Suffering from Pre-Presentation(Proposal) Syndrome? Here are some tell-tale Symptoms:
- Chasing a Decision after presenting valuable solutions...Painfully long sales cycles, prospects that hide & voice
mail jail - Dealing with objections, stalls and put-offs during and after your presentation like "we don't have the time to implement that" or "we didn't think it would be so expensive" or "Great presentation and solution, looks really good, give me a call next week..."
- Getting a lot of "think it overs"
- Sales Forecasting and pipeline management are inaccurate
- Shrinking margins and dismal quote to close ratios
- Finding yourself trying to convince your prospect to buy from you during presentations
One of the biggest sales mistakes is jumping into presentation mode way to early. The prospective client asks a few simple questions and we immediately start singing and dancing eager to show our expertise and product knowledge. Unfortunately, this places us in the category with all the other typical salespeople who are all chomping at the bit to tell their story. The above symptoms, or frustrations from PPS typically stem from awareness & execution issues relative to underlying gaps within the qualification stages of the sales process.
Why is it important? Before presenting a solution it's necessary to determine the reasons to do business by qualifying, or disqualifying deals in a way that clarifies, for both sides, whether it really makes sense to proceed. If you fail to uncover the complete picture of the situation & objectives (including their budget & their decision making process), you can misdiagnose the problem and set yourself up for undesirable scenarios. As David Sandler said "There is a difference between willing and able."
One likely scenario is burning time, money & resources pursuing an opportunity that either doesn't exist or isn't a good fit for the solution you can provide. Another scenario may be presenting your solution without the key decision makers only to find out your contact was bench-marking the incumbent with your scope and pricing. Similar scenarios like these two can cripple the efficiency, effectiveness and profitability of an organization.
How do you cure PPS? We have a rule that states - The Best Sales Presentation You Will Ever Give, the Prospect Will Never See Now, Don't take that literally...Obviously there is a time and place to present your solution and talk about the features and benefits of your products or services. The takeaway from Sandler Rule #15 is that you should always be helping the prospect discover the best reasons to buy from you, not telling them why they should. The prospect should know that they’ll be buying from you long before you present your final pitch or proposal.
To do that you must execute defined qualification stages in your process with strategically crafted questions and 3rd party stories (i.e. indirect situation or story that the prospect can envision and relate to). Craft your questions by leveraging your product knowledge and industry experience. Show your knowledge by the questions that you ask. Not by the information you dispense.
People don't buy simply on your say-so and they resist being told what to do (or to buy!). A prospect must go through a period of self-discovery before making the decision that your product or service is the right solution. When you ask questions that lead to a discovery, the prospect then “owns” the discovery and the resistance disappears.
After all, people don’t tend to argue with their own data. Once all the necessary data is collected to qualify the opportunity and if there is a fit, it's now time to leverage your expertise and the data collected to develop a winning solution and presentation to obtain one of two things. Preferably A YES, or a NO.
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