Art of a winning sales presentation

A well-prepared sales presentation is often overlooked, not deemed important. In our experience, too many salespeople use relationship selling rather than strategically planning for sales success.

Flawless presentations require work. They bridge the sales conversation from confirming needs and bridging product features to solution benefits. Then smoothly manoeuvre into a prepared sales presentation.

PROFITS, our beverage sales training program, looks at the techniques required for a flawless sales presentation.

If applied correctly, using these tips, beverage salespeople will be able to provide their customers with fact-based solution benefits for their needs.

Empathize

Empathy selling can be described as the willingness and ability to put yourself into the mental and emotional position of a prospect during a sales process. Listening is not enough. You need to be able to sell using an empathetic understanding of their needs.

Tip: Keep in mind that what prevents most people from having empathy is they are too focused on their selling agenda the whole time.

An empathetic approach needs to be applied to all daily activities to effectively understand your customer.

Use Reflective Listening

A winning sales presentation requires the thorough understanding and use of reflective listening.

There are huge benefits to seeking to understand your customer’s need. You then repeat it to confirm their need has been understood correctly. They will feel heard and understood.

This empathic communication should be part of every salesperson’s presentation arsenal.

Here is an example

Sarah: How’s business?

Retailer: “OK, Could be better.”

Sarah: “Better in what way?”

In this exchange, Sarah showed she was listening by reflecting back the retailer’s words.

Identify Tactical Opportunities

Tactical opportunities present themselves on the fly.

As an effective sales person, you need to identify such an opportunity, analyze and apply retail tactical management to make the most of the given opportunity.

For example with Ex. Assortment, sales professionals will offer an assortment solution as a way to increase distribution for a product.

Answer as many of the questions below as you can to begin understanding how an assortment tactic is currently being managed by a retailer:

– What segments, varietals, or brands have unnecessary duplication?

– What SKUs are the slowest selling?

– What SKUs sell well in the market yet are not in distribution?

Tip: You should always have a list of the slowest selling SKUs that have market wide distribution.

Explain Your Solution’s Benefits

During a sales presentation, it is crucial that you know your features from your benefits. You should be able to easily describe SPRITE benefits as well as distinguish the fact-based benefits of your products.

A feature is a distinctive trait the company or product has. For example, our company provides retailers with marketing support.

A benefit is what the feature will bring to the retailer. For example, our marketing support will lead to increased traffic to your store.

Use Industry Math

To be compelling and convincing, it is important that you are able to calculate the fact-based benefits of sales, profits, trade-up and transaction rings. This data will provide much-needed credibility to your sales presentation because it is based on factual data.

Business Image & Excitement = Not Measurable

It is not possible to accurately calculate business image and excitement with trade math.When presenting these benefits you should use qualifying words such as possibly.

Increased Traffic = Difficult to Measure

It is difficult to definitively calculate increased traffic. The customer can refer to an increase in transactions but there is no way to calculate why that is occurring with trade math. Thus, you cannot formally analyze it as a benefit.

Sales, Profits and Transaction Rings = Measurable

It is simple to use industry standard trade math to perform an analysis that will measure actual or estimated values for sales, profits, and transaction rings based on internal sales reports and/or industry insights.

For more techniques geared towards success in beverage sales, have a look at our PROFITS Sales Training Courses.

PROFITS NBWA

Our PROFITS courses were developed in collaboration with Tom Fox from CM Profit Group, who is a nationally recognized beverage retail leader.

The training encompasses a blend of self-directed digital learning, a classroom environment, on-the-job reinforcement, team meetings and online support. It is blended learning at its best.

The PROFITS sales training system accelerates change with a focus on blending various types and frequency of training, coaching and feedback on performance.

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