« Older Entries
Newer Entries »

How to Pitch In 2 Minutes for Sales Presenters

It happens too often to ignore. You spend hours working on your elaborate presentation. You spit and polish your pitch with colorful charts, testimonials and a project plan. When you reach the meeting room, your client says, “Bob! I have to rush for an urgent meeting. Show me what you’ve got in 2 minutes.”

What do you say in those 2 minutes to create the impact of a 20 minute presentation?

There is no point searching for words at that point in time. You need to be ready with that pitch – upfront, if you want to make it big as a sales presenter.

Here is my suggestion to make your 2 minute pitch.

Take a sheet of paper and answers these three questions:

1. TANGIBLE BENEFIT: What is the one most important tangible benefit offered by your product? The benefit should be clearly measurable.

2. SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCE: How is your offering significantly different from any other such offering? The difference should be an obvious one.

3. CLEAR PROOF: What is the proof for your claim? The proof should be credible enough for the customer to accept without question.

Your answers to these questions are the 2 minute pitch.

There is a lot of science behind those 3 questions. They directly influence the decision making process of your customers.

Here is the caveat. Though the questions are simple and direct, the answers to those questions may not be easy to find.

Take the time necessary to come up with the best answers. Call up your existing customers, visit your ‘Product’ department or interview the highest producing sales people to get the clues. The time spent on this is worth its weight in gold.

In fact, creating this pitch should be your first priority as a sales presenter. The process will give you a lot of clarity about your product or service, which in turn will reflect as conviction in your voice when you make your next sales presentation.

Happy selling!

Tags:

How to Give Great Presentations at Work

What is a great presentation? As you might have already seen on the Internet, or read in books, there are many definitions of great presentations. Nevertheless, they all emphasize one point – a great presentation is one which, ideally speaking, completely holds an audience enthralled. It is not entirely true that only great personalities can give great presentations. To develop great presentation skills, which you will need, especially if you are a Six Sigma professional, you need to understand the anatomy of a great presentation.

Anatomy Of A Great Presentation

Unlike written reports where you have a chance to correct mistakes, presentations are a sort of ‘get it right the first time’ business activity. So, a considerable amount of preparation is necessary to make a presentation great.

1. All Great Presentations Are Well Researched and rehearsed in advance. You must determine how much information or statistics needs to be given in proportion to a plain lecture. Too much statistics defeats the purpose of your presentation and makes it boring.

2. Encourage The Audience To Have Confidence in you at the beginning by greeting them and briefly explaining the points you are going to cover during the course of your speech.

3. Presentations Are All About Scoring Points and winning over others to your opinions. Delivery skill is a vehicle of driving a point home. Statistical information should be presented in logical sequences and in the right doses.

4. Make The Presentation A Light-Hearted One wherever possible but without compromising on the seriousness of the matter. All great presentations are made in simple language using industry specific jargon, but not words that are too hard to understand.

5. Great Presentations Use Audio-Visual Aids for greater impact. This is based on the principle that a picture speaks a thousand words. Even a budgetary speech or an accountant’s presentation can use slide pictures.

How To Give Great Presentations

Begin with greeting the audience; end with asking their feedback and then thanking them. Announce that you will answer their questions later at the end of your speech. Apart from the apparent benefit this provides you, you get their undivided attention to your speech which is vital to your success.

Proven Steps To Give Great Presentations

Whether it is a formal speech to a large audience or an informal briefing, knowing your audience is vital to your speech preparation and helps you to relate it to them. Here are a few steps to making the actual presentation.

1. Judiciously Use Examples from everyday life or from past events to make your point quickly understandable. But don’t let examples occupy center stage.

2. Don’t Forget, Your Audience may have come from different departments within your organization. Each of them has different interests and different levels of understanding on your topic. Strive to address the needs of the entire audience, not just a select few.

3. Grasp Audience Responses that show whether and how much they like your speech. Make midcourse corrections to the tone of your speech if necessary. At this point you can engage them to lift their moods.

4. Extemporaneous Presentation goes a long way to make it interesting as this obviously eliminates the ‘report reading style’ and gives your speech a natural touch. You can use notecards if necessary, so that you don’t forget them.

5. Using Body Language Effectively. Make eye contact with members of the audience. Make gestures like hand waving, nodding and voice. Using body language in this way helps to break the monotony of a possibly long speech.

Giving a great presentations at work is not limited to just benefiting your organization. Use this vehicle to travel that extra mile to reach your career goals.

Tags:

Product Managers Know That Pricing Is All About The Presentation

How to correctly price a product has always been a bit of a black art for most product managers. The goal is to not price a product so high that nobody is willing to buy it, while at the same time not pricing it so low that you end up leaving money on the table. It turns out that the correct way to price a product has to do with its parts, not with its cost…

What Do Your Customers Value?

Pricing for a product comes down to two things: what are your customers willing to pay for the product and how satisfied will they be with the amount that they ended up paying for it? In order to create a price that will meet both of these customer expectations, product managers need to find the best way to present their product’s benefits to their customers.

This is where the problems first show up. All too often product managers spend their time (often at the request of their senior management) focusing on the cost of their product when instead they should be worried about communicating the product’s benefits.

The correct way to go about pricing your product is to view it not as a complete product, but rather as a collection of components (product, accessories, support, configuration options, documentation, etc.). Each component does not have the same value to your customer. This means that product managers need to take the time to carefully price each component so that it closely matches the value that the customer places on that particular component.

What Customer Pricing Experiments Show

Researchers Dr. Rebecca Hamilton and Dr. Joydeep Srivastava have studied how customers value different components of a product. They used auto repairs as the product that was being offered and they identified three different components of this product: parts, labor, and shipping (of the parts).

In their studies, the researchers discovered that customers valued parts more than labor, and parts more than shipping. The take-away from this research was that customers assigned a higher price to those things that they viewed as providing them with a higher benefit.

An important lesson for product managers came from the second part of the researcher’s study. Here they dropped the price for labor to nothing. That made customers nervous – somewhat surprisingly they preferred to pay at least something for this component. Clearly, dropping the price of a product’s component below an accepted threshold doesn’t make the product more attractive – it actually makes it less attractive.

Three Guidelines

The end result of the studies were the creation of three guidelines for product managers who are getting ready to price their products:

It’s All About Needs: Product managers need to make sure that they fully understand their customer’s needs. If your car battery needs to be replaced, you will be willing to visit a store and pay full price for a new battery and a big discount on the motor oil that you’ll need later instead of visiting another store that can offer you a small discount on both.
Bundles Work: The researchers found that product managers who can combine both high-value and low value components together in packages do the best. They also caution that a product manager should only take the step of offering low-value components for free if that is what the current market will allow.
Value Is In The Eye Of The Beholder: If a product that you are responsible for has a benefit that you think that customers should be placing a greater value on, then it is the responsibility of the product manager to do something about it. Specifically, you need to find ways to clearly communicate the value of that component to your customer in order to boost its value.
What All Of This Means For You

In the end, what your customers are going to be willing to pay for your product is going to depend on how valuable they view it as being. Product managers need to understand that their customers don’t see their product as a blob, instead they see it as a collection of multiple components that they place different values on.

In order to price a product correctly, product managers need to break their product up into the components that their customers see. Then those components need to be matched to your customer’s goals – what do they really value? Finally, high and low benefit components can be grouped together in order to boost your customer’s willingness to pay for the product.

Nobody ever said that pricing a product correctly was going to be easy. However, taking the time to understand how your customer views your product and the value that they put on the different components of your product is the key to doing pricing correctly. Get this right, and you’ll have found the secret to being a successful product manager!

Tags: