Welcome
Let me start by wishing you and your family a Happy
and Prosperous New Year. I hope that 2007 is the year when your dreams
become realities and you create new dreams to drive you ever onwards and
upwards.
This year, Young Markets
has teamed up with renown HR consultancy, ICR International (Sales
Compensation Plan design consultants, authors of the IPAS worldwide
employee compensation survey
www.icrltd.com
) to provide you with an increased understanding of what works and what
isn't working in your sales team. See the section entitled "What
Stops People Selling?" below.
In the A to Z of Effective Business Presentations, we
are up to H for Hearing and Handouts.
Please feel free to forward this on to your friends and colleagues.
Upcoming Courses
There are still places available on all our
courses, including:
Effective Business Presentation
Skills Wed 24th Jan in Basingstoke
Effective Business Presentation
Skills Tues 6th Feb in Guildford
(only 2 places left)
Effective Business Presentation Skills Wed
21st Feb in Oxford
"Close More Sales!"
Thurs 22nd Feb in Guildford
For more information and to book click
here.
Why our effective presentation skills training
is worth attending in 3 simple quotes:
"The human mind is a
wonderful thing, it starts working the moment you are born and never stops until
you ......... get up to speak in public" Roscoe Drummond.
Implication - The better you prepare the
less you need to think on your feet. "It usually takes
more than three weeks to prepare a good impromptu speech." Mark Twain.
Implication - Planning, preparation and
practise are the key to a good presentation. "Don't
judge each day by the harvest you reap but by the seeds that you plant.”
Robert
Louis Stevenson .
Implication - Plant the seeds for your
next great presentation, book on a course today.
And here's three more great quotes from people who have attended
the course: "Very
worthwhile. Highly Recommended"
Alex Napier, Proxima Technology
"Very enjoyable course. Good mix of practical v
lecturing" James Gibb,
Cerrus International
"Brought new ideas and structure to getting the message across"
Graeme Barker, Director, IP Centric
.
What Stops People Selling?
41%
of sales people will not hit target.* Do you know why?
There are 3
questions every sales manager should know the answers to:
-
What % of
YOUR salespeople will hit target this
year?
-
What do
THEY think are the major issues that
may stop them achieving your goals?
-
What can
YOU
do to improve their chances?
Just asking the
questions may not always result in a complete and factual
answer.
Young Markets
together with ICR International has been talking to a number of
companies who have suggested that we run a collaborative survey,
into Sales Effectiveness. The survey will involve a number of
companies, all of which are in the high tech markets in the Thames Valley and surrounding areas.
Only by digging
under the surface and understanding the real issues, is the
truth likely to emerge. Our confidential survey will get under
the surface gloss to discover the knowledge, attitudes and
behaviours of your sales force. It will highlight exactly those
aspects that stop people selling in your company.
The results will
show "You versus The Others", i.e. showing you the results for
your organisation and comparing these with the cumulative totals
of the other participants. Individual company’s results would
remain confidential as would the responses given by any
individual person.
As an early
participant, you will have input in to the survey design stage,
to ensure you gain the answers to your specific areas of concern
Is this something you might consider participating in?
The costs involved
will be dependant on the number of companies that participate
but are expected to be in the range of £150 to £400 per
participating company.
If you or your
sales director would like to know what your sales force really
think and how they compare with other similar companies in the
area, please email me graham@youngmarkets.co.uk
or call on 01276 502257.
* Source IPAS 2006
– ICR International.
A
to Z of Effective Presentations
In previous newsletters, which you can access
here, I have covered A to
G , so
now it is the letter “H”
H is for Hearing
Make sure your audience
can hear you clearly. If you are not sure that you can be heard, have a friend
or colleague sit at the back of the room and ask them to let you know using sign
language, if you are speaking too quietly or too loudly. Do not forget to look
at this person occasionally throughout your presentation, as although you may
start at one volume your voice may gradually tale off during the talk.
You will need to speak
more loudly to an audience that you would normally speak one to one. The way to
increase the volume is by projecting your voice. Use your diaphragm to increase
the flow of air over your vocal cords as opposed
to raising your voice and shouting, which you would normally do using your neck muscles. It
should not hurt to project your voice, unlike continuous shouting.
A word of caution, if you
are used to presenting without a microphone you will be used to projecting your
voice. If you are then given a microphone by a conference organiser you do not
need to project your voice. Doing so is likely to deafen your audience, if the
sound man is not aware of it in advance.
H is for Handouts
Some people like to provide copies
of their slides to everyone before they start, my advice is not to hand
them out. You want people to pay attention to what you are saying. If
you give them copies of the slides beforehand, they will scan through
them and know what you are going to be saying before you say it. This
is a sure fire way of letting the audience get ahead of you, they will
then stop listening and start thinking about other things.
The only time I
would allow handouts to go out before a presentation is when I know
people will otherwise want to take notes and I am confident that the
visual aids that I am using will not give away the main thrust of my
presentation. Even then, it is better to provide a copy of the slides
with your own notes at the end of the presentation.
When you are
presenting and there is some detailed artwork or plans that you would
like people to look at, again my advice is scan them in to the computer
and show them as slides. Split the artwork on to multiple slides so
that the specific areas of interest are visible on each slide. If they
are too detailed or too large to be scanned in, then leave them until
the end of the presentation and display them on a separate table.
Giving something
out, in the middle of a presentation, to be passed round the table for
everyone to look at, is definitely not recommended. While they are
looking at it they will not be listening to you, they will also not be
listening while they are waiting for it to reach them, and while they
are looking at the expressions on the other people’s faces when they are
looking at it. There is no point in trying to carry on a presentation
while something of interest is circulating round a room.
Special Offer
Every
person who books a place on our "Close More Sales!" courses
taking place in January or February 2007 will be entitled to
a complimentary SOCAscore assessment of their competence at
selling. Normally, these tests cost £25 each and provide a
comprehensive measure of both your sales and salesmanship
skills.
Why not
take the test first, simply go to
www.socascore.com
and follow the on screen instructions. When you book on the
course just let us know that you took the test and we will
reduce the fee by the amount you spent on the test. We are
confident that the test and the training course will equip
you better to tackle next year’s sales targets. In fact,
let’s call it an early Christmas present from us to you!
www.socascore.com
Improve
Your Presentations
I hope you have found this newsletter useful and interesting.
You can learn a lot
more about how to structure and give an Effective Business Presentation, by
attending a Young Markets Effective Presentations Skills training course (see
above), or from my ebook “The A to Z of Effective Business Presentations” which
you can download from my website (www.businesspresentation.biz) today, for
only $15 or £8.75 . Please feel free to forward this on to your friends and colleagues. If you
have received this second hand and would like your own personal copy of future
issues, please subscribe
here. |
