It’s time you skip the presentation. It’s time you skip the demo to close a sale. Do you think customers wake up in the morning and tell themselves, “Wow, I hope I get to sit through a couple more presentations today,” or “Oh, wow! I hope I get to sit through some more demos today.” No way!
Don’t think for a moment that customers are looking for that, because they aren’t. What they want is a discussion. They want help with their challenges and problems. You will not be able to deliver that if you give them a demo or some sort of canned presentation.
Video: Do I Need a Presentation To Close a Sale?
The best presentation ever made is the presentation never given. When you know your content so well, you don’t have to have a presentation.
It all comes down to listening, which means it’s a discovery process. The discovery process of the sales call is the most forgotten part, because it’s so unscripted. It’s so, “Where is it going?” You’re right- it is! But that’s what makes it challenging and extremely beneficial.
That’s where you move from simply delivering or receiving the orders that you were going to get anyway to creating true incremental volume. Your objective is to figure out how to create incremental volume. You don’t do that by sitting there sticking to a script or a presentation or a demo.
When you go to a presentation or when you have a canned presentation, the presentation begins driving you. You are no longer driving, so you’re no longer listening. Furthermore, you stop asking the challenging questions. The same thing happens in a demo. As you sit there, you motor through the features and as you do, the customer becomes totally unengaged.
I challenge you to increase the discovery phase. That’s where you ask them questions. However, don’t just ask them questions that you know the answer to. No. Ask them questions you don’t know the answer to AND ones they don’t know the answer to. That is how you create a conversation. That’s how you really dig deep.
We will all close more sales better when we ask better questions. That’s the discovery phase. That’s how you close more deals. You don’t need a presentation. You don’t need a demo.
Read more about this topic in my book, A Mind For Sales. Then, go back and leave a review to share what you learned.
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Copyright 2020, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of A Mind for Sales and High-Profit Prospecting: Powerful Strategies to Find the Best Leads and Drive Breakthrough Sales Results.
