HOW MUCH OF YOUR PRESENTATION SHOULD BE ABOUT YOUR COMPANY

HOW MUCH OF YOUR PRESENTATION SHOULD BE ABOUT YOUR COMPANY

Death by Corporate Overview
by Peter Cohan
Published on April 19, 2005
Tags: Marketing Smarter, PowerPoint, Sales

We are often asked, "How much of our company's corporate overview presentation should we include in a demo meeting?" Good question. The answer: as little as possible!

Many salespeople and technical staff feel comfortable opening a demonstration meeting with a "brief" overview of their company. Most customers refer to this as "Death by PowerPoint."

Why? Because at the beginning of such meetings, customers are not interested in vendor history—they only want to whether a vendor can help address their critical business issues (CBIs) or enable them to achieve their objectives.

Making the customer wait through and watch and listen to three, six or ten or more slides from a standard corporate overview presentation about the vendor is just cruel!

Instead, start the meeting with a "situation slide."

In the case of a technical proof demonstration, this slide simply recalls the information gathered previously from during qualification/discovery discussions. You should list the following:

The customer's name and job title for each major player or department

The CBIs, reasons, and specific capabilities needed for each player or department

The desired change/result ("delta") for each situation (you may want to create a situation slide for each major player or department involved)

A CBI is a problem that the customer sees as important enough to invest resources to address. It is best to use the customer's words, such as "I'm concerned about our ability to achieve our forecasted revenues this year," which might come from a VP of Sales. In your situation slide, you would rephrase this:

VP of Sales, Acme Software
CBI: Concerned about achieving forecast revenues

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Read more: http://www.marketingprofs.com/articles/2005/1465/death-by-corporate-overview#ixzz1KJKipRBI

MY THOUGHTS

It'll be good to remind yourself that your presentation is not a company orientation.