Selling Power Magazine

Low-tech tools also can include the product you’re trying to sell. Tony Jeary, who calls himself “Mr. Presentation,” is founder of High Performance Resources, a Flower Mound, Texas based firm specializing in helping people develop their presentation skills. He says he’s seeing a trend toward taking the product or service itself to the presentation and demonstrating it in an engaging way. “In the past, presentations were more about outlining feature and benefits on slides. Now I’m seeing more involvement on the part of the audience,” he says.

Jeary works with a company selling racks to such stores as Home Depot, where each sale might be worth $2 to $3 million. The company has had great successes in bringing samples of their racks to presentations and letting customers feel the difference between such things as the various types of ball bearings. It makes sense, “When it comes time to make a decision, which do you think clients will better remember-touching those ball bearings and interacting with the salesperson or reading bullet points about those bearings on a slide?”

Certainly, technology will make it easier to qualify propects, easier to research potential clients and easier to take orders so salespeople can focus on selling. But technology should only augment, not replace, the sales presentation and other face-to-face meetings. To those who believe technology will probably become obsolete,” he cautions. “I personally think that the one-to-one factor, the live communication factor, will elevate the really good salespeople to be much more precious in terms of their value. The ones really at risk now are the vast majority of mediocre salespeople. The ones who are really good communicators, who are good at conveying that they care, are going to become even more valuable because when it comes to large, complex transactons, the human factor is as important as it has ever been.