This article was written by a successful candidate who has just obtained a Heating Specification Sales role. He used this excellent PowerPoint presentation on “Solution Selling” as part of the interview. His methodology is explained below with links to the actual slides and notes.
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My simple process for a presentation of this kind is as follows;
- Devise your theme and summary with the important points you want to deliver to your audience
- Shape the presentation according to time available and audience knowledge
- Create an intro - why you think it’s important, what does not work and why, what does work and why its better, examples with facts and figures, and finish with a neat summary.
In many cases when delivering a presentation like this unless I had some graphs and numbers to share I probably would not use a PowerPoint presentation but simply deliver the message and offer to share a pre-prepared handout at the end summarising the presentation. As this was an interview I guessed they may wish to see if I could put a slide show together akin to the ones used for CPD's.
In terms of slide creation I tend to put some info on a slide pack but use it as a guide with a separate script of notes and for my time allocation of 10 minutes I think five slides is the max you can get away with.
I tend to create a presentation featuring the highlights of what I want to talk about, then add detailed notes and rehearse to assess time take and then iterate the presentation until I meet the time target whilst keeping the key themes. Once this is done I rehearse several more times to an imaginary audience and then reduce my notes to a series of easily identifiable words so I can make eye contact with the audience and only occasionally glance at my notes to keep the presentation shape and discipline.
I have attached an early draft and the finished version I used on the day (version 2). You can see the shape and emphasis had changed through several iterations, some according to time and some to enhance the impact. All about preparation I guess. The key difference between the early draft and the finished version of the presentations is the significant difference in the notes section (the presentation material looks very similar). The first illustrates how detailed my script is and the final version is always one with single words, phrases, or sentences to keep my presentation structure. I guess someone looking at the bare presentations may get a bit perplexed trying to see the difference.
Hope this is helpful for any of your candidates who may be required to make a presentation and have done little presentation experience. My over-riding concern is trying to put myself in the chair of the recipient - if I sat there listening would I be engaged and interested and does it make sense.
This is a really good approach to a presentation. Even though the subject matter is selling itself you have still managed to follow the disciplines of sales presentations.
I used to run workshops with sales engineers and they often would start with a list of features of the product they were selling which left the customer bored.
We used to get them to change the feature into a benefit by getting them to ask themselves the question, “and what does that do for the buyer”.
Your presentation approach tells a story which presentations should do.
We used to say:
1. Introduce what you are going to talk about.
2. Identify the problems that your product will solve so the buyer can identify with them.
3. Make the problems bigger by describing the negative consequences of not doing anything about them for the buyer.
4. Introduce your solution and how it solves the problems and delivers benefits to the buyer.
5. Give examples of how the same problems were solved for other similar buyers and how they benefited.
6. Summarize what you have told them concentrating on the benefits they would receive.
This approach owes a lot to the Spin System (http://www.salesxcellence.co.uk/SalesSkillsArticles/Spin_Selling/spin_selling.html) developed by Neil Rackham and sold by Huthwaite Ltd (http://www.huthwaite.co.uk)