Six Steps to Creating Online Presentations for Tel

Six Steps to Creating Online Presentations for Telephone Selling

by: Roger C. Parker

How much extra money could you make by closing just one or two additional sales a day? You can double, or even triple, the effectiveness of your telephone selling by showing prospects why they should buy from you, instead of just telling them.

Clients and prospects are visually oriented. They process and retain 75% of the information they see, compared to about 15% of the information they hear.

There are six steps involved in preparing online visuals you and your prospects can look at online during telephone conversations and teleconferences.

Step 1: Desired result

Start by identifying what you want to accomplish during each phone call. Ask yourself:

What is the primary message I want to communicate?

What action do I want my client or prospect to take?

What information can I provide to convince them to take the desired action?

Your answers to these questions will provide the framework you need to begin preparing for your upcoming calls.

Step 2: Benefits

Next, translate your product or service into benefits they will enjoy if they take the action you want them to take. Identify as many different ways as possible your product or service can benefit your client. Be as specific as possible.

Step 3: Framework

Open your presentation program and create an ขemptyข set of visuals to support your upcoming calls. This will provide a framework for developing your telephone sales presentation.

Don’t be concerned the contents of each visual. At this point, don’t stop to fill in the details for each visual. Simply create an empty presentation visual and title for each of the points you want to cover in your upcoming telephone calls.

Hint: You may want to create a template with placeholder visuals to help quickly prepare future presentations.

Step 4: Provide proof

Next, go through your presentation framework and complete each of the visuals by adding appropriate text and graphics. As you complete each visual, strive to make your benefits as specific and as visual as possible. Translate your products or services into added dollars and cents revenue, reduced costs, or time savings.

Whenever possible, show, rather than tell. Translate words into information graphics, like tables, charts, and graphs, to emphasize:

Comparisons, i.e. before and after revenues or expenditures of time and money.

Trends, i.e. growing market share.

Add photographs to personalize and reinforce case studies and testimonials. Use logos, rather than words, to emphasize case studies and satisfied clients.

Step 5: Contingency visuals

Next, prepare to respond to objections that prospects may bring up during your calls.

Start by identifying the possible objections that prospects might come up. Determine how to respond to each one. Then, prepare visuals that will only be used if your prospect brings the specific objection up.

Typical objections concern price, competitive features, ease of use, and economic uncertainty.

Step 6: Upload and rehearse

After reviewing your work, use your presentation program’s Save as… command to save your presentation in the appropriate online format.

Then, upload your presentation to the server where you and your prospects can access it online during calls.

Rehearse your presentation, until you can comfortably proceed from point to point, and easily access the contingency visuals, (if needed).

Consider your webbased presentations a ขwork in progressข that you continually update and refine. Prepare additional visuals as new objections come up. And prepare personalized slide titles and visuals for specific clients and prospects.

About The Author

Let Roger C. Parker help you harness the latest technology to promote your expertise. For more information, please visit www.onepagenewsletters.com.

This article was posted on September 14, 2004

by Roger C. Parker

How to Convert Telephone Calls into Powerful Prese

How to Convert Telephone Calls into Powerful Presentations

by: Roger C. Parker

You can multiply your ability to persuade by 400%, whether your audience is 1 or 100. Webbased presentations add a visual element to teleconferences. Instead of just talking to prospects, you can simultaneously show them and tell them. According to a Wharton Business School study, this dual mode communication makes your message up to four times more effective than using just your voice.

Present from your office:

Webbased presentations can be as effective as inthesameroom presentations, but are free from the costs and frustrations involved in traveling.

Talk to your prospects using your current telephone or—for large groups —a rented bridge line. You and your audience view your visuals using a standard web browser and Internet connection.

You control what’s displayed on your audience’s computer screen! Your screen contains a menu listing available visuals. You control presentation content, pace, and sequence. You can spend as much or as little time as desired on each visual. You can show all of your visuals, or just those needed to respond to attendee concerns or questions.

No limits on audience size:

No audience is too large or too small for a webbased presentation! You can easily and costeffectively show and tell 1to1 as you speak to individual prospects, or you can present to hundreds at a time.

No advance scheduling:

Your visuals are available 24/7. No reservations are required to present. Convert any telephone call into a presentation by inviting your caller to immediately access your online visuals while talking.

More than one set of visuals can be prepared and ready for instant use.

Preparing your visuals:

Use Microsoft PowerPoint™ to create your presentation. Presentations can be as simple or complex as desired.

In addition to creating visuals for your ขcoreข presentation, consider creating ขcontingencyข visuals available for showing as needed. This permits you to customize your presentation on the basis of questions from the audience or callers.

You can easily add and edit visuals. This permits you to customize the title or specific visuals with your client’s name or clientspecific contents and prices.

After completing your presentation, upload it to the server where your visuals will be available online to you and your clients, prospects, or employees.

Access:

Only those who know the specific location of your presentation on the web will be able to access your visuals. You can communicate the URL during the phone conversation or you can send it to a group via email before an event.

Unless you are also online, visitors will not be able to navigate through your presentation.

Applications:

Any presentation task you would normally accomplish inperson can now be done on the phone and online:

Demonstrations. Do a better job of describing the benefits of your product or service by showing as well as telling. Interactively walk prospects through the steps you’ll use to help them solve a pressing problem or achieve a desired goal.

Previews. Increase attendance at teleseminars and live events by previewing the contents and benefits of attending.

Proposals. Deliver client presentations in an interactive environment. Use your voice to build enthusiasm and address concerns or questions as they arise.

Continuous contact. Keep in close touch with clients and prospects while helping them make informed purchase decisions and best use of their purchase.

Training. Keep employees and your sales staff motivated and up to date on your latest products and services.

It’s all about relationships. Webbased presentations are just another way you can put today’s lowcost technology to work building and maintaining close ties with customers and prospects. At low cost, you can communicate with added impact from your office.

About The Author

Let Roger C. Parker show you how to attract qualified prospects and retaining clients by creating the right messages and choosing the right tools. Visit www.onepagenewsletters.com or call Roger at 6037429673 for information.

This article was posted on August 12, 2004

by Roger C. Parker

Design vs Content: Who is KING?

Design vs Content: Who is KING?

by: Romelo Itong

Well it is not Elvis, thatกs for sure.

I am a firm advocate of good design but most of the time people tend to interpret design as amazing graphics and astounding visuals they tend to forget that design is the culmination of every aspect of good and effective presentation into one.

We all know that design and content have equal importance in regards to websites but if you must choose which one is immediately important, which will you choose, design or content? If you?re going to prepare an entire web marketing strategy on which of these two shall you focus on more? Why? Please defend your answer?

During my early days (around 1997), when I was still studying/learning to develop webpages, websites with astonishing visuals never fails to impress me and I?d always ask myself this, ?Man, how did they do that great graphic?? I will spend countless hours surfing the net collecting every graphically and visually orgasmic websites I could fine and I?ll try to imitate and recreate them with photoshop (Photoshop 4) and if I can?t recreate them I?ll scour the web for tutorials on how to make those visuals. Man, if I were paying for my internet connection I would be dead broke by now. It was a good thing that my internet access was free. Anyway, back to the discussion. Then it hit me, after saving a screenshot of those awesome website, saving all those wonderful wallpapers and all those banners and images, in my mind a very simple question was formed, ?When was the last time I visited these websites again?? the answer was simple, once or never. After, analyzing my thoughts I finally noticed that most of these sites offers nothing but visuals. I had spent countless hours browsing these websites and I was only looking at their visuals, why, because that was all they have. That was the only thing they can offer, visuals. I finally realized that the websites I regularly visit like Yahoo, Web Monkey, Web Developer Virtual Library, and now google doesn?t have all these WOW factor thing, they don?t have the bells and whistles of those extraordinary websites. All they have and all they offer was information, tons and tons of information. They never bothered to develop their look and their feel, what they developed was their content, their information database. Millions of people or millions of potential clients, buyers and opportunities go to these websites not to look at their remarkable visuals or presentations but to acquire what everybody need information and people pay a lot of money for information. A father will pay millions of dollars just to get some information about his long lost child but this same father would not pay anything more than 10,000 or even 50,000 USD just to look at a design, he won?t even pay at all.

Content development is in a much higher level than Design Conceptualization, Creation and Development. Yes, design will capture your visitor?s immediate attention. All the wows, oohhhsss and overwhelming appreciation of the design will follow it but after that what? I for once is very irritated of websites which will make you wait 1 minute for you to download their 3 minute intro just to find out later that the information you are looking for is not there. It does not only irritates me, it also makes me mad as hell because I?ve wasted 5 minutes of my time for nothing and I believe that almost all internet users especially those on dialup have the same sentiments as mine.

Content makes the big bucks. Here is another analogy. It is like a commercial ad on TV, they?ll hype a product with visuals, graphics, amazing videos, cool sounds and they?ll even get your favorite star to endorse it but in reality it is just as good as the next product. If you ever seen that TV ad for a brand of powdered laundry soap where the speaker just places the cloth stained with grease on a basin of water and just poured some of their product and left it, and after an hour she?ll be back and it is already clean without any effort from you. I tried it, using the same product but it didn?t work. I even left it longer. It didn?t remove the grease from my shirt but it did remove the color and the grease is still there. I?m not saying that the product doesn?t really work, what I?m saying is, it is all hype just like a website with all the hype. If you have a website that has all these bells and whistles, have you ever wondered how many potential paying clients have pressed the back button or have typed in a different URL just because they can?t wait to load your website, just stop for a while and think of the dollars that you easily could have raked in only if your site loaded just a nanosecond sooner.

Websurfers are an impatient breed. Very few will actually wait until your elaborate design loads. Only those that are interested in your design will wait and look at it and who are they? They are not the paying public, they are not the CEO?s, they are not the business people and they are not the people who have the dough to pay for your services, skills and talents. They are not the people whom you are trying to sell your service to. Then who are they? They are designers, artist and creative people who are just there to steal, copy and plagiarize your hard work.

Content is KING. In fact, it is a GOD. A website with good and well thought out content can and will survive longer than an extravagantly designed one. A lavishly designed website will bring in immediate traffic but they are not quality traffic. They could even be just one time visitors but content, fresh and new (am iterating), will drive not just new visitors but will bring in more visitors which could become potential users of your site and once they become users and get hooked on your site then the big bucks will not be very far behind them (hopefully).

About The Author

Romelo Jimenez Itong is a Philippinebased web designer/developer with years of experience designing and developing websites for US and other international clients. Visit http://www.romelo.com for more information.

[email protected]

This article was posted on November 18, 2003

by Romelo Itong