When presenting about your company, solution, or technology, security sales people are often challenged getting their audience fully engaged. The issue is that they’ve heard a similar message from your competitor and it’s just not that exciting. Your competition does pretty much the same thing and true or not, they’ve already said that they’ve got “the best service in the industry”. This is boring and will put your audience to sleep.
When giving a sales presentation or demo, the most effective technique that a security sales professional can use is to make your client the topic. Do not start with your company’s mission statement or feature dump or a case study. Start the presentation with their situation and pain…and let them talk, talk, talk.
Example: “We’ve learned that many companies in your space are experiencing heavy fines from your customers who are government contractors if your system fails for more than a few hours. We’ve created some services that have solved this issue for many of our clients, but I want to ask a few questions before I proceed to make sure our message is valid.”
You’ve disarmed them with competence and authority, and you’re about to hear about their specific issues. Once you start your presentation, they’ll be completely engaged and curious how you can solve their painful issue.
One important note – don’t take longer than five minutes or 10% of your allotted time to conduct this opening. After a while, your audience will want to get to the point.
