How to Make Sure Your Sales Consultant Fails (Step Two)

In my previous article, I outlined the three mindsets that sales teams are prone to adopt, that can have a negative impact on their presales resources. Specifically, these mindsets work surreptitiously to erode presales morale or impede your sales consultant's effectiveness in front of a customer. For my second installment in "How to Make Sure Your Sales Consultant Fails," we'll look at  something more practical: the demo.

Has this ever happened to you?

A sales consultant gets a new opportunity and, as any good SC would do, she looks for the customer's pre-qualification details. She asks her sales rep for the customer's "why-buys" or an opportunity/needs analysis. Normally the rep would have given it more scrutiny, but he just found out about a very fast-moving, lucrative opportunity. But he's sure he'll win, so he kindly requests a "standard demo."

His sales consultant suppresses the urge to grab her sales rep by his impeccably waxed mustache and shout "there is nothing standard about my demos!" Instead she retains her composure and asks about their plan.

...for which the rep has nothing.

Point in case, I was once in a final demo with a customer, and as soon as I logged into the rep's meeting room, he assigned me as the presenter. We were about to play the last card in our collective hand with the customer, and the rep had nothing to say!

At the risk of sounding unfair to our salespeople, I do have to point out that for every unprepared rep we've also seen our share of unprepared sales consultants. More often than not, an unprepared sales consultant arrives at the same result as the unprepared sales rep: a "canned demo" with little or no orchestration between the sales presentation and the demo.

Modes of Persuasion

A rhetorical approach to presentation involves two things: leveraging the three modes of persuasion and properly structuring your presentation.

The philosopher Aristotle coined the term “artistic proofs” to describe the methods we use to persuade our audience. While an argument may rely more heavily on one or two methods, a well-crafted argument draws from all three.

• Ethos, or character, involves establishing your credibility with the audience. It involves using appropriate vocabulary, grammar and syntax, making yourself sound unbiased, and establishing your expertise.
• Pathos refers to the emotions we convey in our argument. In modern presentations we often hear the term “limbic response” to describe making an emotional connection with the audience. Using meaningful language, tone and timing, and storytelling are great ways to keep your audience emotionally invested.
• Logos is the root word from which we get the English word logic. This refers to the sound reasoning behind our argument. 

Parts of an Argument

Knowing that we will ideally draw from all three modes of persuasion, the structure of our argument will also determine whether we can effectively communicate our value to the customer. Aristotle established the framework around which most academic writing, and I will argue most effective sales presentations, are based.

The Aristotelian argument involves setting the context for your presentation, establishing distinctive content that includes your claims and supporting evidence, and a conclusion that supports your argument. Modern sales methodologies that make statements like “tell, show, tell,” are simply structured around the Aristotelian model.

The first part of an argument, context, involves a broad statement that the rest of your presentation will follow. During alignment calls I will often ask sales reps what we want the customer to believe. What is our story? This means that we need to understand the customer well enough to clearly articulate how we are going to meet their needs or help them to capitalize on new opportunities.

This is why the pre-demo alignment call is critical. During that call, the sales team should work together to identify your message, and to establish how you will communicate that message during your customer meeting.

At the beginning of the meeting, we want to answer two questions for the audience: why am I worth listening to, and why are we here? I encourage reps to avoid opening their meeting with a corporate overview in hopes of building credibility. Instead, we can establish our credibility by demonstrating that we understand the customer, their business and their industry.

"The Prima Facie case is an argument that is 'sufficient to establish a fact or raise a presumption unless disproved or rebutted.'"

- WEX Legal Dictionary

While you will build your credibility and establish emotional connections throughout your presentation, the contextual part of your argument means establishing your prima facie case.

In college I was a Rhetoric and Communication major, specializing in pre-law. In a criminal courtroom, the prosecuting attorney opens the case by formally accusing the defendant of a crime. In doing so, they present the jury with their prima facie case. They give us a preview of what the coalescence of evidence will prove, and both attorneys have built their case in efforts to prove or disprove the prima facie argument.

Before we sell or demonstrate, we should begin with a belief that we want the audience to walk away with. Everything that we show during the presentation should support that claim.

Now that we’ve established our primary argument, we can structure our content into a series of topics that support our argument. For example, if my primary claim is that I can enhance profitability by improving lead quality and reducing sales cycle time, I will structure my presentation and relevant demonstration to support those claims. I probably won’t show them how easy it is to build a responsive email, because it isn’t relevant to my prima facie case.

During our alignment call, we will explicitly define the points we want to prove. We should pre-plan our flow using a series of distinct supporting claims. We should structure any product demonstration to prove our supporting claims and avoid spending significant time on irrelevant product features.

Storytelling is potentially one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal as we set out to prove our claims. For example, we can bond over a shared experience to establish an emotional connection with our audience, share customer success stories to establish the credibility of our solution, or talk about times when you’ve encountered use cases similar to the customer’s.

I am fully convinced that the end of a sales presentation is typically the most awkward part. Often the SC timidly asks “are there any questions?” Or perhaps the sales rep says, “so what did you guys think?” This is most often symptom of a canned demo. If we haven’t taken the time to establish a prima facie case, how can we close our argument in a manner that cohesively summarizes our value statement?

As was the case with the rest of our presentation, we should pre-plan the conclusion during the alignment call. Just as the prima facie case was specific to the customer, so too should our conclusion be. We made a claim, showed the customer how we support that claim, and now we will summarize the content section and tie it back to the claim.

I encourage solution consultants to anticipate any objections the customer might have, or that competitors may introduce, and to prepare their response in advance. During the alignment call, the sales team will agree on any objections we want to preempt during the conclusion, and which ones we want to hold in reserve in case the customer brings them up.

I mentioned earlier that I discourage sales teams from opening with a “corporate overview” or “why us” section. The conclusion presents a great opportunity to paint the vision of how we are ideally poised to address the customer’s needs and opportunities. We spend the first part of the meeting establishing our credibility, connecting with the audience, and supporting our claim. In doing so, we earned the right to talk about what makes our company unique.

Benefits of Rhetorical Presentations

There is no shortage of sales methodologies, but the rhetorical approach to presentations helps sales teams to better align both internally and externally with the customer’s requirements. Rhetorical presentation helps us to be intentional about how we will connect with our audience at the ethical, emotional and logical levels, and it keeps our audience engaged because we explicitly made the presentation specific to the customer. Finally, rhetorical presentations require a bit more advance preparation, and that preparation will result in a more articulate and effective message.