Stop selling!—1: Two barrels

(This is a piece about not using presentations to smuggle in sales pitches.)

Imagine you have two barrels.  One is full of expensive wine, the other is full of urine.

Transfer a tablespoon or two of wine to the barrel of urine.  What do you have left?  A barrel of expensive wine, and a barrel of urine.

Transfer a tablespoon or two of urine to the barrel of wine.  What do you have left?  Two barrels of undrinkable liquid.

Unless a presentation is advertised to be about the history of your business, the services it offers and their benefits, leave all of that out.

At best, this material will be irrelevant to the bulk of the presentation;  but usually it will be interpreted by the audience as a sales pitch.  I think speakers put in this content because they think it justifies why they are speaking to the audience (and they think the audience needs to hear a justification).  But a much better endorsement is the content of the presentation itself.

Unexpected sales pitches are never greeted with enthusiasm.  People don’t like being sold to without their permission.  Sales pitches, in what the audience was led to believe was going to be a presentation designed to be of interest and help to them, particularly antagonise the audience.

Putting your sales pitch at the end is particularly divisive since, until the sales pitch was started, the punters thought you really were being helpful;  but now, at the end, you’ve revealed your true colours. All along it was just about your need to sell to the audience, after all.   And now you’ve let them down.  At least, if you do it at the start, people know the context in which to receive the content of the whole presentation:  ie, the whole thing is a sales pitch.

Sales pitches in presentations invariably come across as needy.  They imply that, even when you’re supposed to be helping the audience, in reality your primary need shows through.  The truth is that, punters will be far more impressed by someone who spends the entire presentation being of value to them than by people whose fear of not getting enough clients pollutes the whole event.

Related material
>  Stop selling!—2:  Be clear who it’s about

by Jeremy Marchant . © 2015 Jeremy Marchant Limited . uploaded 5 april 2015 . image:  Free images