remember, you’re probably NOT the only company offering your product or service. Even companies seeking investment funds (e.g., from private equity or venture capital firms) may have other options. Also when companies can do things themselves rather than use your services, you are competing again those people who advocate doing so. So, even though you may never get to see these “competitive” presentations, you need to imagine and understand
- What their message is and how to demonstrate that your offering has greater value
- Why theirs is a more compelling message and/or being presented it more powerfully than you
- That you need to “counterpunch” their message by demonstrating that your value – in terms of analysis, quality, timeliness, convenience etc. is superior.
We’ve had the privilege of working with over 5000 client presentations from virtually every industry, from start-up to Fortune 50 company. We’ve seen so many presentations, that we can imagine what the competition might do when we create a presentation. We use that information to consulting clients and workshop participants craft and deliver better presentations.
Sharing that perspective with the participants of this particular workshop group was probably for everyone the highlight. Consider joining one of our public workshops. The next one can be found at http://presentationexcellence.com/prestraining.php