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Presentation Tips:  The Crucial Slide: The Demo Slide

This presentation tip is in the category:  The Perfect Sales Presentation Series

After letting your customers to understand their own pain (problems in their daily life or job), you need to provide them with a solution.  The best way to let your customers understand the benefits, features and everything else of what you are selling is to do a product demo.

In your sales PowerPoint presentation package, include a slide that states the description of your products and a link to your demo document.

Here is a list of basic guideline to follow to do the right product demo:

Brief and to- the-point description and pictures: your PowerPoint presentation should simply have the brief description of your products or services and some pictures there.  Pictures are always better than words.  You save a lot of time by showing your customers what your product look like and how it works visually.  You briefly introduce your products in your PowerPoint slide and quickly move on the do the demo.

Bring a real product with you if possible: the best product demos are the ones that bring customers to the later stages of the adaption process.  The adaption process consists of six stages including Awareness, Interests, Evaluation, Trial, Decision and Repeat.   You should try to give your customers the opportunity to physically try out your products or services in your product demo.  This will help customers to get closer to their purchasing decisions.  Bring your products with you if possible.  Let your customers to physically feel and touch your products.

Video or flash demonstration: Not all products or services could be physically presented at the product demo session.  If this is the case, place a link in your PowerPoint slide that links to a previously recorded video or flash document on your desktop.  Never do an online demo.  You never know if your clients have any wireless connections in their office.  There are plenty of tools available to help you created first-class pre-made video or flash demo.  I personally prefer using Macro-media’s tool to do screen recording.  There are plenty of free tools you can download for free at www.download.com to do screen recording.

Your video or flash document should not be too fancy: The key is to get your point across and let your customers understand the benefits and everything else about your products.  Don’t spend too much time doing fancy animations in your product demo.  Design should never be over usability.

Prepare to speak with the video or flash document: technology is not as reliable even today.  I have seen many occasions where a salesperson’s laptop doesn’t work.  Prepare to speak without your PowerPoint slide and your demo document.  I usually print out the paper forms of the demonstration documents with me to the meetings.

The demonstration should never be too long and boring: remember! Your customers are being pitched by many salespersons everyday and bored with their jobs.  Make sure your demonstration is short and fun.  If you lose your customers’ attention, your customers lose their interests in your products.

If you have done your product demo effectively, it will be very natural for you to go on to the next PowerPoint slide – closing and call to action.  Even if you don’t go to the next slide yourself, your customers will also be starting to ask questions about your pricing and other arrangements.