In your sales presentation, you need to be at your best from the very first second. Already in the first moments the decision is made whether you arouse interest in your viewers or whether you rather bore them. If you do not succeed in introducing your presentation topic, it will be difficult for you to regain the attention of the audience as the presentation progresses. We will show you how to get off to a good start with your presentation.
Do you know this too? You’ve been preparing for an interesting sales presentation, anxiously awaiting the start of the talk, and a few minutes later regretted coming here at all. If the speaker is simply rhetorically weak and boring, you quickly lose interest and only listen with half an ear. And unconsciously, people question whether the offer presented is really that great if the representative presenting it is not convincing.
Not only the offer must be good. The presenter must also be convincing from the start
If you want to succeed with your sales presentation, you need to deliver a top performance from the first minute. If you “stumble” your way in, you are unnecessarily putting business success at risk. So, what matters is that you immediately gain the attention and goodwill of your viewers. Therefore, we will now look at different ways of getting started with your presentation.
What audience is sitting in your sales presentation?
Know who you are dealing with in your sales presentation. From which living environment do the participants come? This will be important right from the start, because if the approach does not fit the target group, you will not be successful.
Entry into the presentation about a topic of the day
Sometimes you get really lucky and the latest news relates to the topic of your sales presentation. In this case, an introduction via the “news” is just the thing: “Did you also hear the news earlier? A study has just been published at the University of XY that fits in exactly with our topic today.” However, even if there is no direct connection to your sales presentation in the news, you may still be able to use this form of entry. To do this, you need to know more about your audience. Let’s say you want to talk about insurance. The radio just reported that a famous movie star had an accident and was just lucky to be alive. This could fit the topic of insurance as an introduction. But could your auditorium really know the star, or does the name rather mean nothing to you? You need to know if your entry fits into your customer’s experience. If you are confident enough here, you will create a good entry point into the topic.
Start your sales presentation with an interesting statistic
If you find a really interesting statistic to go along with your presentation, you can also use it to get started with your topic. Let’s stick with the insurance example from earlier. After a brief introduction, you could start like this: “A recent statistic from the German Insurance Association lists that Germans spend an average of XY euros a year on insurance. Of this, around Z percent is a waste of money because policyholders are not given good advice. We want to change that, and I’ll explain to you now how we’re doing it.”
Engage in dialogue with the audience at the beginning of your sales presentation.
Passivity quickly leads to lack of concentration. If your audience can simply be sprinkled by you, that’s not really optimal. It is better to try to actively involve the audience in your presentation right at the beginning. For example, you can ask for a show of hands, “How many of you have purchased insurance in the last 12 months?” Or ask a pointed question from which you expect a CONCRETE answer: “Do any of you know the current cancellation dates of property insurance policies?” In both cases, you encourage your audience to actively think and focus on you.
Start your sales presentation with a promise-.
A good strategy to get your viewers’ attention from the start is to make an interesting promise. This arouses curiosity. Of course, you have to make sure that at the end of your presentation you have delivered on this promise. For example, “I promise you that today you will learn three things about XY that I’m sure you didn’t know.” You can also find more examples of how to get started in the right way in my book the Magicbox for Presentations.
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Dipl.-Wirtsch.-Informatiker Matthias Garten as the expert for multimedia presentations and professional PowerPoint presentations knows about the art of professional slide design. He is an entrepreneur, speaker (TOP 100 Speaker), trainer (TOP 100 Excellence Trainer), multiple book author, presentation coach (presentation training), member of the GSA and Club 55, organizer of the Presentation Conference, Presentation Bootcamp and Presentation Rocket Day. In addition to PowerPoint and presentation training, he inspires and advises companies to present themselves even more effectively and thus stand out from competitors. He is the business owner of the presentation and PowerPoint agency smavicon Best Business Presentations and with his team has created over 10,000 professional PowerPoint presentations for over 150 industries since 1993.
