Recession-Busting Sales Skills: Super Charge your Presentations!
You can generate new sales leads easily and cheaply even during a so called economic crisis—if you know how to give a fantastic presentation. Most people feel out of their depth when they need to say something in front of a crowd. Now imagine that crowd includes prospects, clients, journalists, and competitors, all in one room at an industry or networking event. In this context, being able to entertain, inspire, and persuade during a keynote speech can have a dramatic impact on your business. Once you are done the short talk you’ve prepared, you still have to field some questions…detailed questions from experts and colleagues. Did you know that how you answer impromptu questions is much more important than what you actually say? Usually no one expects great skill at fielding questions. As a result, it’s a powerful skill. You can practice and enjoy mastery in answering impromptu questions and giving speeches, by joining a public speaking club like Polish Your Polish.
Communication is not optional. Even if you aren’t speaking, your body language is saying something. Your business depends on how well you and your employees communicate. Your sales force’s effectiveness depends on how well they persuade clients. Your sales managers must know how to inspire and motivate. There is always a message to your clients, even in how you and your colleagues answer the phone, or how you establish eye contact during a meeting. The better you know how to communicate and leverage your own personal communication style, the faster you will succeed.
Presentation Skills Help Improve Revenues
To keep things simple, let’s stick with sales communication, and stick with presentation skills only. Every company’s profit starts with the top line of their income statement. Extraordinary presentation skills help you increase sales directly, represent your company effectively, and overcome objections with aplomb. Consider the following:
1. Increasing Sales
Salespeople move others to action. Convincing presentations will help influence prospects faster and in greater numbers. You can increase your ticket sizes, shorten your sales cycle, and improve your contact with your prospects. How you present is an important part of your success. For example, according to a study by the University of Minnesota, visual aids increase your chance of persuading your listener to accept your position by 43 percent on average. By learning how to really leverage visuals, you can increase your sales even further. Being certain that you can persuasively give a presentation—and not just recite product features—gives you an immense boost psychologically. It also helps you become more authoritative in the eyes of your prospects. You engage your listeners by knowing how to interpret body language cues they send you. These are only a few of the many training benefits you can obtain from Polish Your Polish membership.
2. Representing your company effectively and indirectly increasing uplift
Brand yourself and your products or services more effectively with great presentations. Each of your sales calls becomes more memorable, e.g. if your presentation entertains prospects. As a result, you build better relationships with prospects and clients. With presentation skills, you can also confidently take advantage of guerrilla marketing situations like industry or social events by enjoying and using your time at the microphone, so that tens or hundreds of people walk up to you and congratulate you for the fantastic speech you gave—and hand you their business cards.
3. Handling Difficult Questions and Overcoming Objections to increase sales
Hot questions (or “gorące pytania” in Polish) are unexpected questions or objections. They usually test how well we communicate more than what we actually know. If you can comfortably answer difficult questions persuasively and with humor, you’ll find it easy to win new sales. This is even more important in the upper levels of organizations or for PR professionals, i.e. for people closely involved with the press. Interviews on TV, radio, or even discussions with reporters can benefit from grace under fire, particularly with respect to getting your message across while addressing the underlying concerns being raised. This will help raise awareness of your products, give them positive spin, and subsequently increase sales. By mastering “gorące pytania”, you will actually look forward to opportunities to answer difficult impromptu questions. This is actually easier than most people think. Becoming brilliant only requires a bit of planning.
The cumulative effect to your business of mastering these three areas can be phenomenal. Regardless of how you are faring currently, your company’s prospects can be significantly improved if you and your salespeople work on this crucial set of skills.
How can this be learned and practiced?
All of the skills above can be extensively developed in the context of Polish Your Polish, a Toastmasters International public speaking club in London. We are a non-profit organisation focused on helping you master and enjoy giving presentations in Polish or English, taking into account the nuances of each culture. We use a proven educational system of customized direct feedback that has helped hundreds of thousands of people in similar clubs succeed since 1924. In our view, presentation skills are best acquired using methods similar to learning a foreign language, i.e. on a regular basis, and not just with a weekend crash course before a major event, so that they are internalized. Many English speakers will have heard of Toastmasters, but now there is also the option of practicing this in Polish in London.
Come and meet us to learn more. We get together twice a month at Ognisko Polskie (Polish Hearth Club) in South Kensington, always happy to welcome new guests. Everyone can benefit from our meetings, including salespeople, entrepreneurs and managers. Check our homepage https://www.polishyourpolish.org.uk in Polish or https://www.polishyourpolish.org.uk/english/ in English for more information and for dates of upcoming meetings. Once you master presentation skills, you will realize how much of an opportunity public speaking provides, and enjoy having your competitors for lunch–at an event.