If we could speak face to face, I am certain we could debate this point for hours. The answer lies in the type of salesperson you are. If you are a price-based, transactional seller, you position your product or service as a commodity and so you want the opportunity to go last in every presentation situation. This way you are in the best position to beat the competition with a lower price. If you go last, you can always ask the customer what prices he or she has received from other vendors and then indicate your willingness to offer the lowest price.
This is not selling as I understand the word, but of course you know that by now, having read this book up to this point. In
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fact, this kind of selling almost sounds like an auction, and auc-tions can be done on the Internet, without direct involvement of sales professionals. I do not advocate that you compete on the basis of price, although I do acknowledge that there are situa-tions when you may need to use price as one element of your overall sales process. Some of these situations will be due to circumstances beyond your control, and others will be due to flaws in your sales process or sales strategy. Either way, compet-ing on the basis of price is usually not the formula for a success-ful, long-run sales career.
If you are a value-based, relationship-oriented sales profes-sional, however, you will want to always go first to make that presentation! In fact, you can almost make going first a condi-tion of your delivering a presentacondi-tion at all. When the customer lets you know that you are among two or three finalists, an-nounce right then and there that you would like to go first.
The reason for going first is simple: you are well prepared.
The preparation traces back to a point made in Chapter 5, on sales discovery. By asking a question along the lines of ‘‘What do you value in a relationship with a company like ours?’’ you probed for the customer’s current buying criteria. Knowing the customer’s criteria, you aligned those criteria with key value points in your solution.
Going first also sends the message that you have done a lot of hard work to develop the solution you propose. Likewise, it tells the customer that you believe in that solution and stand behind it. Going first also positions you as the vendor against whom all others will be judged. It says that you want to be the one to set the bar over which any other competitor must jump in order to win the business. By going first, you become the standard bearer for your business.
Polish Your Presentation Skills
I assume that you are familiar with the techniques of public speaking, to the extent that they apply to small-group presenta-tions. This is not a book on public speaking. And if this is a weakness for you, you should consider working with a coach to develop your skills. For our perspective here, I give just a few tips.
To begin, you should divide the room into two, three, or four segments, depending on the size of the audience. Finalist pre-sentations rarely exceed ten participants; if that is the case, three segments may be enough. One segment can be on the right-hand side of the room (from your perspective), one segment can be directly in front of you, and one segment can be on your left.
A standard presentation technique is to address each seg-ment of the room in turn, starting on the right and moving to the center, and then to the left. The reverse also works just fine.
By making eye contact with each room segment, you can ensure that you are drawing each person into your presentation. If you notice that someone is not paying attention, you can ask a gen-eral question to try to bring the individual back into the presen-tation. For instance, a question that requires everyone to raise his or her hand in agreement might be good at this point. This way, you do not have to focus on the person that is disinterested, but you can still get them involved in the presentation.
If asking a general question requiring everyone to raise a hand in agreement does not work, try asking a question directed at the inattentive person. Make sure it is a soft and easy ques-tion, as there may be a reason they are distracted and you do not want to alienate. You can also physically move closer to the per-son, gliding into his or her personal space, and gently remind the individual to pay attention to what you are doing—being
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careful, of course, not to alert the rest of the group or call out the individual.
In addition to segmenting the room and addressing each room segment in turn, you can specifically address each person as his or her need or objective is discussed. I remember people telling me about Frank Sinatra when they had seen him in con-cert. They typically saw him in a large concert hall such as the ones in either Las Vegas or Atlantic City. Yet each person de-scribed the experience in the same way. They all said that he made you feel as though you were the only person in the concert hall. That’s exactly how you want each person to feel as you ad-dress their specific concern, objective, or need.
Always Be the Standard Bearer
Selling is all about setting, managing, and re-setting the stan-dards or perceptions that customers have of what is important in a relationship with a company like yours. The customer usu-ally enters a given sales transaction believing that he or she will select the company that will meet the current set of needs. Your job is to understand and then manage this belief until the cus-tomer’s buying criteria align with the strengths of your solution.
The extent to which you can manage those customer percep-tions and criteria is a function of where you enter the sales cycle.
If you enter early, you have a lot of time to accomplish this, and time improves your chances of being successful in the sales process. If you enter in the middle of the cycle, not only do you have less time to manage customer perceptions but also the competition has had time to get involved. This complicates the picture for the customer and may be one reason that customers frequently revert to price as their key decision-making criterion.
Everything else being equal, they select the least expensive
solu-tion. Fortunately, you have the ability to ensure that criteria other than price dominate the customer’s decision-making process.
If you enter the sales cycle late, you are in a tough position.
First, you have only limited time to manage customer percep-tions. You can have little, if any, impact on the decision-making process. What’s worse, there is a good chance that the competi-tion has shaped those customer percepcompeti-tions and you have to align your strengths to these competitor-based criteria. There is little, if anything, you can do at this point except to compete on the basis of price.
Ultimately, your best option if you frequently enter the sales cycle at the end is to ensure that you have a full pipeline of prospects to counterbalance your losses. If possible, don’t put yourself in this position, whereby you rely on one or two oppor-tunities to reach your sales goals. Since most customers have recurring buying patterns, entering the sales process consis-tently late is likely to lock you out of later sales as well. If you realize that your customer purchases items like the ones that you are selling, and you are not well positioned for the current sale, think about how to properly position yourself for the next sale.
First to Customer
Where you enter the next sales cycle and the ones that follow after that are a function of desire, process, and strategy. The fact that most customers go to market one or more times a year provides you with the opportunity to be ‘‘first to customer’’ in every sales cycle after the first sales cycle.
Being first to customer gives you the maximum time in each sales cycle to manage customer perceptions. Additionally, one
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sales cycle can blend into another over time, and so effective management of customer perceptions becomes an ongoing part of your sales relationship. Your job is to use the large-account strategy to select customers who will allow you to maximize your sales growth, then make managing customer perceptions a key ongoing responsibility. In so doing, you will see how much sense it makes to go first in every finalist’s presentation you are part of. Being first to the customer to present your solution set is a powerful sales strategy.