David Fish: The biggest mistake sales teams make that marketers have sorted

By David Fish, strategic communication specialist and founder of No Two Fish.

In my 25+ years leading strategy across a range of advertising and marketing roles, I have pitched solutions with a combined value of several hundred million dollars to global and local clients, sat through thousands of sales presentations and seen great ideas fail to connect despite many hundreds of hours spent brainstorming potentially game-changing ideas.

What I began to observe over the years was a stark difference in starting points between where consumer marketing started and where many B2B services businesses and so many sales-led organisations began their pitch.

One was deeply grounded in a problem or specific consumer need that had been deeply researched and well understood, while the other started with what they had that needed to be commercialised and sold, what they wanted to take out into the world and convince someone to buy.

When it comes to landing that idea, selling a solution and convincing others to take action, this can set up a sales presentation to fail from the very start.

No reason to care

When the audience isn’t clearly defined, and a need they have isn’t placed front and centre of the narrative what then follows is a presentation built around what you have and what you want to sell. This can create a very unhelpful tension that can play out as a frustrated and agitated audience sit through slide after slide thinking, What has this got to do with us, and how does any of this help us move forward?

Instead of drawing the audience in, the presentation can trigger a mindset of seeking to find flaws as they try to make sense of what this means, and even outright rejection of the idea or concept being shared.

The workings of the brain dictate that we are intrinsically drawn to narratives that involve us. And the earlier that happens in the story, the better. When a story is relatable, we add our own thoughts, reinforced through the emotions we associate with the experience. This all aids our understanding and recall.

Solve something that matters to them

A presentation without a problem to solve is a presentation without a purpose. You are essentially presenting your ideas and hoping to find a problem they might solve, and if you don’t, your ideas will have no value, at least no value to the people in front of you right now.

To take the audience on your journey, showing how you solve their problem, you don’t just need to know what the high-level problem is — you need to understand what it means to them, what the impact is of having this problem and what could be at stake if it isn’t solved.

This fundamental understanding is core not just to how your presentation can be crafted around a compelling story but how stories are structured to bring a reader in. This understanding does more than provide a nice way into your story; it is critical to how you establish the value in your ideas for your audience and how you curate the content to make this clear to them.

Dale Carnegie makes his view on this very clear in his classic book on interpersonal persuasion, How to Win Friends and Influence People:

‘You are interested in what you want…the rest of us are just like you: we are interested in what we want. So, the only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.’

Journey of change

Starting with a clear understanding of your audience and the change you see as being possible for them means you can take them on a journey with a narrative addressing how you help shift the current reality of your audience and take them to a better place.

This is where all consumer marketing begins — deeply grounded in the problem or need the consumer has, followed by how this is solved front and centre of the communication. To create winning sales presentations this is a valuable tactic to create a narrative that draws the audience in from the outset and connects them to the benefit of what lies ahead.

David Fish is a strategic communication specialist, founder of No Two Fish and author of What it Takes to Create Winning Presentations (Publish Central, $39.95). Visit www.davidfish.com.au