When customizing a presentation, the salesperson determines a prospects needs by developing a

People love to be told a story, especially if it’s relevant to their experiences and problems.

Statistics, facts and figures can help when you’re trying to persuade a prospect to become a customer, but they’re more impactful if you can frame those statistics in a relatable way. For example, if you tell a story about an existing customer who faced the same challenges as your prospect, and supplement that with powerful data, they are more likely to listen and want to know more.

Human beings have a deep relationship with storytelling. Stories move us, teach us and, in a sales context, persuade us. We remember stories more than we remember anything else.

Chip Heath, a Stanford professor and the co-author of Made to Stick, demonstrates the importance of storytelling by doing an exercise with his students. He divides them into groups and asks them to deliver a one-minute persuasive pitch based on data he’s just shown them.

After the pitches have been delivered and there’s been a break, he’ll ask the class to jot down everything they remember about them. Although most students use stats rather than stories, 63% remember the stories, while only 5% remember an individual data point.

The stickiness of stories makes them a useful tool for developing a sales presentation outline, as they help prospects understand and remember the key points of the presentation and your product.

“Analogies or relatable stories are an extremely powerful technique to avoid using internal ‘jargon’ and allows the customer to understand the product/service in the real world,” explains Thomas Dredge, sales manager at Particular Audience.

“For example, explaining a display ad across the internet can be likened to a billboard on the side of a building. Sellers often confuse clients by using complicated language. They may believe this makes them come across as more knowledgeable, but it’s not a good way to sell. People buy things they understand. Help them understand.”

Your presentation is about the solution you’re offering your prospects, but it shouldn’t start with that solution.

Instead, you should begin with the problem your solution was designed to solve, and the challenges you’re solving for your customers.

“Value Selling is key,” says Bradley Davies, business development at Cognism. “It is important to understand your buyer and tailor their journey to what you can do for them.

“First you need to understand what is motivating them to have a discussion, which allows you to identify their pains and present how your offering solves their pains. Everything presented to a prospect should be based on the value for them specifically.”

The problem, their pains associated with it and your solution should be delivered with a story; a tale that highlights the specific challenges faced by your customers.

You might also choose to tell a story that positions your product as the hero, helping the customer vanquish a villain: their pain point.

Your story, which should be tailored to the prospects in the room, should focus on change rather than their pain point. For example, on a change to their business, industry, or to the technology they use — something that impacts and improves the way they do business.

“If an element of your offering is not relevant, then don't distract them from the important features. It will keep them engaged and help to build their user story,” adds Bradley

Create a sense of urgency around your product: It’s a solution to their problem, but if they don’t act now, they could miss an opportunity. Tell a story about what might happen if your prospect doesn’t change, framing the consequences of not taking action.

You’ve outlined the problem, and, if you’re doing your job, your audience is nodding along. Now it’s time to start talking about the solution.

However, that doesn’t mean you should launch into the features and benefits of your product just yet.

Rather than presenting your product, a good sales presentation draws a picture of what life could look like for a customer once they start doing things differently. How will their business or lives change for the better? How will their world change? Importantly, how will they reduce spending and increase revenue?

Then you can start talking about your solution and the features that can make this brave new world possible. Do this in a few ways:

1. Position your features against the old way of doing things

2. Present those features as “superpowers” that will solve your prospect’s problems

3. Compare those features to competitors’ features

4. Use a combination of some or all of the above

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Posted by: Lucid Content Team

If you are one of the 2.5 million employees in the United States working in sales, you know that even for the most natural salesperson, it can sometimes be difficult to turn potential leads into closed sales. Across industries, you need different skills and knowledge to prove to your potential customers that your solution is best for their particular problem.

The seven-step sales process outlined in business textbooks is a good start, especially since leading sales ops teams attribute to 60% or more of their total pipeline in any quarter to actively designed and deployed sales plays. The seven-step sales process is not only a good start to customizing it to your particular business but more importantly, customizing it to your target customers as you move them through the sales funnel.

As the old adage goes, “Learn the rules like a pro so you can break them like an artist.” Once you’ve mastered the seven steps of the sales process you might learn in a business class or sales seminar, then you can break the rules where necessary to create a sales process that may not necessarily follow procedure but gets results.

The textbook 7-step sales process

What are the seven steps of the sales process according to most sales masters? The following steps provide a good outline for what you should be doing to find potential customers, close the sale, and retain your clients for repeat business and referrals in the future.

1. Prospecting

The first step in the sales process is prospecting. In this stage, you find potential customers and determine whether they have a need for your product or service—and whether they can afford what you offer. Evaluating whether the customers need your product or service and can afford it is known as qualifying.

Keep in mind that, in modern sales, it's not enough to find one prospect at a company: There are an average of 6.8 customer stakeholders involved in a typical purchase, so you'll want to practice multi-threading, or connecting with multiple decision-makers on the purchasing side. Account maps are an effective way of identifying these buyers.

2. Preparation

The next step is preparing for initial contact with a potential customer, researching the market and collecting all relevant information regarding your product or service. Develop your sales presentation and tailor it to your potential client’s particular needs. Preparation is key to setting you up for success. The better you understand your prospect and their needs, the better you can address their objections and set yourself apart from the competition.

3. Approach

Next, make first contact with your client. This is called the approach. Sometimes this is a face-to-face meeting, sometimes it’s over the phone. There are three common approach methods.

• Premium approach: Presenting your potential client with a gift at the beginning of your interaction
• Question approach: Asking a question to get the prospect interested
• Product approach: Giving the prospect a sample or a free trial to review and evaluate your service

Dive deeper into the various sales approaches you can use to start a relationship off on the right foot.

In the presentation phase, you actively demonstrate how your product or service meets the needs of your potential customer. The word presentation implies using PowerPoint and giving a salesy spiel, but it doesn’t always have to be that way—you should actively listen to your customer’s needs and then act and respond accordingly.

5. Handling objections

Perhaps the most underrated step of the sales process is handling objections. This is where you listen to your prospect’s concerns and address them. It’s also where many unsuccessful salespeople drop out of the process—44% of salespeople abandoning pursuit after one rejection, 22% after two rejections, 14% after three, and 12% after four, even though 80% of sales require at least five follow-ups to convert. Successfully handling objections and alleviating concerns separates good salespeople from bad and great from good.

In the closing stage, you get the decision from the client to move forward. Depending on your business, you might try one of these three closing techniques.

• Alternative choice close: Assuming the sale and offering the prospect a choice, where both options close the sale—for example, “Will you be paying the whole fee up front or in installments?” or “Will that be cash or charge?”
• Extra inducement close: Offering something extra to get the prospect to close, such as a free month of service or a discount
• Standing room only close: Creating urgency by expressing that time is of the essence—for example, “The price will be going up after this month” or “We only have six spots left”

7. Follow-up

Once you have closed the sale, your job is not done. The follow-up stage keeps you in contact with customers you have closed, not only for potential repeat business but for referrals as well. And since retaining current customers is six to seven times less costly than acquiring new ones, maintaining relationships is key.

Want to nail the sales follow-up process? Follow our tips.

Now that you understand the basic seven stages of sales process development, you can begin to tailor them to your own product or service and customer base. Cut out steps that are unnecessary to your particular business and focus on your customer. You know the rules—now get ready to break them in ways that bring you closer to your customer and turn you from a sales professional to a sales artist.

Whatever approach you take, keep these fundamentals in mind:

Identifying the customer’s problem

You have a product or service you want to sell—now what? Anyone with a problem related to your area of expertise can be a potential customer. You'll need to dive deep into discovery work to learn each buyer's specific goals, needs, and pain points. 

Develop a solution for the customer

Once you have uncovered problems for your products to solve, tailor your offerings to fix those issues—and be prepared to explain how your product truly is a solution for the given problems. Sales engineers can use Lucidchart to visually demonstrate how their product or service solves client problems and makes their lives easier, such as the flowchart below.

Following up isn’t just for after the close to get repeat business. As stated before, most customers don’t buy right away. You have to handle objections and try, try, try again. This is where the seven-step sales process doesn’t account for repeated approaches, presentations, meetings, or phone calls where you handle objections. If it did, it might be a 13-step sales process or a 21-step sales process, or… you get the idea.

Bottom line: stay connected—set up a calendar for repeated contact with potential, present, and past customers so you're more likely to reach them when they're ready to buy.

What are the key steps in the sales process? Whatever your customers need them to be.

Once you’ve tried out a few different approaches, tweaking the original seven steps in the sales process to fit your customers better, document your successes so that you can follow the steps that work best and easily get new reps up to speed as they are onboarded.

Whatever steps you settle on, you need to document your sales process to ensure that sales reps follow it. Learn about sales process mapping.