You’re A Salesperson in Your Life!

 

Strange as it could seem, our life is formed of a series of “sales presentations”. Sales might not be your gig, but if you’re the boss you’re making presentations everyday. Be it a pitch to your Board, announcing a policy change to employees, selling an idea to your spouse, or simply trying to win others over to your point of view – you would like to punch up your people skills for winning pitches.

Human nature is such people support solutions that they help create, so involve them by allowing your audience to participate with questions or ideas. It goes without saying that to not involve key people is risky because messages may be misunderstood. Your plans may be derailed before they start if sufficient “buy-in” is lacking. Use a lot of open-ended questions in your presentation to draw out the silent type.

Preparation is a key to success. Prepare your listeners for what’s coming during or before your presentation. Try these pre-meeting tactics:

Assign task-related pre-work. This could be pre-reading or study of a problem, and the preparations of possible solutions. An example can be, “go and visit three types of accounts before the meeting.”

Make pre-meeting contacts with those invited by email, phone, or in person. You might want to try an informal survey to urge people’s position on the problems at hand.

Remember support on key or controversial matters are often established before time by lobbying if you recognize where to lobby.

Do your research! People who make it look easy and are effective presenters have a hidden arsenal. This is an arsenal of up-to-date, organized material which will be accessed quickly in ready-to-use form when needed. They have the stats to copy their ideas, and that they have a mental arsenal of stories, examples, jokes, and ice-breakers to use when needed.

Your physical presentation could include tangible items concerning the difficulty like recent articles clipped from newspapers or magazines, photographs, reports, and demonstration property. To become masterful during this art learn to take care of resources you'll access for just the proper thing at the proper time.

The next thing you want to do is to elucidate “why?” the only most powerful thing you'll do to convince your audience of something is to supply a convincing reason why they ought to do what you suggest or believe what you say. People want and wish a transparent “WIIFM” – “what’s in it for me?” – to be able to react positively to what you want them to do. It’s extremely important that you simply deliver a vision of advantages . Hearing the “why” won’t automatically generate a “yes” to your proposition, but it’ll open the door for receptivity to your idea.

Knowing and accepting the “why” satisfies a basic need that we all have – to know the aim of our actions. Use the words “because” or “so that” in your presentation then finish the phrase. When your material is controversial or likely to get emotions, it's essential that your “why’s” be tested in advance. Ask some people you trust or that are on your “team” to play devil’s advocate to help you together with your logic and arguments.

These are just the first four points for creating a successful presentations. There are eight of them in total, and we’ll check out the other four in my column next week. For now, let me leave you with this thought.

Life is a sales job from starting to end. From the moment that we discern the way to get approval as children, winning friends in school, getting our first beau, getting our first (and subsequent) job, getting engaged and married, achieving our goals, and anything you'll think of in between – we’re selling ourselves or our ideas all along the way. Who said you weren’t a salesperson?