Some presenters are silly enough to think that if they talk longer, they are giving more value or getting their point across more effectively. Actually, audiences of any size, from 5 to 500, are eager for content to be presented as efficiently and as memorably as possible.
Here are eight ways to make your message memorable:
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Being a competent, confident communicator is key to career success. Unfortunately, many begin their careers without adequate communication skills, even the college educated. Do you have the training, practice, and tools you need to communicate and lead effectively? As an in-demand speech coach and the creator of FrippVT, I know that even if you aren’t a natural communicator, you can transform your speaking skills and equip yourself to reach your career goals. I share this from Toastmasters International:
Read More...Improving Communication a Key to Closing Millennials’ Workplace Skills Gap
Employers seek applicants with strong speaking and writing abilities.
These three techniques will help you turn simple stories into examples that will be remembered and repeated:
In January, Mark, a district sales manager from a biotech company, was preparing to moderate a panel at the Las Vegas National Sales Meeting. He was nervous with his new role in front of the 100-person audience.
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The world of business has changed and continues to change dramatically and rapidly. Markets have grown from local to national to global. Technology no longer offers a competitive advantage, and customers have become much savvier. All of these changes and more have created an environment in which salespeople must adopt new attitudes, learn new skills, and gain a new understanding of how to approach their markets and work with customers.
Tony Alessandra is an expert in behavioral styles and sales. Patricia Fripp is an expert in sales presentations. Together they are an unbeatable combination at how to drive sales and be more persuasive.
Read More...6 Rules of High Trust Selling
No doubt, you have seen this quantum shift and its consequences in your industry: your competitors have increased in number and become more aggressive. Your products or services are more difficult to sell than in the past. It has become a challenge just to differentiate your company from your competitors, and price issues are a constant problem.
Six Steps To Your Sales Success
This advice is given by one of my good friends and colleagues Dr. Tony Alessandra is a Hall of Fame keynote speaker and author of 20 books.
There are six steps, or phases, to any successful selling process.
1. The “Target” Stage
This step helps you understand exactly what you have to offer that’s unique and exactly which target audiences can best use what you have to sell. It takes some time, but your success ratios will be much higher because you’ll be focusing your efforts only on those prospects who have a high probability of buying. Then you’ll work to see that these prospects have a positive image of you before you call on them.
On Tuesday, April 12 at 10:00am Pacific and 1:00pm Eastern
We collaborate in an online learning experience.
You are invited to How to Sell the Way People Want to Buy
2. The “Contact” Stage
Making contact with your prospect is the first critical test. Apart from product knowledge, no other facet of the sales process makes a greater impression on the customer. In the first few minutes, you often make, or break, the sale. In that time, your prospect sizes you up and decides if you’re the type of person he’d like to do business with.
This contact may be in person, over the phone, or by letter/email. Each makes a different impression and has its advantages and disadvantages. But the key, regardless of which approach you use, is for you to build credibility and trust. When prospects sense you have their best interests in mind, the rest of the sales process should follow more easily.
3. The “Explore” Stage
The purpose of the Explore stage is to get enough information to know the customer’s needs and what it’ll take to fulfill them. To do that, you need to listen to what the prospect says, but you also need to know how to ask questions.
What you want to look for are the prospect’s problems and opportunities. The problem, or need, is the gap between what a customer wants and what he or she now has. This gap already exists.
An opportunity, on the other hand, is something extra that can be added. For example, a new market, or a better avenue of distribution, or an untapped promotional vehicle. A resourceful salesperson can create an opportunity.
Read More...The first and last 30 seconds of your speech have the most impact, so give your opening and closing words careful consideration. If you open your presentation with an obvious and dull greeting, such as, “Ladies and Gentlemen, it is a pleasure to be here today,” you waste your precious first seconds. In this brief video sample from FrippVT, I share several examples of effective opening phrases. You are welcome to borrow or adapt any of these for your own presentations!
Read More...Isn’t it frustrating? Often it appears your prospects are almost completely walled off from you.
Okay, that’s not entirely true. But for all practical purposes, it may as well be. Your prospects are busy with multiple priorities and they are definitely not waiting around for a mass email message from your marketing department or a cold call from you.
Reaching prospects that way is about as easy as winning the Powerball – only with worse odds.
The Harvard Business Review tells us, “90% of decision makers never reply to a cold call.”Kurt
They’ve walled themselves off with caller ID, spam filters, voicemail and something else they’re going to invent next Thursday.
Read More...If you want to amp up your sales my best advice is to revisit your strategy, the quality of you sales questions, conversations and presentations, listen in on my conversation with best selling sales author and authority Andy Paul. You missed the live event, however, at the end of this post you will find it.
Andy Paul is the author of Amp Up Your Sales: Powerful Strategies That Move Customers To Make Fast, Favorable Decisions and Zero-Time Selling: 10 Essential Steps to Accelerate Every Company’s Sales and sought-after speaker and business coach.
5 Ways to Amp Up Your Sales With Powerful Sales Presentations
In your business, how long does it take for you to go from an inquiry to a serious sales presentation with the buyer or executive team? Weeks? Months? When the time comes, are you prepared? Do you know exactly what to say in order to customize your presentation to meet your client’s interests? Or is your presentation the same no matter who the client is?
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Successful sales presentations are always focused on your prospect’s problem, goal, or challenge – NOT on the product or the service you are offering. If a prospect believes their needs are not seen, or not of interest to you, they will never become your client. This is true for all avenues of sales and marketing. My friend Lois Creamer is an expert in branding, marketing, and sales.
In the mean time, Lois shares this excellent advice for professional speakers and consultants on why and how to create and use a positioning statement. She reminds us that in order to be effective, our sales and marketing efforts should always let our potential clients know how we can solve their problems.
Lois and I collaborated on a web training to help speakers Book More Business. You can watch a replay of this web event at the end of this blog post.
Position Yourself For Success!
Read More...by Lois Creamer
My friend and colleague Lois Creamer works with professional speakers who want to book more business, make more money, and avoid costly mistakes. We teamed up for a web event to help you build your professional speaking business, but our suggestions will help you in any professional services practice! Enjoy the video replay below.
Lois “Book More Business” Creamer says, “If your goal is to get more speaking engagements, it is necessary to connect with those professionals who actually book speakers. You may find them on the phone by calling. However, social media is a great way to find and connect to executives in the companies who could well hire you. Unless you have an existing relationship, an email to discuss how you might help them in their next meeting is unlikely to be opened.”
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Receive free, on-going Fripp webinar invitations, sales and presentation skills information, and special discounts from Executive Speech Coach, Sales Presentation Trainer, and Professional Keynote Speaker, Patricia Fripp, CSP, CPAE. As an added bonus, sign up now and receive a free copy of Patricia Fripp’s How to Present and Teach in the Virtual World.
