Cover story, continued ...
STARTWITH A STORY Narrative is one of the easiest ways to engage a crowd. More often than not, the goal of your presentation will be to sell something, but you won’t have much luck if you structure your talk to be an hour-long sales pitch. Instead, start by getting personal and sharing a compelling story with your audience.“Stories will make youmore likable, trustworthy, and interesting,”says Leslie Belknap, marketing director at Ethos3. Building this rapport early will pay dividends as your presentation unfolds. If you can hook an audience in the first five minutes, you’ll have their attention for the remainder of your time onstage. You can even build references to your initial story into later parts of your talk or pepper in additional stories throughout. Don’t be afraid to sprinkle in a little inoffensive humor. A crowd that’s laughing is a crowd that’s listening. USE VISUALS
points, but nomore. You should structure your presentation to emphasize your three most important points, touching on themmultiple times and inmyriad ways. To create these three concepts, ask yourself, “What are the three things I want the crowd to know by the time I’m finished?”It seems simple, but far toomany presenters fail do it. Too few takeaways, and you come off as airy and insubstantial; toomany, and you risk overloading your guests with information. Unless you encourage somebody to take action (i.e., buy what you’re selling), they have no reason to. However, don’t spend the bulk of your time onstage selling. Demonstrate the value of your product or service without beating people over the head with it. You’re not Ron Popeil, and a presentation isn’t an infomercial. You have to present your sales proposition as a natural part of your talk rather than tacking it on at the end. SELL THROUGHOUT, BUT SUBTLY
gifted orator. It’s also bound to alienate the visual learners in the audience. The more graphs, charts, animations, and pictures you can incorporate into your presentation, the better. To be frank, there’s a good chance most audience members will forget the bulk of what you say within a day or two. Striking visuals, though, might stay with them a lot longer. There’s just one caveat to go along with this advice: Put time into your visuals. A janky PowerPoint presentation will lower your credibility.“If it looks stock, it probably is,”notes Ryan Mack, president of Carrot Creative.“Altering an existing template doesn’t take a tremendous amount of time. It also indicates that the presenter knows how to represent the idea and narrative visually.”
FOLLOWTHE 3-POINT THEORY
In the desire to provide actionable takeaways during your talk, don’t give the audience too much to chew on. A good rule of thumb is that the average person can remember three key
Talking for an hour straight without any aids is a herculean task unless you’re a preternaturally
The Secret to Lead Conversion It’s All About the Relationship
FOLLOWUP, FOLLOWUP, FOLLOWUP
In the business classic“How toWin Friends and Influence People,”Dale Carnegie showed us that the secret to sales success builds on showing a genuine interest in other people and rests in the relationship that develops from there. The concept may not be much of a secret anymore, but it’s as important as ever in the sales cycle—and toomany people aren’t following through on it. It turns out that Carnegie was onto something. Did you know that just 2 percent of sales happen during the first touch? Two percent . Let that sink in. That means 98 percent of sales happen sometime after that first touch. In fact, ample research supports that 80 percent of sales happen after the fifth follow-up. If your sales team isn’t following up past that first touch with a prospect, there’s a slim chance they’ll convert. With the direct correlation between touches and conversion, it’s clear how important it is to follow up and nurture relationships with leads. We can look back to our good friend Dale Carnegie and thank him for sharing his wisdom about relationships. If you want to nurture and convert your leads, you’ll want to instill Carnegie’s principles into your sales team. Considering howmany quality leads get away, there’s always room for improvement in developing relationships. How can you start building that lead relationship today?
It’s all about the follow-up — or lack of follow-up, if you’re wondering why your leads aren’t converting. You’ve probably experienced it yourself: You have a great interaction with a company and express interest in their product, but then you never hear from them again. That company just lost you, a hot lead. You can’t buy if you’re not presented with the opportunity to do so. Make it easy on your consumer base by implementing a follow-up system. The habit of nurturing leads stems partly from company culture and partly from systems and processes— it’s something of a chicken-egg situation. If you don’t have systems in place tomake follow-up part of your sales process, it’s not going to be a priority for your team. And if you don’t have a culture of determination and relationship-building in place, the systems and processes don’t matter. Entrepreneur and business transformer Robert Clay recommends a five-no strategy— follow up with a lead until you’ve heard no at least five times. IMPLEMENT A SYSTEM
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