Selling Presentation В2В. How to make value greater than price

Picture a salesperson who spent a whole hour preparing for an important meeting. He gathered the data, cleared the prices, put on his best shirt. And now he sits across from the customer and delivers: “We have prepared an individualized commercial proposal for you, reflecting the best prices in the region, prompt logistics, and an optimal solution with the finest technical parameters on a minimal budget.” The customer nods politely and says: “Thank you. I’ll think about it.”

Curtain.

Tell me honestly: how many times have you said something similar about “best prices” and “optimal quality”? And how many times have you heard “I’ll think about it” in reply? Is there a connection between the first and the second? That is what this book is about.

I love the subject of presentation. For me it’s daily practice: speaking, telling, teaching, directly instilling ideas in people. If needs discovery — to which the first book of this series was devoted — is a difficult technology, a technology of extracting the truth from people, then presentation is easier. It’s even more fun. And you use it far more often. The bitter truth sounds like this: proper work with the client’s problems and needs is something we almost never do. But a presentation we do always, one way or another. Every day. So this will be easier for you: we’re not building a new skill from zero, we’re re-tuning the one you already use daily.

But there’s a catch. Precisely because everyone gives presentations, everyone’s presentation is the same. However many companies I’ve trained — from porcelain-tile plants to jewelry chains — the same averaged text sounds everywhere. And it sounds at your competitors’ too. Which means you have a chance: my assembled presentation technology contains an element that almost everyone skips. Once you master it — and I’ll hand it to you in this very chapter, like a punch combination in boxing — you will gain one more superpower in working with clients. And you will differ sharply from everyone who walks, in parallel with you, into the same customers’ offices. The technology is called monetization. Today I’ll immerse you in it; we’ll turn it over, play with it, and in the following chapters land it on specific clients and specific working situations.

If you’ve read the first book, you know how to ask questions, extract the problem, and rock it back and forth until the client himself says: “Well, go on, tell me what you’ve got.” Here it is, that moment. The client looks at you and waits. Everything you’ve built up with questions will now either turn into a deal or shatter against the phrase “I’ll think about it.” The moment of truth arrives — the presentation.

1. The Most Frequent and the Most Worn-Out

Let’s begin with the two words that determine everything. A presentation has a HOW and a WHAT. How I present — and what I present. And I’ll say it straight away: the HOW matters more. The same information, delivered limply and delivered vividly, produces different deals. So take this directive from this very page: speak vividly with all your might. But the book is built honestly: first we’ll sort out the WHAT — the content, the substance, what a presentation consists of. Because if there’s emptiness inside, the most vivid delivery is just beautiful wrapping around nothing. And then, closer to the book’s finale, we’ll take up the voice, the openings, and the slides — the whole toolkit of the HOW.

Before moving on, do one thing. Formulate a request to yourself: what, in your presentations, doesn’t come out well? This is actually the most important question. I ask it of every group of salespeople I work with, and the answers are always revealing.

One manager says: “I want to hook the people watching my presentation. I think mine is boring. I want to make a show out of it.” A strong statement. I rarely hear anyone say so consciously about themselves: “My presentation is boring.” That’s worth a great deal — with a request formulated like that, the person will definitely grow.

Another puts it differently: “I’d like to work through a slight nervousness. At a meeting the dialogue can go wrong: counter-objections, the wrong tone — and you’re no longer a lecturer, you’re making excuses.” A third asks for prepared lines: “Phrases that hook. You say one-two-three — and the person pushes his own affairs aside and focuses on you.” A fourth is about retention: “Sometimes you’re leading a negotiation and you see it: whoop — the person has switched off. And now you’re telling things to someone who isn’t interested.”

Notice: you can make the same mistake on experience your whole life and not even understand that it’s a mistake. Twenty years of tenure cure nothing by themselves. What cures is a formulated request: when your brain asks for specific information, it will get it — from this book, from practice, from observation. And without a request, the most useful technique will fly right past.

Remember: in a presentation the HOW matters more than the WHAT — but first you must put the WHAT in order. Emptiness cannot be delivered vividly.

Check Yourself

— What comes out well in your presentations, and what comes out frankly weak?

— How does the averaged presentation of your industry sound — those phrases that both you and all your competitors say?

— Why does long experience by itself not guarantee that a person presents well?

Practice

Take a sheet of paper and write your request to this book in one phrase: “I want to learn to…” Then rate from 1 to 10 how well your presentation sells today. Write the number in the margin — you’ll come back to it at the end of the book.

2. What You Call a Presentation

The word “presentation” conjures different pictures for different people. For some — slides and a projector. For others — a conversation at the shelf on a sales floor. Let’s figure out where your presentation lives, because the toolkit depends on the format.

I ask salespeople: to whom, and how, do you give presentations? Where does it physically happen?

One answers: “For me a presentation is a relaxed conversation with the decision-maker. Introducing a new product, an attempt to spark interest. Most often on the sales floor or at the client’s office.”

Another adds: “For me it’s usually standing on the sales floor. Shoppers walking past. In an office — extremely rarely, only with the big chains. Mostly sales floors or markets, right in the pavilions.”

A third describes an entirely different life: “I bring the information to the distributor’s category manager, then train his salespeople: the sales department, the wholesale department, the retail one. I arrive at an outlet — people gather in small groups, and you perform in front of them: samples, comparison with competitors, full communication.”

A fourth works with design institutes and developers: “My presentations are a meeting with the site manager at the construction site, or office meetings with the developer’s management. A tablet, catalogs, samples, references of completed projects, technical models of assemblies. Plus internal briefings at the company.”

Notice: fundamentally different things are mixed together here. Let’s separate them.

The first format is the in-passing presentation, face to face, in the flow of an ordinary sale. You’re standing with the client at the shelf, sitting in his office, driving around the site with him. No grandeur is needed here. More than that — this kind of presentation should be, as it were, invisible. It’s stitched into the conversation so that the client doesn’t notice the transition: click — and he’s already understood everything.

The second format is the presentation as an event. A separately created meeting at which you perform before people: training a dealer’s salespeople, defending a solution before a group at a developer’s office, a seminar. Here it’s the reverse: it must be a show. People have set aside time, gathered, they’re looking at you — and limp mumbling will kill everything.

And the third format is online. Video negotiations with a remote client, where you switch on screen sharing and walk the person through the material. Most salespeople still use this format little, and that’s a mistake: it saves weeks of road time and lets you show calculations visually.

The good news: the content — that very WHAT — is built by one and the same technology in all three formats. What changes is the delivery. So everything we break down in the coming chapters will serve you at the shelf, on the stage, and on Zoom.

Remember: the in-passing presentation must be stitched into the conversation so that it can’t be seen. The presentation-as-event is obliged to be a show. The content is one — the delivery differs.

Check Yourself

— Which of the three formats — in passing, event, online — exist in your work, and which of them brings in the most money?

— How do the delivery requirements differ between the “in passing” format and the “event” format?

— Which format do you barely use, and what are you losing because of it?

Practice

Recall your past working week and write out every situation that could be called a presentation: where it was, who listened, what you showed. Next to each, mark the format: “in passing,” “event,” or “online.” This is the map of your battlefield.

3. Warm-Up: Sell a Person

Before selling a product, let’s train on the most complex and most expensive product in the world — a human being. The exercise is this: choose a colleague and prepare his selling presentation. So that a business owner, hearing you, would say: “Yes, this is the guy I need — I’m hiring him at any price.”

What is worth learning and saying about a person? First, his strong qualities — character: drive, persistence, the ability to see things through to a result. Second, experience and skills. And do separate them: “I’m driven” is a quality, while “I know how to build relationships with the customer’s technical specialists so that they work only with us” is already a skill, a person’s hard side. And third, examples of successes. Ask your colleague: what was your coolest deal? And tell it: “He once closed a deal so big the plant ran for five years on that one contract.”

Watch how salespeople do this when I give them the assignment.

One introduces a colleague like this: “I propose we consider a candidate for the position of regional manager. A maximally driven person; he will always find a common language with the decision-maker. At his previous job he negotiated his product range into a large regional chain — and that chain has been running on his range for more than five years now.”

Another leads with a number: “I have a super-profitable proposition for you. Dmitry is a professional at his craft. But his main achievement: he grew distribution of a new product line from zero to twenty percent of the active client base in just nine months.” Admit it — “from zero to twenty percent in nine months” carries more weight than “he’s a good salesman”.

And a third doesn’t start with the person at all: “Colleagues, the labor market today is in a difficult state. It is very hard to find a person who is willing and able to work well. It is with great pleasure that I present to you Viktor…” See the move? He started with a problem — and pulled people in. The listener hasn’t yet heard a single fact about the candidate, and he’s already nodding: yes, finding people is hard — go on, go on.

Why do I begin a book about product presentation with the presentation of a person? Because the bricks are the same. Specific features instead of general words. Proof in numbers instead of adjectives. Usefulness for the one who’s listening — an employer doesn’t want “a good communicator,” he wants the one who will bring in money. Memorize this feeling: when you hear “driven and diligent” — boring; when you hear “he brought his range into a chain, and it’s been running on it for five years” — interesting. Your client listens to your product in exactly the same way.

Remember: the selling presentation of anything — a person, an insulation board, a service — stands on three bricks: specific features, proven successes, usefulness for the listener.

Check Yourself

— In presenting a person, how does a quality differ from a skill — and which of them sounds more convincing to an employer?

— Why does the opening “it’s hard to find a good person on the market” engage the listener more strongly than a list of the candidate’s merits?

— What numbers from your own career could play the role of “from zero to twenty percent in nine months”?

Practice

Write a selling presentation of yourself in five to seven sentences: qualities, hard skills, one success story with a number. Read it aloud. If it sounds like a résumé — rewrite until it sounds like an advertisement after which someone would want to hire you at any price.

4. The Presentation Is Not an Island

A short but important clarification without which we can’t go on. When we communicate with a client, we pass through the same stages every time. First we establish contact. Then we uncover and shape needs. Then we give the presentation. After it, if the presentation didn’t impress or we didn’t work the needs properly, we have to handle objections. And then — closing the deal.

Look where the presentation stands: exactly in the middle. And that means two things.

First: the presentation’s effectiveness is influenced by more than the presentation itself. How well have I established contact with the audience — be it one person in an office or twenty salespeople on a sales floor? How well do I understand these people’s pains, and have I let them see their own pains — so that they’re motivated to hear my talk as an answer to their pain? If there’s no contact and the pain hasn’t been raised, the most technically polished presentation falls into a void.

Second: after the presentation, the work isn’t over. Am I ready to follow through — to clear objections, to move people toward the deal? Even if you’re speaking to a room of twenty, you’ll still have to walk all the stages with them: establish contact, work the pain, deliver the talk — and then, for people to start doing what you want, you’ll still have to nudge them over the line somehow.

So the presentation is not an island but a link in a chain. In this book we focus on the link itself, but keep in mind: to its left stands the entire first book of the series; to its right will stand the third one, about objections.

Remember: the presentation stands in the middle of the five stages of a sale. Weak contact and unsurfaced pain before it, no follow-through after it — and the best content won’t save you.

Check Yourself

— Between which stages of the sale does the presentation stand, and how do the “before” stages influence its result?

— Why does a presentation to a group of twenty still require contact and work with pains?

— In your practice, what kills the deal more often: a weak presentation, or the absence of follow-through after it?

Practice

Recall your last collapsed deal. Honestly lay it out across the five stages and find where exactly it broke: before the presentation, during, or after. Write down the conclusion in one sentence.

5. Goal One: Narrow the Choice

And now the main question that begins our immersion in the subject. Every stage of the sale has its own particular goal. What is the goal of the presentation stage? Think before you read on. Formulate your own version. There are two goals, and neither is what people usually answer.

When I put this question to salespeople, the guessing starts. “To offer the customer a solution.” Well, that’s what a presentation is — offering a solution; but what’s the goal? “For him to buy.” Of course, to buy — that’s the goal of everything we do; that’s pop-chart stuff. “For him to want it.” That’s an emotional goal, and I’m asking about the intellectual one: what must the client clearly understand after your presentation? “To show the benefit.” Benefit — not bad, but that’s a means, a process. Everyone knows about benefit. “To create interest.” Also a means. “To show that our product is necessary.” The product is always necessary — the question is who they’ll buy it from: you or a competitor.

We’re looking for the pearl. And here it is, goal number one — narrow the choice. Make a note: you have most likely never heard this anywhere. I never read it anywhere myself — I stumbled onto it some twenty years ago while running one of my first trainings for a jewelry chain. I looked at their presentations and understood how foolish what they were doing was. And since then, with dozens of companies, we have returned to this theme.

What does narrowing the choice mean? Imagine: your company has many product lines, many different offers capable of solving roughly the same client problem. What does the ordinary presenter do? He tells about everything. “Look how great we are — we can do it this way and that way. We have the little green one and the little red one, the thin one and the thick one. The thin one in three layers and the thick one in a single layer. We can do it diagonally, on adhesive, on nails, on screws.” What happens to the client at that moment? He says: “All right, guys, I’ll think about it. I’ll be sorting this out for the next six months.”

And when does a person buy quickly? When there’s no more thinking to do. When in front of him stands one thing that he needs. Test it on yourself. You come to a store for a jacket, and there are a hundred jackets. How do you feel? Personally — bad. I think: forget it, I’m leaving. It’s much better when there’s one jacket hanging there, two at most. And I go: works for me. This one or that one. Let it be good, expensive, beautiful — but one. I need one jacket, not a wide selection of jackets.

That is the presentation’s first task. First — at the needs stage — you gather information about the client. And then you say: “Right, I’ve understood. This is what you need.” And the presentation is aimed at focusing on one solution. Two at most, if your sale implies a “pricier — cheaper” fork, but still within the frame of one solution.

Remember: the client who was shown five options leaves to think. The client who was shown one precise solution buys. The presentation’s first goal is to narrow the choice.

Check Yourself

— Why does the wide selection a salesperson takes pride in slow down the client’s decision?

— What must happen at the needs stage for you to have the right to narrow the choice down to one solution?

— In which of your sales is a two-option fork appropriate, and how do you keep it within the frame of a single solution?

Practice

Take your latest presentation or commercial proposal and count how many solution options you offered the client. If more than two — rewrite: one solution, a fork at most. Note what you had to throw out and why throwing it out felt frightening.

6. Goal Two: Value Heavier Than Price

Goal one is fixed — and we move on, because goal two is the more important. When a person decides whether to buy from me or not, a set of scales always appears in his head. Draw them right now on a sheet: ordinary scales with two pans. On these scales, two things are weighed — price and value.

Now a question with no trick in it, a literal one. What is price to a buyer? The first answer is usually: “what he’s prepared to give.” True, but let’s pick a scarier word. Price is what I will lose.

Feel it. Imagine you’re holding fifty thousand rubles. Ten five-thousand notes, right there — a chunk of your salary; you earned it. And you’re standing at a jewelry counter, because you’ve decided to buy your wife a holiday present. Fine, fifty is a bit much — let it be twenty-five. I can’t stand jewelry, by the way, but I know my wife loves it. So I stand there, looking at the counter, there’s something for twenty-five thousand, and I understand with perfect clarity: in a moment I will not have this money. I will flat-out lose it. I worked a long time to get it. And so I stand there hunting for an excuse to leave this store. That is price. It lies on one pan of the scales and presses down.

And what is value, the thing lying on the other pan? Value is what I will receive in exchange. What I will have. I’ll give away twenty-five — and what will appear in my life?

Now watch how the scales work. Three states.

State one: price and value are equal. I’ll give twenty-five and receive, by my own feel, twenty-five’s worth. A twenty-five-thousand brooch — a twenty-five-thousand little stone. What do I tell the salesperson? “I’ll think about it.” What does “think” mean? It means: seems okay, but somehow there’s no gain. I give as much as I get — might as well do nothing at all, that’s even better. Well, at the very worst, since a present is needed, I’ll consider you. But for now I’ll go take a walk.