The Secret To Creating A Winning Sales Presentation

There are a lot of moving parts that help sellers successfully close tenders and RFPs. One still needing improvement is the final presentation to senior decision-makers. It becomes especially important if you’re told the playing field is level between you and one or two competitors. This means the decision-makers at the buyer will be paying close attention to what you have to say and how you say it.

In situations like this, your presentation has to be well-planned, almost to military precision, where you make every slide count.

The secret to creating a winning sales presentation is the discipline of taking a structured approach where you spend more time and energy planning your presentation and less time putting it together. However, most vendors do it the other way around.

Let Structure Guide Your Winning Argument

The structure of a well-told story is made up of an Introduction, Body and Conclusion - all linked where one idea flows to the next.

Focussing on story structure might seem fundamental, but it bears thinking about when you’re putting together a complex presentation that usually involves multiple authors and presenters.

If you don’t focus on creating a logical structure and making sure everyone holds to it, your presentation will go off the rails in multiple ways – too long, too detailed, not specific enough, off-topic, vague or rambling. We don’t want to confuse, frustrate or bore our audience, whether online or in person.

What’s worse, if we fail to create a well-integrated story structure, our buyer audience may conclude that because we’re incompetent at putting together a presentation, we might be incompetent in other ways.

Thinking Informs Structure

Before structuring the beginning, middle and end, it's important to get our thinking straight by answering the following three questions:

1. What is the purpose of this presentation? (Possible answers: jump from third to first place, solidify first place, position our company as a serious player, challenge the client/disrupt the status quo, or overcome buyer indecision and uncertainty?)
2. Who is my audience? (Think about roles, personality types, attitudes to us, and their business or personal objectives. What about their political agenda? Who in the audience is for us, against us or is neutral? Also, what is the result individual decision-makers want, and what possible objections and doubts might each of them have?)
3. What is the one overriding value we offer? (if you provide 3 to 5 benefits, you must combine them into one unique value driver. Just don’t be trite or cliched like, “safe pair of hands.”)

The answers to these questions will guide the message strategy inside the structure and flow of your presentation.

Even if you answered these questions when putting together the written RFP, do it again to test assumptions, explore new ideas or consider fresh insights.

Note: If you know the answers to the above questions in your head, but you’ve never written them down, you should because seeing your thoughts in black and white helps you better assess and refine your critical thinking.

Once you answer the above questions to your satisfaction, you can share the answers with all of the authors and presenters so they align their contribution to the right roles within the client organisation and to your over-arching promise of value.

Now you’re ready to start outlining ideas in your introduction, body and conclusion.

What Goes In The Introduction?

Most vendors start their introduction with an agenda slide – makes sense. However, I recommend if you want to stand out and grab the attention of your audience fast, your first slide should be about them. It can be anything from painting a picture of a brighter future for your prospective client because of your solution (without directly referring to your solution), presenting your point-of-view about their challenges and industry trends, to posing an intriguing question.

Your second slide might touch on their challenges like stagnant growth, unable to keep up with customer demands or competitors squeezing their profits. And it might include your understanding of the capabilities they’re looking for in a vendor to help overcome their challenges, again without mentioning you.

Your third slide will then introduce the agenda and presenters. And when introducing the agenda and presenters, you can subtly link your speakers’ credentials to your unique promise of value.

What Goes In The Body?

Slide four and the beginning of your body should answer, Why You? Use this to directly link the capabilities the buyer is looking for with your capabilities.

This is about getting the client to trust and respect you. Provide evidence of this via a compelling customer testimonial and/or a quote from your CEO, either written, via a live video feed or a recording.

The next few slides are about your product or service, which I call, THE WHAT. While it’s likely that some of the C-suites like the CIO are technical, executives think in terms of outcomes (hint: solution strategy and not features), so keep THE WHAT high level with a small amount of techspeak to prove your team knows their stuff. And make sure your technical team adheres to constraints you put on the level of detail you want.

The second part of your body is about THE HOW (implementation/transition timelines, schedules and org charts, project leads). Instil further confidence and lessen fear of risk by making sure schedules and project diagrams are simple and clear. If complicated, dense or hard to read, your buyer audience will become irritated and may doubt the veracity of your claims.

This is also where you can get specific about the delivery leadership team and senior leaders sponsoring this project. The point of addressing your teams’ years of experience, specialisation or expertise is to instil confidence and minimise buyers’ fear about risk, especially if you can demonstrate how your people have done this many times for similar clients.

It’s up to you to decide how many slides to include for THE HOW. In my opinion, this section needs more care than THE WHAT as there is a greater perceived risk from the client around implementation cost-over-runs, low user uptake, or interruption to business as usual.

What Goes In The Conclusion?

Usually, by the time you get to the conclusion, you’ve exhausted your audience with details of THE WHAT and THE HOW. So now you need to re-energise them. This is why the first slide of your conclusion must be compelling and exciting.

Something compelling might be offering your buyer some extra value, or you can show powerful financial results if they choose you. (Of course, you must be able to back up your financial figures). Whatever you decide to do, it’s important to pleasantly shock your audience into full alertness. An emotional story about a current customer directly relating to the value of your solution also works. I've offered a few suggestions, there are more only limited by your imagination.

The second slide of your conclusion summarises THE WHAT and THE HOW while homing in on the value that your solution or service offers at low risk. This is the Power of Repetition at work.

The third slide in the conclusion is the wrap-up and is similar to the executive summary in your written proposal. It's where you must prove that you’re committed to helping the client succeed in their goals. It’s not enough to say, “we’re committed”; you must demonstrate this. It might be via sharing risk, providing flexible payment terms, offering exclusivity in some way or giving them free consulting and training. Note: this is something as the presenter you can talk about, but don't put it in your slide.

To finish strong, the slide needs to focus on the outcomes or results your audience is seeking. It's your final slide, and I call this 'The Wow'.

Create a compelling yet simple image or diagram that's all about your prospective client - either realising financial gain, improving services to their customers, realising growth plans, etc. Once you verbally present your promise of commitment, conclude by bringing their attention to the image on the screen, which shows them as the hero of the story enabled by your product or service. It's never about you. It's about them. Elevate their potential.

Most salespeople will then add a final slide that says, “Thank You”. I don’t recommend this.

While you should verbally express thanks for your audience’s time, never have the last slide of your PowerPoint deck say, Thank You. That’s a wasted opportunity to use the Power of Repetition to convince your audience that you’re the right vendor. Say thank you while you leave the third slide of your conclusion on the screen. Let them soak in their better future.

A Template To Help You Structure A Clean & Classy Pitch

If you’ve read this far, Dear Reader, and you want to follow the above advice as an easily remembered process, I provide it below. While I show how many slides to use across the 9 steps, it's a recommendation only, you can use less or more.

Take Control Of The Mess Thrown At You

Now, even if you follow the above process and send contributors and presenters your high-level bullet points of the introduction, body and conclusion, and you include guidance on slide limitations, some people will ignore it and throw in whatever they think is best.

Frequently, their slides are not customised to this bid, or it’s more slides than you need.

What I suggest is that you go back to the contributors and ask them to pay attention to the structure and guidelines and trim their sections to the required length. It’s more useful if they do it first as they are the best judge of the most relevant message relating to their area of expertise.

As the PowerPoint presentation goes through multiple iterations and drafts, it’s essential to keep an eagle eye on the structure and make sure people don’t deviate from it. On the other hand, a sales presentation is a living thing, and so structure evolves somewhat, but this needs to be managed by one or two people (usually the sales and solution leads) who own the sales and solution strategy.

Final Thoughts

Of course, the story you tell in your oral presentation must align with and reiterate your messages in the written response of the RFP and tender.

Also, you can put together a well-constructed argument, but what if it’s the wrong argument? Even when you've assembled an excellent sales presentation, it might fall flat if you don’t have insight into the client beyond what they’ve shown in the RFP. For more about that, see this article.

However, if you’re doing everything right up to this point, you'll want to make sure your final presentation positions you as a sophisticated professional, respectful of your audience's time and needs. And the secret sauce to accomplishing this is putting in the effort to design a well-integrated story STRUCTURE inside your PowerPoint!

I also cover other PowerPoint tips like how to use visual themes and colour, how to effectively present diagrams or charts, and more in this article.

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This article was originally published on the now-retired relatable.IT blog.

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