Do You Say This Before Your Sales Presentation?

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Some time ago, I posted a question on LinkedIn asking for the worst cliches that are frequently used by salespeople. We received a fairly decent number of responses and one of them inspired this post.

From Tim, a good friend:

“…so I’m going to just blow through a few of these and then we’ll get right to the demo.”

Are you guys trained to say that? Because everyone says it – right before they dive into 30-45 minutes of slides!

Tim, Tim, Tim, don’t you understand that those slides are pure gold! Our marketing departments, executives, and product managers, maybe even our SVP of Sales, have spent hour upon hour, crafting those mini-dissertations to provide you, our customers, with a comprehensive, 360-view of our company, our vision, maybe a picture of the boss’s new Porsche, and the overwhelming value that we deliver. You just need to be more committed.

Jeez.

I’ll admit, I have given presentations where mentally I’m was asking myself “Where is the point in this?”

Guy Kawasaki, (if you don’t know who he is, you should), has an excellent guideline for high-level, executive presentations called the 10/20/30 rule.

It breaks down like this:

• 10 Slides

• 20 Minutes

• 30 Point Font

The reason people use a small font is two-fold: first, that they don’t know their material well enough; second, they think that more text is more convincing. Total bozosity.

Here’s Guy’s post

Note: there are more reasons why your presentations don’t impress – here are a few others.