With a little practice and preparation, you can confidently deliver effective sales pitches and land more big-time special event business for your portable sanitation company. The factors that make a high-impact presentation are not as mysterious as you might believe; however, they are more complex than most people realize. Above all, successful presentations begin with intense preparation.
PREPARATION IS CRUCIAL
First, spend time brainstorming and discover every possible benefit your company provides to a special event client. You should be able to list dozens of them. This exercise alone should illustrate how important it is to choose the benefits you should discuss during the limited time you have to make presentations.
Make a list. This could be a great exercise for you or your managers to conduct with employees. From their perspective on the front lines of delivery and restroom service, they might come up with benefits your company provides that you have overlooked.
Determine which benefits are most important to your prospect and analyze your sales tools — for instance, brochures, testimonials or a rundown of your service protocol — before you use them. Take time to know and understand the different uses of all your tools.
Don’t be in such a hurry to talk. First learn the real needs of your prospect and select the right approach. With the right plan, your presentations will generate high impact.
Whenever you give a presentation to a potential lucrative event customer, speak from the heart and follow these tips for success:
Match the presentation to the audience
Salespeople commonly fail to recognize the different needs of potential clients and then to tailor their messages accordingly. A construction unit customer may be focused on the bottom line and a no-frills product, while the special event organizer is interested in aesthetics and providing a good mix of units to satisfy everyone in a big crowd. A successful sales person caters each presentation to the audience to maximize satisfaction for everyone.
Timing is everything
Timing is an issue of critical importance in the sales process. A sales leader focuses on the right benefits and uses literature and samples very differently during various phases of the sales process. Early in the process, you should use literature and samples to highlight issues related to product quality and selection. Later, you should educate the event planner on the logistics that will provide the best possible service for a big crowd.
Establish credibility
Rather than spouting the wonderful features of a particular restroom unit, enlighten the potential client about crucial sanitation issues they may face. Preemptively volunteer limitations of your service so the customer gains respect for you and your company. Consider sincerely complimenting your competitor. By demonstrating general knowledge of the industry and showing your value as an objective resource for information, you establish high levels of credibility.
Talk in chapters, not in novels
Carefully select the issues you will focus on with customers and talk in “chapters.” Try using shorter, more concise sound bites. Prepare in advance by listing all the benefits of your service or your company to create a presentation template. Then, take a moment to organize the benefits of each attribute and write out a short chapter for each one. This allows you to cover massive amounts of information in a short period of time and organize your thoughts effectively.
Create emotional interest
The purpose of the chapters is to focus on the specific issues of interest to the customer. People make decisions based more on wants than on needs, so concentrate on the emotional issues of your prospects. If you have a two-hour story to tell in just a few minutes, be prepared to focus on the most important issues, presented in a way that elicits a powerful emotional response.
There are two ways to make a presentation: from your heart or from your mind. Just as a good actor makes a movie or play engaging and believable with expressive dialogue, you can establish interest and credibility by speaking from the heart about what you sell.
A phenomenon discovered years ago indicates that vibrations are felt in unique and symmetrical ways. Striking the string of a guitar causes a vibration of the same un-plucked string of another nearby guitar. This became known as the principle of “harmonic resonance.”
The same principle exists in people. They will receive your message the same way it is delivered. If you speak with your head, they will receive your message with their minds. But when you speak with your heart, your message can actually touch the other person and make him or her feel differently.
LISTEN & LEARN
Finally, make sure to listen with your heart. If the issue is providing crack service for a big event, consider how you really feel about your service capabilities. This doesn’t mean you have to oversell. It merely means you need to honestly describe your feelings about how well you handle a high-profile event. Selling with your heart and your head will certainly lead you down the path of success.
