A great deal of work goes into creating and giving great sales presentations. But even with all of that work, a good sales presentation could fall flat. If your sales presentations aren’t delivering the results they’re supposed to, there’s a good chance you’re making one of these three fatal mistakes. The good news is that you can improve all these to improve any presentation or communication that you need to deliver.
Bad Body Language
Body language has a tremendous impact on presentations. Studies have found that one of the huge reasons for the success of TED Talks isn’t the big ideas they share, but the delivery. In other words, it’s the speaker’s charisma, gestures, and rapport with the audience that makes all the difference.
A couple of the biggest body language problems include:
- Lack of body language. You’re just standing still
- Um’s and Uh’s that distract from what you’re saying
- Over usage of phrases such as “You Know”
- Freezing behind the podium and not moving around in a natural way
- Distracting habits such as licking lips, shifting weight from leg to leg, or fidgeting
- Signs of nervousness like shaking, sweating, or shallow breathing
- Closed arms. Causes you to appear unapproachable and closed off
- Poor posture. Slouching or leaning
The first step in improving your body language is to record yourself practicing your presentation. You’ll notice a great deal that can be improved.
Unprepared for Objections
Failure to adequately plan for a presentation could cause you to appear disorganized, causing you to struggle to stay on track when presenting. This lace of preparation could also cause you to be unable to answer questions and objections being posed. When you make a sales presentation, your audience is going to have objections. Everyone has these objections when they’re considering making a purchase. It’s like a voice in the back of your head giving you reasons not to take action and buy.
In your presentation, you can anticipate these objections and try to dispel them, but there’s a good chance your prospects will voice these objections during the Q&A portion of your presentation. If you’re not prepared to answer them and you fumble over your words, this will kill the sale completely.
The better you know your audience, the better you can prepare for their objections. Try to consider every possible question and prepare an answer. The answer should reassure the prospect and ease their doubts. As you go about giving sales presentations, you’ll add new questions to your preparations based on what real prospects ask.
Putting Your Audience to Sleep
Finally, you won’t make a sale at the end of a boring presentation. Your speech needs to be engaging from beginning to end. Add stories to your presentation to make it more intriguing. Use images and videos to liven it up. Give your audience plenty of opportunities to participate. Maintaining good eye contact during your presentation is also important as it allows your audience to feel acknowledged and creates a unique personal connection. In addition, overwhelming your audience with too much information at once is guaranteed to cause them to tune out while you’re speaking. Instead, provide them with the most relevant an impactful information to keep them engaged.
Another opportunity to keep your audience’s attention is by varying your tonality. This means not being monotone and using different voices and pacing. (We’ve all been in class before with a teacher or professor that made us want to fall asleep during the lecture) Most of all, be excited about the offer yourself. Your excitement will be contagious. You can also learn to expect the unexpected and be able to adjust your presentation on the fly based on the needs and interest of your audience.
If you are interested in learning how to create presenations that leave your audience amazed and ready to buy from you, then grab a copy of the presentation skills training course today.