The Hello Bar is a simple web toolbar that engages users and communicates a call to action.

Presentations

Sellers generally love to make presentations. Unfortunately most presentations fail to keep buyers’ awake, much less lead to a win. Here are several ways to make your presentations better – more interactive, compelling and persuasive – and deliver your desired outcomes.

Ditches & Pitches

by Chris Arlen

Everyone makes pitches, some more formal than others. But with every presentation there are ditches to overcome. Ditches are the many, critical choices to be made before developing your pitch. They are [...]

click to continue → April 13, 2012

23 Tips for Delivering Great Sales Presentations via Web Meetings

by Chris Arlen

Web meetings are a fantastic tool for delivering sales presentations. Web meeting providers  (GoTo Meeting, WebEx, Windows Live Meeting, Adobe Connect, etc.) are eager to point out their benefits, such as:

click to continue → January 13, 2012

You are the Dog & Pony Show

by Chris Arlen

“Dog and Pony show”; late 19th, early 20th century term in the U.S. for small traveling circus whose main attraction was often a “dog and…” Late 20th, early 21st century: sales presentations [...]

click to continue → November 18, 2011

12 Tips for Great Sales Presentations

by Chris Arlen

Sellers need great sales presentations. However, the majority don’t have them.  As a sales consultant I’ve seen too many of their atrocities. Great slideshows are rare as oxygen on the moon. Minimally [...]

click to continue → February 2, 2011

Mea Culpa – Presentation Mistakes to Avoid

by Chris Arlen

The dumb things I’ve done in sales presentations are legion. This isn’t humility, this is fact. I’ve made these mistakes selling facility services. 14 years later, as a consultant running an RFP [...]

click to continue → September 29, 2010

Head in a Bucket

by Chris Arlen

Moving up the business food chain requires understanding nuances, whether as an employee inside or salesperson from the outside. Yet there are business practices that occur 1,000s of times and we botch [...]

click to continue → April 1, 2010

Strategy in Short-listed Presentations

by Chris Arlen

You receive the following email: Congratulations. You’ve been selected as one of the three supplier finalists in our RFP process for our (fill in the blank) service contract. We’re requesting your firm [...]

click to continue → October 17, 2009

Socrates & Sales Presentations

by Chris Arlen

There’s not a lot known about Socrates, (469 BC to 399 BC), but it’s fairly certain he didn’t provide sales training for presentations. However, he did provide a legacy of questioning used [...]

click to continue → May 20, 2009

True Sales Stories #1: The 10-Minute Scenario

by Chris Arlen

The following story is true. A security guard firm was bidding on a large, $1 million contract. The firm had successfully completed the customer’s RFP process, making the short list from 15 [...]

click to continue → May 12, 2009