The sales presentation stage is the core stage in any commercial action. That is why we must take care of all the aspects that make it up so that everything runs according to your objectives. What can these objectives be?

• Make your prospect (potential target customer) aware that they have a need or problem.
• Get them to understand that you can solve that problem or meet that need.
• Gain customer confidence for you and your company.
• Convince them to buy or hire your service.

Sales presentation from a neuro-sales point of view. 

•  Emotions are fundamental. We need to establish an emotional connection with customers. This will enable us to gain their trust, reduce their misgivings or objections, etc.
• We must highlight the customer's need and make them understand that the product is made for them. If they are not aware of this need, we must awaken it by highlighting what they are missing out on. Make the customer imagine what their life will be like once they have the product.
• Female clients require more arguments than male clients.
• Well-used fear is important: What does it mean not to have the product?
• Let your customer speak freely. In any sentence he can give you a useful key to the sale. 
• Offer alternatives if you can. Don't go overboard. You may confuse them and lose the sale because of indecision.
• Manage the social side of the relationship well: We are talking about establishing the right chemistry in the relationship with the customer.

Confirmation and Re-Discovery of the client's needs:

It is important that at the time of the presentation you already have a clear idea of what the customer's needs are, but be sure and ask questions, validate your hypotheses! Only in this way you will be able to offer your product or service properly and persuade the customer that yours is the best solution. 

Information about the customer and their needs can be obtained in multiple ways. If you are starting out, you have already identified those needs, so in theory you have already gone a long way. However, remember that every customer is unique and it is important that when you make a sales presentation you tailor your entire presentation to the specific needs of the customer in front of you.

Spend time thinking about who can give you the information and what questions you should ask them. Develop your active listening skills when questioning the customer himself in a pre-briefing meeting, a company technician, a current supplier of the customer, or even a customer of your prospect. Any source of information can be good to find out everything you need to know about your customer and the problems and needs you can solve.

Customers are not always aware of a problem or need. The customer may be in a state of homeostasis (equilibrium and satisfaction) with their current suppliers or the way they do things. Only the knowledge of something new that can bring an improvement in their processes, a cost reduction, a time saving or the creation of a new value for the customer will make them aware that there is indeed a problem, there is something to improve. Your skill is to make them see the advantages of your product and the benefit they can get from them.

The sales presentation is not the most appropriate context to inform you about customer needs. That is done beforehand, but it can help you to introduce your proposal and confirm those needs. But we recommend that you bring the homework done to the meeting with your customer. An added value is that you will be demonstrating to the client that you have taken the trouble to get to know him before you sit down in front of him.

The 10 minutes before your meeting with the client practice immersion, stop everything you are doing, forget your worries and focus on the person you are going to talk to! Review any notes you have, last conversations ..... refresh everything you know about them. Waiting times can be a good time to do this exercise. 

Offering the most appropriate product or service:

When you offer a product or service to a customer in a sales presentation, you do so because you understand that it is the most suitable product or service for the needs identified. But it is also important to make sure that your product matches the customer's buying motives. These motives can be rational or emotional and manifest themselves in the form of preferences. The most common ones can be brand preference, quality preference, price preference, design preference, etc.

Presentation strategies:

The marketer satisfies the customer's needs through three strategies: information, persuasion or recall.

Information strategy: The seller must ensure that the customer understands the message. To do this, they use information brochures, photographs, catalogues, demos, comparative data or graphs, expert testimonials. Sometimes sales presentations are made using multimedia resources such as videos, powerpoint presentations. 

This is an appropriate strategy for complex products. The salesperson can even be accompanied by an expert from his or her organisation to provide knowledge about the product, its advantages, ways of using it, etc.

Persuasive strategy: The goal is to influence the customer's beliefs, attitudes and behaviours in order to make the decision we are looking for. It is a delicate strategy as it can be interpreted as pressure selling and this can lead to rejection.

Recall or reinforcement strategy: When the customer has already gone through an information or persuasion process, the recall strategy helps to reinforce key concepts conveyed and puts the customer in a position to decide.

Regardless of the strategy selected, it is essential that the salesperson develops argumentation skills. The following tips should be taken into account in this regard:

1.-Do not start arguing until you have the customer's attention. People coming in and out of the office, mobile phone calls, etc. are enemies of the salesperson and it is advisable to wait until the interruptions stop.

2.-The fewer arguments the better: The retentive capacity for information is reduced, so a profusion of arguments should be avoided and only those that are necessary in each case should be used.

3.-When using a canned sales strategy, the arguments are the same for any customer. A good argumentation takes the customer into account and adapts to their specific needs and circumstances.

Use the most powerful arguments at the beginning. And don't shoot all of them, save cartridges to save doubts or to redirect.

5.- Make use of objective supporting information to reinforce your arguments.

6.-Argue more about advantages and benefits than about features. This is very difficult for technologists to understand. The important thing is not what the product is but what it does.

Approaches to sales presentations:

We have already looked at presentation strategies. Let's talk about the various dominant approaches and orientations in sales presentations. In any case, good salespeople use all these approaches with ease, depending on the moment of the sale. 

Let us look at the most important approaches. 

Stimulus response: It consists of leading the customer towards a predisposition to buy the product based on questions whose answers we know in advance. The continuity of answers always in the same direction makes it difficult for the customer to refuse the purchase.

An insurance salesman could use this string of questions to sell life insurance: You don't want your family to be homeless if you are gone because you can't pay the mortgage, you don't want your children to miss college if you are gone and there is no one to pay for their education, you don't want your family to be left without resources to get by when you are gone, you don't want your family to be left without resources to get by when you are gone, you don't want your family to be left without resources to get by when you are gone, you don't want your family to be left without resources to get by when you are gone, you don't want your family to be left without resources to get by when you are gone.

Good salespeople talk very little and listen a lot, they ask questions until they are clear about the need, and only after they are clear about it do they start talking. It's not about throwing a lot of mud to see if you get it right.

Formulated sales or pressure sales: It is an approach in which the customer's needs take second place and the important thing is to sell. The argumentation follows the so-called AIDA structure: acronym for Attention, Interest, Desire and Action.

Need-Satisfaction: The salesperson discovers the customer's needs and how to satisfy them. It is therefore an adaptive sales style. It is the most used approach because it is an adaptive approach (to different customer profiles); the salesperson can position himself as an expert consultant in the eyes of the customer and it also allows to take advantage of the best of other approaches.

DEMONSTRATION IN SALES:

The demonstration is a sales presentation tool that allows the customer to see the product in operation. Increasing competitiveness in the commercial environment has made demonstration a requirement for selling. 

The automotive industry uses demonstration to give potential customers a taste of cars and a sense of ownership. Promoters who give us a taste of a food or drink in supermarkets follow a demonstration strategy. 

In any case, the advantages are shared: The customer can evaluate the product, use it, touch it, smell it, taste it. The seller has reliable proof of his arguments. 

Demonstration awakens the customer's eagerness to own the product, saves time on presentations, builds customer confidence and reinforces the image of the seller, the product and the company.

Now that you have learned all about this Tip, you should be able to answer these questions:

1.-Do the exercise of creating your sales kit? What things do you think you should take with you when you go to meet the client to make the presentation?

2.- How do you think you can demonstrate your product or service?

What arguments would you use to persuade a client?