Do you give a stock sales pitch on the first call to every new prospect you see?

Does your pitch start with a few slides or monologue from you "About Us"?

Do you follow the "About Us" stuff with all the features and capabilities of your product?

Or do you give a canned demonstration to your prospects on the first sales call?

I call this type of selling "Show Up and Throw Up".

Because when you sell like this, you aren’t being interactive. You are showing up at the prospect’s office and regurgitating (i.e. throwing up) all your product and company features and capabilities.

Many people in sales do this.

I was guilty of it early in my career too.

The problem is this is not very effective.

Typically I find that reps who "Show Up and Throw Up" have closing ratios of anywhere from 30% on the high side to as low as 5%.

So a lot of valuable sale time is getting wasted.

Tailor Your Sales Presentations

Each and every sales presentation you give should be tailored, personalized that is, for that prospect’s unique wants and needs.

To do this you need to go beyond the usual preparation that most of your competitors are doing. You need to get beyond merely being experts in what your product does and how it does it.

Yes, you DO need to have product knowledge.

But it’s not enough.

Product knowledge just gets you prepared to walk into the prospects office.

Once you’re there, you should be spending most of your time questioning and probing to find out what the prospects true needs, wants and desires are.

If they are actively investigating products like yours to purchase, then you need to find out why they are in the market now?

What’s the reason that started them on the path to looking for a product like yours to purchase?

When you have answers to these questions, you can tailor your presentation to each unique prospect.

Too Much Volume for "Show Up & Throw Up" to Stick

There are just way too many features, capabilities, potential benefits for you to show up and throw up all of them on your prospects in hopes that they will see the things they need to convince themselves to purchase from you.

Instead when you tailor your presentation, you focus on just those few features that give them the results they want.

You show them the capabilities that will help them solve the problem that caused them to start looking for a product like yours in the first place.

You’ll find that you presentation anxiety goes down when you prepare and present this way. This happens because you’ll know that what you are about to talk about is something that your prospect truly cares about.

More importantly you’ll find that you’re more effective, you’re closing more sales, you’re making better use of your sales time, and you’re putting more cash money in your pocket.

So stop the show up and throw up and start tailoring your presentations. You’ll sell more (and look better!) as a result.