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We
often hear the question, “How much of our company’s corporate
overview presentation should we include in customer meetings?”
Good question.
The answer: as little as possible!
Many salespeople and technical staff feel comfortable opening a
meeting with a “brief” overview of their company. Most
customers refer to this as “Death by PowerPoint”!
Why? Because at the beginning of such a meeting, the customer is
not interested in the vendor’s history. The customer is interested
is seeing if the vendor can help the customer address their Critical
Business Issues (CBI’s) or enable the customer to achieve their
objectives. Making the customer wait and listen to 3, 6, 10 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 follow-up meeting that takes place after an initial
meeting, this slide simply recalls the information gathered previously
from during qualification/discovery discussion(s). You should list:
- The customer’s name and job title for each major player
or department.
- The CBI’s, Reasons, and Specific Capabilities needed for
each player or department.
- The Delta for each situation (you may want to create a Situation
Slide for each major player or department involved).
The “Critical Business Issue” (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 re-phrase this as:
- VP of Sales, Acme Software
- CBI: Concerned about achieving forecasted revenues
A “Reason” is the issue behind the top-level problem
that makes it a problem. In our example above, a typical Reason
might be expressed by our VP of Sales as, “The reason I’m
concerned about making our numbers this year is that we are having
difficulty closing the technical sale – there is miscommunication
and misalignment between our salespeople and the pre-sales Systems
Engineers, and their demos are simply not getting the job done!”
Your growing Situation Slide would then look like this:
- VP of Sales, Acme Software
- CBI: Concerned about achieving forecasted revenues
- Reason(s): Not closing the technical sale, due to miscommunication
and unsuccessful demos
The “Specific Capabilities” are those capabilities expressed
by the customer as needed to address the CBI. Our VP of Sales might
say, “We need training to improve the communications within
the Sales Teams and to enable our demos to generate a ‘Wow!’
response on the part of our customers.” The Situation Slide
would reflect this:
- VP of Sales, Acme Software
- CBI: Concerned about achieving forecasted revenues
- Reason(s): Not closing the technical sale, due to miscommunication
and unsuccessful demos
- Specific Capabilities: Intra-Sales Team communications and demonstration
effectiveness training
Finally, the “Delta” is a measure of the difference between
the way things are today vs. with a solution in place. In our example,
the VP of Sales might share that, “Right now it looks like
we are about $1,500,000 short of achieving our annual quota.”
The complete Situation Slide would then look like:
- VP of Sales, Acme Software
- CBI: Concerned about achieving forecasted revenues
- Reason(s): Not closing the technical sale, due to miscommunication
and unsuccessful demos
- Specific Capabilities: Intra-Sales Team communications and demonstration
effectiveness training
- Delta: $1,500,000 in annual revenues
Situation Slides enable the sales team to “recall the facts”
and start the meeting with the customer’s issues. By presenting
the Situation Slide, the sales team can confirm that (1) their information
is correct and accurate or (2) determine whether there have been
any changes since the last meeting with the customer.
In the case of an introductory meeting, you would use the same
format for the Situation Slide, but instead of listing the specific
customer’s Situation you may need to list another, similar
customer’s situation (known as a “Reference Story”
and sanitized to remove any confidential customer information or
specific names).
Once the facts have been recalled or the Reference Story presented,
you have the choice either to drill deeper into qualification questions
(particularly if the meeting is “Vision Generation” in
purpose) or proceed directly into a demo or other method of offering
proof.
When should you present the information in the corporate overview?
The answer is when the customer asks for it, specifically. Once
you have shown that you have capabilities that can help the customer
address their business issues, then the customer will begin to ask
questions about your company – and, the answers then have relevance.
For example, if the customer is contemplating a deployment into
three countries, then they may ask, “Do you have sales and
support offices in the U.S., Germany, and France?” Providing
the answer at the beginning of the meeting makes no sense (particularly
if your standard presentation describes showing sales, customer
service, customization, and training offices in 54 countries around
the world – the customer is only interested in the three regions
they occupy).
Most corporate presentations are entirely vendor-focused. As an
exercise, review your corporate overview presentation from a customer’s
perspective. Ask yourself, “What information really captures
my interest?” It is likely that the answer will be, “Very
little!”
As a final tip, for sales and marketing teams that simply must
start with a corporate overview, work to reduce it to a single slide
that focuses on the top-level business issues that your tools address.
Focus on the customer’s interests first – and enjoy the
rewards of crisper sales!
Copyright © 2005 The Second Derivative – All Rights Reserved.
For more on demonstration effectiveness skills and methods, visit
www.SecondDerivative.com.
For other articles like this, as well as tips, best practices, tools
and techniques, join the DemoGurus Community Website at www.DemoGurus.com.
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