Articles by Steve Vachss

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When Your Sales Web Site Doesn’t Deliver There’s an Alternative

July 2, 2009 in Remote Sales by Steve Vachss | No comments

Many sales and marketing organizations invest time and resources to increase Web site traffic, yet gain very few new prospects. Despite site redesign, search engine optimization, and improved messaging, their sites still don’t deliver their required sales performance.

The reason for these disappointing results is that many Web sites are unable to tell a compelling sales story. Although online pages are very effective at selling simple e-commerce products like books, t-shirts or cell phones, many products and services require a much more focused conversation to engage prospects.

Very few Web visitors spend more than a few seconds on a page before clicking to a new subject, going to a new page or leaving the site. Most sales stories require a few minutes of focused attention. Potential prospects are therefore lost before they have mentally connected with anything beyond a headline and one or two pictures. Although a Web page for sales is supposed to bring visitors to a follow-on step, Web sites typically don’t get the job done.

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Online presentations are potentially much more effective vehicles for sales and marketing. However, presentations for this application must be designed with some common sense rules to be fully effective.

Rule Number One: Take advantage of multimedia capabilities, especially voice narration.

Rule Number Two: Tell a logical focused story in the same way that a sales professional would tell it face-to-face. Don’t distract the viewer with unrelated ideas.

Rule Number Three: Use interactive technology that makes the viewer a participant in the conversation. Ask the viewer to respond to questions that keep him or her mentally engaged.

Rule Number Four: Maintain viewer attention with compelling graphics and photos. Visuals are much more effective than text in helping the narrator to tell a content-rich story.

Rule Number Five: Combine information with emotional appeal. Prospects use both sides of their brains when they are fully engaged in a sales conversation. People buy because of their feelings as well as from the information that they understand. Presentations that appeal to emotions without a logical story don’t create new customers. Conversely, presentations that are content-rich yet dull and unappealing won’t succeed either.

Rule Number Six: Every slide must be an integral part of the story. It must match the narrator’s words by using eye-appealing imagery with little or no text.

Rule Number Seven: Be brief.

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Smart Use of PowerPoint is Mandatory for Effective Sales

June 23, 2009 in Lead Generation, Webinars by Steve Vachss | No comments

Microsoft PowerPoint is one of the most important tools used by every successful online marketer. It is the medium of choice for creating a clear, concise online presentation. Sales professionals soon learn that they need a strong visual presentation to tell a compelling story, and PowerPoint is the obvious answer.

More than 40-million people use PowerPoint. It’s the world’s most widely used presentation tool. So many people have used it that we can safely recruit new salespeople and expect them to be PowerPoint users. That means that any organization can quickly train new people to deliver presentations using the same basic tools.

slidepresstack1Virtually everyone needs PowerPoint to build a business online. PowerPoint slides may be used like brochures in PDF format, for live presentations in a Webinar or as the basic medium of an on-demand presentation.

The negative side of PowerPoint is that many people think of a slide presentation as tedious and uninteresting. That’s because so many presentations are poorly planned and use only the weakest capabilities of the program. PowerPoint designers at Microsoft designed this tool with so much flexibility that presentations have an unlimited range of styles. Unfortunately, most people take the easiest road, resulting in the weakest possible presentations. We therefore want to offer recommendations for PowerPoint use that will provide the most compelling results for sales and marketing professionals.

Our most important overall recommendation is for every PowerPoint presenter to discover how to use the program’s full capabilities. Don’t re-use an unimaginative presentation produced for someone else. Customize every presentation to leverage yourself and create a professional, entertaining audience experience. Most people—even long-time PowerPoint presenters—don’t understand the incredible things that can be done with this powerful tool. Spending a couple of hours thumbing through “PowerPoint for Dummies” can deliver ideas that totally change the results produced by any presentations.

What are the basics for making presentations more effective? We can begin by following a few simple rules. The first simple rule is “keep presentations as short as possible.” Every slide should contribute to drawing audiences to “the next step” in a well planned sales, training or information transfer process. If any slide in a presentation doesn’t contribute in this way, delete it.

Rule number two is “use as little text as possible. Instead use graphics, photos, videos, cartoons, etc. to make visual statements. Although writing a virtual script of text bullets is easy, audiences don’t listen effectively when forced to read bullets. If the text bullets differ from the presenter’s speech they create confusion. If the bullets are identical to the spoken words, audiences assume that the presenter is simply reading from a script. PowerPoint provides much more powerful tools than simple text bullets. Successful professionals use these tools to be become master presenters, and master marketers.

We still need a few more rules to maximize the power of PowerPoint, and we will cover several of them in later posts.

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Bridging Microsoft PowerPoint to the Web

March 23, 2009 in Uncategorized by Steve Vachss | No comments

Microsoft PowerPoint is a great tool for telling a detailed story to any audience. But getting that story to work effectively and smoothly on a Web site is challenging. PresenterNet On demand Showrooms provide a low-cost way to get the job done. And any PowerPoint user can add, edit or change their online content, without a Webmaster or tech support. For more details go to:
http://www.presenternet.com/advantage/microsoft-powerpoint-online.php

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The Myth of Lead Generation CRM Software

September 15, 2008 in Webinars by Steve Vachss | No comments

CRM companies and related software providers offer a myriad of tools to identify, qualify, and track sales leads. Many of these offerings sound great to potential CRM users, but they all have one basic flaw that can leave them useless. They all depend on a system being able to identify qualification criteria, or simply offer database searches based on plug-in criteria like industry, size of company, revenues, etc.

Salespeople know that there are only three TRUE criteria for qualification:

  1. prospects must be interested in speaking with them;
  2. the product must meet the prospect’s needs;
  3. and the sales contact must have the capability to make or drive a buying decision.

Unfortunately, these criteria can only be defined by prospects themselves, not by database searches or even by sales rep call reports.

The most successful sales of any product or service are those that occur when a potential buyer informs a sales organization that he or she is ready for serious discussions. The success of Webinars as lead generators has grown exponentially for that reason, but Webinars alone aren’t the full answer. The fact that a potential prospect attended a Webinar is indeed an indication of some level of interest, but the overwhelming majority of attendees are not prospects, having participated for a variety of reasons other than buying interest.

Webinars on PresenterNet however, add the most important element for qualifying a true sales lead. By providing InterActors on slides that enable attendees to respond onscreen to various questions during a Webinar, they capture information directly from the potential prospect. These are the kinds of questions that a salesperson would want to ask if given the opportunity to speak candidly:

“Would you like us to call you for an appointment?”

“Do you have a need for the kind of product we sell?”

“Are you the decision maker, or should we contact another person in your organization?”

“Do you currently have funding to commit to this area?”

“On a scale of 1 to 10, how interested are you?”

“How do you see our product potentially fitting into your company’s plans?”

Answers to questions like these help sales people to find and close the very best opportunities. Interactive slides with these capabilities therefore become the missing links to making Webinars the top business drivers available to any sales organization worldwide.

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