Sales Presentations That Win!

We hope you've started 2012 ready to embrace the opportunity that awaits those financial planning and insurance businesses that have developed the capabilities to positively engage clients with depth relevance and meaning.

That means you'd be familiar with the concepts around client engagement that are regular features of our writings:

- using smart questionnaires that embed communication models within them
- you have a great story
- you use a family tree in your dicussions with clients

And most of all you have developed capabilities in your business to engage the client throughout the buying process and made the financial planning and insurance strategies, relevant by using techniques that ensure the client projects and assesses the future and can see what your strategy looks, feels, even sounds like to them, thus providing compelling reasons for action.

Now you just need to make your final pitch.

In the financial planning and insurance business - you need to present your Statement of Advice.

The next phase of our writings in the coming months will be focussed on making sales presentations.

A good reference for anyone making any sort of presentation is a wonderfully engaging book by Stephen Bayley and Roger Mavity - "Life's a Pitch: How to Sell Yourself and Your Brilliant Ideas" (2008).

As Bayley and Mavity point out, "when you are pitching to someone, you're asking them to judge the future.....their judgement won't be based on logical fctors, but on emotional factors, trust, confidence, hope, ambition, desire".

In the financial planning and insurance world this point is incredibly relevant.

If you have not engaged clients for example with an understanding of the four drive theory - then you have not engaged your client with emotion, trust, you have not inspired confidence, demonstrated the ability to deliver hope and the ambitions and desires they have.

Your sales pitch is doomed.

Re-read our previous articles for help if you have no idea what we're talking about at this point!!!

Next time we'll look at what it takes and how to write a great presentation and over the coming weeks, we'll discover:

- what to say and how to say it
- keeping things simple
- the power "slide"
- where to put your executive summary
- the power of practice
- language that resonates, is remembered and illicits a response