When you’re giving a presentation, one of the easiest things to do is to overwhelm the audience with information. Most salespeople go in figuring that if they throw enough Jell-O on the wall, they're going to offer enough information to appeal to everyone. It’s like a big Lazy Susan with 400 items on it…just spin it around and someone’s going to find something on that platter to eat. The problem with this scenario is that there is so much information splattered about the room that nobody can separate the wheat from the chaff or the noise from the signal of the radio. As a result, you don’t really make the message as powerfully as you could have made it had you thought about what the audience really needs to know and saved everything else for the “technical appendix.”
I’ve been on the receiving end of this type of presentation, and I leave the room thinking that I learned nothing. They could have sent me a videotape, which I could have watched in my pajamas on a Saturday and we would have been just where we are today. As a presenter, it is a very demoralizing feeling to leave a meeting saying, “I don’t know whether they liked it or didn’t like it. They didn’t have any questions, and we didn’t really have enough time to discuss the important topics.” So don’t overwhelm the audience – keep it focused.
Love one of our blogs? Feel free to use an excerpt on your own site, newsletter, blog, etc. Just be sure to send us a copy or link, and include the following at the end of the excerpt: “By Mark Jewell, Wall Street Journal best-selling author of Selling Energy: Inspiring Ideas That Get More Projects Approved! This content is excerpted from the Sales Ninja blog, Mark Jewell's daily blog on ideas and inspiration for advancing efficiency. Sign up at SellingEnergy.com.”
Want our daily content delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to the Sales Ninja blog!
