Appoint a Team Coordinator

Your team coordinator must understand the presentation’s objective and be directly involved with all phases of presentation development. This coordinator must hold a position of authority in the organization to ensure that all decisions carry the proper weight. The coordinator should not be one of the presenters.

The team coordinator:
-Is responsible to management for execution of all presentation related activities.
-Reports status to management as required.
-Runs the daily stand-up meeting.
-Develops and provides themes and strategy to management.
-Prepares the audience analysis and confirms attendees.
-Collects audience concerns and questions as they arise.
-Gathers information (SWOT) on the competitors.

12 Essential Steps For Leading a Major Team Presentation

The stakes are high. A billion dollar deal is on the line. Your company has been short-listed by the customer and invited to present your proposal face to face in a four hour meeting. There is a lot riding on this for both parties. The customer wants to know what it’s buying but also, who it’s buying in this deal. So, they want you and your management and technical team leaders to take part. You have 30 days to get ready.

Over the coming weeks, we will look at a series of 12 essential steps to help you plan and manage your team’s presentation. Because each presentation is unique, all 12 may not apply to your situation but most of them will.


1. Appoint a Team Coordinator
2. Assign Responsibility
3. Conduct a Site Inspection
4. Convene a Kick-off Meeting
5. Review Key Points
6. Prepare Storyboards
7. Conduct a Preliminary Storyboard Review
8. Begin Segment Dry Runs
9. Make Final Content and Lineup Decisions
10. Conduct Team Dry Run
11. Conduct Final Dress Rehearsal
12. Make Final Preparations

Getting this right is a lot like getting a team ready to compete in sports or an army ready for battle. If you think this kind of preparation is overkill, think about how much is riding on the outcome. Think about what your competition is doing. Think about what Napoléon Bonaparte meant by this great quote:

“From the sublime (victory) to the ridiculous (defeat) is but a step.”

Good selling!

The Engagement - Salesperson as a Human Search Engine

Many amateur salespeople spend a lot of time and energy memorizing product features and benefits. What would you say if I suggested that this, in many cases, is a waste of your strategic sales planning time? Why? People with ultra-deep product knowledge, when engaged with customers, tend to spend a lot amount of time talking about their product…what it does, how it works, and why it's good for the customer. This invites objections, resistance and continuations from the customer.

The skilled salesperson spends time asking questions about the customer's problems - understanding how serious they are, and how important it may be to solve them. This line of engagement leads to follow on appointments, creates value for the customer, and, is strongly linked to sales success. When working in the account, a salesperson can be most effective behaving like a human search engine...a Google salesperson. Think about how Google works? Google uses a proprietary formula to "score" the relevancy of websites for each search query. The highest ranking or "most relevant" websites for a specific query are listed first in the search results. A Google salesperson knows the kinds of problems her products can solve and searches for the relevancy of the customer's problem in relation to her solutions. A Google salesperson's proprietary formula is found in the quality of the questions she asks. The Google salesperson asks insightful questions that - 1). Help her surface problems, 2). Help her prioritize them, and 3). Help her understand all the impacts these problems have on the prospects’ business. Once the Google salesperson finds a problem that the customer now believes is painful enough to solve, then and only then, does she bring in the marketing experts and sales engineers to help the customer understand all the benefits of her solution and seals the deal. Want to sell more? Ask questions, talk less, and listen more. Be a human search engine.

Good selling!

Solution Selling: What Separates the Best from the Rest?

We have all heard the stories of the superstar salesperson. This person has the magic touch, the gift of rapport and the innate ability to close deals. But as Malcolm Gladwell describes in his classic book Blink, often, the superstar’s natural abilities gives them skills that they don't really understand, can’t explain, and definitely can’t teach. Gladwell gives dozens of examples, such as a tennis teacher who knows when a player is going to double fault before the ball is struck but can’t say how he knows it. The tennis player that swears up and down that his secret to hitting a cross-court winner is in the way he rolls his wrist when in reality, super high-speed film shows that at impact, his wrist does not roll at all! So what are some of the things top sales performers actually do that make a difference and that are teachable and repeatable? Let’s take a look a short list of fundamentals - a list that Neil Rackham calls First Approximations (with a few modifications and additions from me!):

Top Performers
-Plans the call in detail
-Gets down to business quickly
-Asks insightful questions
-Holds back on talking product features and benefits early in the sale
-Ends the call by agreeing on joint “next steps”

Average performers
-Plans a presentation
-Spends too much time in boring small talk
-Does most of the talking and asks unfocused questions
-Jumps in early with product descriptions and PowerPoint
-Often ends the call with no action or agreement

In sales, in sports, and in life...there are often a few little things that make 80% of the difference. Those things usually include some very simple, repeatable, and teachable fundamentals.

Good selling!