Stellar sales presentations lead to impressive sales, success for your reps, and a promising future for your company. Therefore, when you improve and perfect your sales presentations, you set your team’s course in the right direction. What can you do to help your sales team perfect their sales presentations?

Keep Your Presentations Up-to-Date

By keeping your presentations current, you present the image of a cutting edge expert who can help your customers navigate the current and coming trends in their industry. If your sales presentations sound dated or generic, you could lose business to those whose presentations are more current. What can you do to keep your presentations up-to-date?

• Relate your services and products to current industry trends
• Know how your industry fits in to the global economy and what forces affect it
• Understand the current issues facing your customers and address them in your presentation

When your sales reps know and understand the current state of your customers’ industries and they include this information in their sales presentations, they come across as trustworthy thought leaders and experts.

Seek Criticism and Then Incorporate It

Nobody likes criticism, but really taking criticism to heart can significantly improve your sales presentations. Ask colleagues to listen to your presentations and then ask for advice, reminding them that any feedback is good feedback. After you receive their feedback, be humble enough to carefully consider incorporating their ideas into your presentation. An outside perspective can do a lot for your presentation, so be grateful for any criticism you receive.

Role Play

Once your sales presentations are critiqued and revised, have your sales reps do some role-playing to find out how the presentations will play out in real life. Don’t wait until you have a sought-after appointment with a client to do your dress rehearsal, try it out with your team members first.

Instruct your team members to be difficult when they play the role of the customer. Role-playing should help you to find the weak spots in your sales presentations and to amend them before you put them into action. In addition, role-playing helps your sales reps to get comfortable with their new, perfected sales presentations so they don’t stutter on the new phrases and facts.

People often feel uncomfortable with role playing exercises because they feel so contrived, so create a safe feeling among your sales reps by reminding them of the great benefits of practicing their sales presentations on each other before they take them to potential customers. They’ll soon realize that role-playing is not nearly as embarrassing as messing up in front of clients.

Re-evaluate on a Regular Basis

Once you have perfected your sales presentations, are you done? Of course not. Nothing is as constant as change, and as we mentioned earlier, it’s critical that your presentations keep up with the times. Schedule a regular meeting (monthly or quarterly) to review sales presentations and modify them as necessary to keep them current. When you have these meetings, ask for feedback from sales reps. What has worked well with this presentation? What feels rocky? Do potential customers have the same concerns over and over? If so, what can you do to resolve those concerns earlier in the presentation? By asking these questions, you can keep your sales presentations perfected, current, and effective.