Best Practice #23: Routinely makes powerful persuasive presentations
In my first professional sales position, I spent six full weeks in sales training before I was released to go out into my territory. That included memorizing two five-page, single-spaced sales
presentations, presenting them to the sales training class, critiquing the video-taped playback of the presentation, and then doing it all again – for six weeks! At the end of those six weeks, every one of us could give those two presentations masterfully.
While the use of prewritten, memorized sales presentations still continues today, it’s only rarely used in the business-to-business
selling environment. It may be that today’s frantic pace of new product development makes the time it takes to memorize a sales presentation seem less valuable. I’d like to think it may be that today’s salesperson is more sophisticated and able to adjust the sales presentation to the needs of each individual customer.
While memorized presentations may be a vestige of years gone by, that in no way
reduces the need to make a well designed, practiced sales presentation. The ability to routinely make powerful, persuasive sales presentations, regardless of the customer or product, is one of the practices of the best.
