Sales training ideas – Don’t forget these two important aspects in sales presentations.

Your sales presentations can be made or broken by two critical ingredients. Most salespeople include only one of these in their sales presentation and completely disregard the other.

2 Ingredients for powerful sales presentations

Your sales presentation should focus on a strong logical argument backed up with strong emotional appeal. These two ingredients, emotion and logic, more than anything, will keep the prospect listening and interested while you pave the way to closing the sale. 

Too many salespeople focus primarily on the facts, figures, and statistics of their product during the sales presentation and fail to get the prospect emotionally involved. People unequivocally do not buy on logic alone. People may look at all the logical reasons to buy and even build a logical case to buy, but ultimately they buy emotionally, using logic to justify their buying decision. In other words, people always buy on emotional logic. Keep this fact in mind when designing your sales presentations. 

Becoming emotionally involved in business might be the equivalent of becoming infatuated with a product’s bells and whistles (features). Once you get the emotional purchase home, logic will begin to enter the equation. Do the bells and whistles work properly? How effective are they at helping you do what you want to do? And when you do have a problem, how quickly can you get it resolved? If it turns out that the bells and whistles work only 50 percent of the time, and when you need service you have to wait much longer than expected, these “logical” problems will ultimately make the “emotional” purchase of this item a poor decision. 

In the short term, emotion sells. In the long term, logic will show whether the decision was a good one. If you start dating someone because he or she is drop-dead gorgeous and makes you laugh, you are buying emotionally. Once the infatuation wears off, you will now be focusing on “logical” factors such as, does this person support you? Is he or she there for you at important times? Can you have meaningful discussions? Can you work out finances equitably? What about shared interests? What about distance? If these “logical” areas are a problem, the relationship probably will not last. 

If someone gives you an emotionally charged sales presentation, but there is no logic to back up that emotion, you will not buy from that person again. If you get sold emotionally on prime rib and it turns out “logically” to be a tough cut, you won’t be back. On the other hand, if you get emotionally sold on prime rib and it turns out logically to be the best prime rib you’ve ever had, you’ll be back again and again. 

Once a decision is made, service after the sale, performance of the product, efficiency and profitability, or lack thereof, will give solid, logical proof as to whether the decision was a good or bad one. 

Keep in mind some of the dynamics that are at work with your prospect. At the corporate level, decision-makers are concerned with how the buying decision will move them up the corporate ladder, earn the company more money, make them look good to peers and/or superiors and, overall, how the decision will give them more power within the organization. 

On the other side of the coin, they are afraid of making a mistake that could do the opposite and decrease their power within the organization. Ultimately, the buyer will weigh the two sides and make an emotional decision based upon a preponderance of evidence and then use the evidence to logically justify the decision to others. 

Most people, when they’re buying for business, desire to look good to others so that they can experience more positive emotions. Will they be seen as intelligent, frugal, tough, and a great negotiator? Or will they be seen as someone who paid too much and got taken advantage of? Remember this when putting together your sales presentation. 

A Potential Emotional and Logical Pitfall 

Many salespeople with a superior product focus their sales presentation solely on the logical reasons to buy, believing that details, statistics, and hard facts will be enough to sell a high-quality product. While logic might be enough to initially arouse interest in a superior product, the salesperson needs to add emotion to the sales presentation to ensure the prospect will pay higher dollars for a higher-quality product. 

On the flip side, salespeople with a weaker product or service will often use an emotionally charged sales presentation, while completely disregarding logic. The salesperson may feel that unless they throw an excess of enthusiasm and emotion at the prospect, they will not have a shot. In this case, the salesperson tends to oversell the emotion. 

The bottom line: as a salesperson, you need to know your product’s strengths and weaknesses, and then sell the strengths with logical enthusiasm in your sales presentation. Stir up strong emotions and justify those emotions with logical reasoning. Sell the steak (logic) and the sizzle (emotion). Sell the logic of prime rib, but paint “juicy” emotional pictures along with it. Conversely, you can sell the butt steak emotionally, but also sell the logic of the great price or “deal” the prospect is getting. 

All products and services have strengths and weaknesses. A lower-quality product or service, or one with fewer options and less flexibility, usually has low price as a strength. On the other hand, a product with a high price as a weakness usually has options, flexibility, superior performance, or other strong features as strengths. 

Whether you have the highest-priced, highest-quality product or the lowest-priced, lesser-quality product, you can always emotionally sell the logical benefits of whatever your product and thus have a powerful sales presentation.