The Presentation Trap: Why Making Presentations Can Cost You the Sale

By Jeff Thull

In many conversations with sales professionals, I am often surprised that even the most sophisticated professionals get caught in what I call the “presentation trap.” They spend such an inordinate amount of time preparing for a razzle-dazzle presentation that they often lose sight of the issues at hand. Everything salespeople do before—the prospecting, contacting and qualifying of potential customers—seems to be aimed at creating opportunities to present their solutions. Everything after—the downhill run to the sale itself that includes overcoming objectives, negotiating and closing—is designed to support and reiterate the presentation. Consequently, sales organizations devote a tremendous amount of time and resources to creating compelling presentations and proposals.

The irony is that most of this effort is lost on customers. Presentations that come too early in complex decisions are largely a waste of time .

Conventional salespeople hate to hear this because the presentation is usually the key weapon in their sales arsenal. It is their security blanket and their comfort zone, and they are loath to give it up. They seem to be on a mission to relentlessly educate the customer because, they argue, customers will not buy what they don't understand.

True, a presentation can take customers to a higher level of understanding, but it is one of the least effective methods for accomplishing that goal because:

• It's a lecture. The salesperson is the talking “teacher” and the customer is the listening “student.” The big problem is that people retain only about 30% of what they hear. The use of visual aids (e.g., a PowerPoint slide show) boosts retention rates to 40%, but most experts say that more than half of even the most sophisticated presentation can be lost.
  
  
• The focus is wrong. A typical sales presentation devotes only 10 to 20% of its focus on the customer and his current situation. Generally, 80 to 90% of the information is devoted to describing the seller, its solutions and the rosy future if you buy. So while a presentation may raise the customer's level of understanding, that gain is usually centered on solutions. All too often, customers are not sure of the exact nature of their problems or needs. As a result, while customers may be greatly impressed with the offering being presented, they still lack a compelling understanding of how it applies to their situation and why they should buy the offered product or service.
  
  
• They've heard it all before. Your competitors are busy presenting as well. Unless you are the rare organization that has no competition, your customers will surely hear their stories, too. Your team is telling the customers that they need the solutions that only your company offers, and your competitors are making the same arguments about their own solutions. In every case, the presentations are heavily skewed toward the seller and the solutions.

The Customer's Perspective

Ultimately, sales presentations exacerbate communications between buyers and sellers, leading to frustration, misunderstandings, conflict and adversarial relationships—all of which impede the salesperson's ability to create cooperative and trust-based relationships with customers.

Customers respond to competing conventional presentations in one of three ways:

• They concentrate their efforts on the information that falls inside their area of comprehension. Customers attempt to make the complex understandable by weighing those elements that vendors' offers have in common and eliminating those elements that do not fit neatly into a comparison chart. When this happens, salespeople's ability to differentiate their offering from the competition is subverted, and price, the one common denominator of all offers, is likely to become the deciding factor in the sale.
  
  
• They respond by not responding. They listen politely as you “educate” them, thank you for your time and promise to get back in touch when they are ready to make a decision.
  
  
• The customer objects and the sales professional goes to work overcoming those objections. This is the response that every conventional salesperson expects. When this happens, it is apparent that there has been a disconnect along the way and back peddling is often the only way out.

Avoiding the Presentation Trap

To keep yourself from becoming a presentation trap victim, ask yourself these questions:

• What percentage of your sales presentation/proposal is devoted to describing your company and its solutions?
• What percentage of your sales presentation/proposal is devoted to describing your customer's business, his problems and objectives?
• How well do customers understand their own problems?
• How much of your presentation is focused on persuading and convincing?
• How well can your customers connect your solutions to their business situations?

My advice to sales professionals is simply, “Don't present.” Instead, use a diagnostic approach—conduct a thorough diagnosis to uncover a customer's problems and then expand their awareness of the situation. Once the problem is clearly understood and the customer perceives all its ramifications, then the salesperson can make recommendations. A presentation will not be necessary.

When you guide your customers through this process, you will establish a high level of credibility and find that you will jointly develop optimal solutions, which will ultimately benefit both you and your customers.

© Prime Resource Group 2005

You can learn more about effective selling techniques at these AMA Seminars:

• Principles of Professional Selling
• Selling to Major Accounts: A Strategic Approach
• Fundamental Selling Techniques for the New or Prospective Salesperson

AMA On-site: Every one of AMA's 170+ public seminars can be delivered on-site. This flexible, money-saving option allows you to train ten or more people, when and where you choose, at a low cost per participant.

Author Bio: Jeff Thull is CEO of Prime Resource Group. He is the author of the best-selling books Mastering the Complex Sale—How to Compete and Win When the Stakes Are Big, and the newly released The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins, and Win the Complex Sale (Dearborn Trade Publishing). For more information, contact: support@primeresource.com or call 800-876-0378.