The Two-Hour Sales Presentation Vs. A Seven-Minute Attention Span

The average decision-maker has an attention span of just a little over seven minutes. I’m convinced that adult attention spans have been carefully programmed by network television, by the seven to eight minute time segments of entertainment, wedged between commercial breaks. On the other hand, the average sales presentation in the United States runs from one and a half to two hours in length. As a sales manager, you should easily figure out what’s wrong with this picture.

Those of you with complex products or services, or with large product lines may be saying to yourself, that it takes at least an hour to demonstrate all of the features and benefits of what it is you sell and another 20 to 30 minutes for questions and answers, right? Well, if you want more sales, help your staff to cut the length of their presentations down appreciably.

The $elling Edge®, Inc.’s Sales Success Strategies workshop, teaches a six-step selling process that can be completed, no matter how complex the product or service, in 30 minutes or less. We speed up the selling process, not only because of a decision-maker’s lack of attention , but more important, so that a sales professional can make more presentations in a given time period. And, the more presentations made over time, the more sales that are consummated.

You do the math. If a sales representative averages one and a half to two hours for each presentation as compared to an average of 30 to 40 minutes, how many more presentations can your staff make each year? How many more sales?

The six-step selling process, taught in the Sales Success Strategies workshops, is outlined in detail in a self-directed learning manual of the same name. You can learn more about it at: http://www.TheSellingEdge.com/manual1.htm

VIRDEN THORNTON is the founder and President of The $elling Edge®, Inc. an Ohio consulting firm specializing in sales and sales management training, personal coaching, advisory services and publishing. Clients have included Sears Optical, Eastman Kodak, IBM, Service Linen Supply, Bank One, Jefferson Wells International, and Wal-Mart to name a few. Virden is the author of the “best selling” Building & Closing the Sale, Prospecting: The Key To Sales Success and Close That Sale, a video/audio tape series published by Crisp Publications a division of Thompson Learning. He has also authored a client acclaimed Self-Directed Learning series of sales, coaching, telemarketing, and personal productivity manuals. To obtain a substantial discount on two of Virden's latest books, 101 Sales Myths or Organizing For Sales Success, go to: http://www.TheSellingEdge.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Virden_Thornton

Read More...

Presentation Planning - 5 Easy Ways to Streamline the Process

Practicing for presentations can waste more of your key personnel time then almost any other business activity. The possible exception being useless meetings! To maximize your planning efforts just follow these 5 easy steps. You will find that you can streamline the process and make Presentation Practice much more productive.

- There must be One Person in Charge. This person has responsibility for scheduling, coordinating and, perhaps most importantly, communicating with all of the presentation team members. Preferably this is a staff position working in Business Development who can be assigned the job. Never put a busy executive in charge of the day to day process.

- Select the Presentation Team Early. Be sure to determine who is required to be a presenter. Almost always the client wants to meet and hear from the people working directly on the project, not just the sales group.

- A detailed presentation schedule is mandatory. Everyone must understand what the plan is. At a minimum the schedule needs to show the following: Presentation date and time. Team practices and who needs to be present along with where and when practices will be held. A block of time needs to be allocated for preparing visual aids. They can be power point slides, presentation boards, handouts, leave behinds, or anything else that may need to be created for the presentation. The schedule needs to be distributed to all team members as quickly as possible to allow maximum time for individuals block out times in their personal schedules.

- When practices are scheduled everyone must be prepared to practice. This sounds redundant but I can't tell you how often I have heard people complain over what a waste of time a practice session was. Having a room full of people waiting for someone to finish the power point presentation slides is not where you want to be.

- Communicate everything pertaining to schedule with everyone as quickly as possible. Again, numerous times I have seen practice sessions rescheduled without letting everyone know. The result is always a conference room of senior staff with nothing to do! They didn't know the practice had been rescheduled.

Try these steps and you will be surprise at how much more productive your Presentation Planning will become.

Allen Jossim is a retired executive and freelance writer with much presentation and public speaking experience. Please go to his blog Public Speaking - You Can Do It! Where helpful information is always available.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Allen_Jossim

Read More...

Better Presentation Skills - Don't Care Too Much About What Happens!

Caring about your audience and how you do as a speaker is a good thing. If you don't care about what you do, how well you do it, or what the audience takes away from it then you are just apathetic and probably shouldn't be speaking to this group.

However, caring too much can be just as bad as not caring enough. By caring too much you actually reduce your ability to perform well. It sounds ironic, but the more importance you put on succeeding, the less likely you are to succeed.

Caring too much is the number one reason people feel nervous before they speak. There are many reasons you can care too much: you are afraid of being embarrassed, the speech is important to your career so you want to do well, you think the audience is hostile, etc.

Allowing these nerves in makes it very hard for you to perform your best. It is hard to speak naturally when you are freaking out!

This happened to me in my early speaker days, during one of my first "big" speeches. I walked in to the event with my speech prepared. However, before my speech I spoke with several of the attendees. I found out that the year before that had a world champion boxer as their speaker. Here I was, this young guy going to do this little comedy speech, when they were used to speakers who had been on the world stage! "There is no way they are going to like my stuff," I thought.

On top of that, I started discovering that a lot of these people were very successful. Way more successful than me. Also, this was my first "big" speech and I wanted to do really well so I could get referrals and follow up business. I was counting on it.

I got up to speak, but it was too late. I cared too much, and psyched myself out. The speech was ok (they didn't ask for their money back or anything) but I got zero referrals or follow up. Nada. Zilch.

I realized afterward that the problem was that I put too much importance on what the audience would think. I wanted to do a great job and give great value to the audience, but I realized that all I could do was worry about doing my best, and if they didn't like it, too bad.

Now, whenever I start to get nervous about a speaking engagement, or anything else for that matter, I remind myself to do my best and not care so much about what the audience thinks. When I do this, my nerves immediately calm and I am able to perform much better. I encourage you to try this before your next presentation.

To read about six more mistakes speakers make, and to watch a free 20 minute video on how to be authentic and natural as a speaker, and to download a one-hour MP3 on how to be a better speaker, check out http://www.avishparashar.com/speakingschool/ Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Avish_Parashar

Read More...