Modern Selling

Bullet points are lazy and kill a presentation says M62's Nicholas Oulton.

Here's a prediction, you read the bullet points above and agreed with most, but you didn't understand 9 and so looked down the page for an answer?

Right? Why was that?

The answer is that, if you see - or in this case read - something you don't instantly understand, you pay it more attention in an attempt to understand it (an effect called Cognitive Dissonance). When PowerPoint slides don't make sense you get a similar effect that I call 'Visual Cognitive Dissonance', the purpose of which is to encourage engagement, without which audiences remember nothing of the content of your presentation.

1-3 (above) seem obvious but, depressingly, they are the most often ignored by presentation authors. I have lost count of the number of times sales people come to consultancy sessions with me with presentations that sell the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong time in the sales cycle. Time spent thinking through objectives and planning the sales approach is time well spent but, thanks to PowerPoint's ability to allow us to edit an existing presentation, salespeople (not normally known for avoiding short cuts) have a bad habit of rehashing old material instead of thinking through the content of the presentation first and looking for appropriate material afterwards.

4 is all about value, and it needs to be articulated clearly, simply and repetitively. Once more, my experience - based on 4,500 sales presentations - is that what is obvious to you as a sales person is rarely obvious to a prospect. Again, it seems trite to say, but value lies in benefits not features and not advantage, so make sure your presentations articulate real value.

6 is called justification. Because buyers assume you are, at worst, lying and, at best, exaggerating, you need to back up claims like 'We will improve your sales conversion rates by 20-30%' with hard evidence such as 'Here are the 4,500 presentations that we used to do the same for our other clients!'

8 is just a simple fact: bullet points in a presentation simply don't work. They are counter-productive and ineffective. If you eliminated all the bullet points in your presentation it would be better. The issue is what to do instead and that would take longer to explain than the space available here.

10 is also obvious and clearly linked to 3. However, you would be surprised (or maybe alarmed) at the number of highly paid salespeople who tell me it is inappropriate to close. Neil Rackham* has a lot to answer for. Clearly, aggressive small sales techniques do not work in more complex big-ticket sales and Rackham?s observation that closing too hard and too aggressively can damage the sale is accurate, but this can lead salespeople into not bothering to close at all.

Thanks for reading the article. What do you think the most effective next steps for you should be?

PS Point 5 was ignored for the sake of simplicity!

*Author of the seminal work Making Major Sales.

My Question / Comment Is...