You had me at slide sorter…
I was where you often are. I have stood at the front of the room during hundreds of high stakes sales presentation. For many years I sold “the big iron”, big ticket medical imaging products.
But in the beginning it wasn’t pretty. I don’t remember any presentation skills training. Just hours of reviewing mountains of PowerPoint slides from our marketing dept. My first sales presentations were less than stellar. I took the years of experience I had as a community college level instructor and applied it to my medical equipment sales presentations. I combined my lecturing experience with about a zillion marketing slides full of features and even some benefits.
Spoiler alert!
I eventually discovered that lecturing highly educated medical professionals on your leading edge, state of the art, revolutionary, integrated, (place your favourite over used buzzword here) … solution can be boring for them. Really boring. One day I had an epiphany (that’s another story) and dramatically changed my presentation style. It wasn’t until I changed my style that I fell in love with sales presentations.
I love the creative challenge of it all. Taking so many different parts and pieces and putting them together into something that will persuade people to take a step forward with you. Or nowadays, take a step forward with one of my clients.
What did your intro to sales presentations look like? Trial by fire, here’s a laptop, that’s your projector, good luck? Or something more formal, like 3 weeks at head office learning product specs and features? How have you changed since you started out?
I would love to hear your origin story!
Joe Pops
R2BB