As part of my job I have to deal with vendors trying to sell me stuff. Big vendors, small vendors covering a wide range of technological marvels and services. Unbeknownst to them, I only talk to vendors for two reasons A) I called them in myself. B) I was asked to attend by someone else. If a vendor is there for option A, I have already done my research, reference calls, technical checks and you are on a very short list of vendors I am spending my precious time with. In option A, all you have to do is answer my questions to my satisfaction better than the other guys. If it's option B, I am there to ask the tough questions or listen. I will be bored if I have no interest or decision in that vendor being there.
Either way, I have sat through many, many sales presentations and I have given many sales presentations in my former sales life. Today I sat through one of the most unorganized, embarrassingly sloppy powerpoint presentation in a long time. What was so bad about it was that there were 6 or more suits there to support this and the company is huge, big player. So instead of paying attention to the subject matter, I paid attention to the faults and came up with this post to throw out a list of simple things vendors can do to help them look polished. The subject matter was no where near my job or department, I had to do something to look engaged.
Powerpoint is a tool and with that tool comes a level of practice and understanding on how to use it effectively as to not have guys like me write blog posts about sloppy attempts.
- Review Your Deck - A simple process. Take a few minutes before you get onsite and check all the slides, colors, alignments, fonts. Doing this will prevent 99% of the stupid moments that make you look...stupid. It also shows that you took a little time to prepare. Because when I see font colors not matching, alignments off, bullets points not matching, it looks like to pieced it together with cut and paste, I think that if you don't care to polish your one chance to sell me, how do you operate with other tasks?
- Color Schemes - Contrasting colors. It must be read 20 feet back without straining. Black on White, White on black.... today they had from a bad cut and paste job black on dark orange boxes with black background. You couldn't read half of it. If they did bullet point #1, this would have been caught.
- Learn Your Slides - When you are up there in front of your audience you are the expert. You are the one that is supposed to know everything about the subject. You put the deck together, it's your material, you should know it inside and out. Today one of the guys hit a slide, he acted like he never saw it before. He stopped, read it, then said "This slide looks like it's explaining this...." Bullet #1, problem solved.
- Don't Guess or Estimate Stats - Your deck, your info, your expertise. Don't throw into the presentation estimated savings, "about 80% or so...". Don't pad numbers, "they had roughly 95 to 100 issues". Room for error, I estimate down.
- Simple, Simple, Simple - A powerpoint slide should be able to be scanned and consumed in 20 seconds. If you have 30 icons and a full architectural diagram for a sales pitch, you lost me. There's a time for complexity, you need to sex me up with flair. 5-7 text points of no more than 1 sentence each, 5 icons per slide. Clutter bores. You are the star and in the spotlight, not the deck. If you have to rely on the deck to make the sale, get a new job.
- Timing - Always leave 10 minutes at the end for questions and discussions. If you suck up an entire hour with slide after slide, you will bore them out of their mind and make them run for the door when it's over. no more than 40 min in length, tops. Conversation, personality, likability, that's what they buy. All the products are the same, get with the program. In IT, people buy the people with the products that work.
Easy tips that I came up with from one really bad presentation that violated all those rules.
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@binaryblogger
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