Vendors, Again—8 Things To Do When Delivering a Technical Sales Presentation

In the last two days, I’ve sat through some of the most horrific sales presentations I’ve ever done—this was worse than the time share in Florida. If you happen to be a vendor and reading (especially if you are database vendor—don’t worry it wasn’t you), I hope this helps you craft better sales messages. In one of these presentations, the vendor has a really compelling product that I still have interest in, but was really put off by bad sales form.

I’ll be honest, I’ve never been in sales—I’ve thought about it a couple times, and still would consider it if the right opportunity came along, but I present, a lot. Most of these things apply to technical presentations as well as sales presentations. So here goes.

The top 8 things to do when delivering a sales presentation:

1. Arrive Early—ask the meeting host to book your room a half hour early and let you in. This way you can get your connectivity going, and everything started before the meeting actually starts, wasting the attendee’s valuable time, and more importantly cutting into your time to deliver your sales message. Also starting on time allows you to respect your attendees’ schedules on the back end of the presentation.
2. Bring Your Own Connectivity—if you need to connect to the internet (and if you have remote attendees, you do) bring your own connectivity. Mobile hotspots are widely available, and if you are in sales you are out of the office most of the time anyway, consider it a good investment.
3. Understand Your Presentation Technology—please understand how to start a WebEx and share your presentation. If you have a Mac have any adapters you need to connect to video. If you want to use PowerPoint presentation mode (great feature by the way) make sure the audience doesn’t see the presenter view, and sees your slides. Not being able to do this is completely inexcusable.
4. Understand Who Your Audience Is—if you are presenting to very Senior Infrastructure architects in a large firm, you probably don’t need to explain why solid state drives are faster than spinning disks. Craft your message to your intended audience, especially if it has the potential to be a big account. Also, if you know you are going to have remote attendees don’t plan on whiteboarding anything unless you have access to some electronic means to do so. You are alienating half of your audience.
5. Don’t Tell Me Who Your Customers Are—I really don’t care that 10 Wall St banks use your software/hardware/widget. I think vendors all get that same slide from somewhere. Here’s a dirty little secret—large companies have so many divisions/partners/filing cabinets that we probably do own 90% of all available software products. It could be in one branch office that some manager paid for, but yeah technically we own it.
6. I Don’t Care Who You Worked For—While I know it may have been a big decision to leave MegaCoolTechCorp for SmallCrappyStorageVendor, Inc., I don’t really care that you worked for MegaCoolTechCorp. If you mention it once, I can deal with it, but if you keep dropping the name it starts to get annoying and distracting.
7. Get on Message Quickly—don’t waste a bunch of time telling me about marketing, especially when you go back to point #4—knowing your audience. If you are presenting to a bunch of engineers, they want to know about the guys of your product, not what your company’s earnings were. Like I mentioned above, one of the vendors I’ve seen recently has a really cool product, which I’m still interested in, but they didn’t start telling me about the product differentiation until 48 minutes into a 60 minute presentation.
8. Complex Technical Concepts Need Pictures—this is a big thing with me. I do a lot of high availability and disaster recovery presentations—I take real pride in crafting nice PowerPoint graphics that take a complex concept like clustering and simplify it so I can show how it works to anyone. Today’s vendor was explaining their technology, and I was pretty familiar with the technology stack, yet I got really lost because there were no diagrams to follow. Good pictures make complex technical concepts easy to understand.

I hope some vendors read this and learn something. A lot of vendors have pretty compelling products, but fail to deliver the sales message which is costing them money. I don’t mind listening to a sales presentation, even for a vendor I may not buy something from, but I do really hate sitting through a lousy presentation that distracts me from the product.