How to Win High Level Shortlist Interviews (Sales Presentations) Part 11

This is lesson number 11 of our 12-lesson series on how to win group sales presentations. 

So far, we've covered a lot of the foundational concepts of group selling skills and ways to get buying committees to buy from your team after you get shortlisted. Just as a 30,000-foot recap, we started by covering many of the myths about shortlist presentations. 

One of those myths is that the slideshow is the presentation so you should start by designing your shortlist slideshow. That one mistake can cause teams to lose the high-level sales presentation more than any other mistake.

Instead, you want to design the presentation -- design what your team will say -- first. Then, after you have a clear presentation designed, create your slideshow to enhance what is being said in the presentation.

We also covered the power of case studies and success stories in a shortlist presentation. The best evidence that you can help this buying committee is past experience on similar projects. When you get really good add adding specific case studies as evidence that you can help this committee, they will trust your team more. These success stories also build rapport with the audience and reduce the nervousness of your presentation team. 

We also covered how important it is to research the buying committee. The more you know about what they want, the easier it is to design a targeted shortlist presentation. 

Then, finally, last week, we covered how to create a succinct presentation outline. This is your blueprint for a successful shortlist presentation.

Now that we have a great presentation outline, in this episode, we're going to help you help your SMEs (your Subject Matter Experts) design their component parts of the presentation. 

In this process, you have to be a great coach. You have to help them design a very concise presentation-within-the-presentation. And the backbone of each of those mini-presentation will be... wait for it... Fantastic case studies.

So, we are going to help your presentation team members create a mini-presentation within the big presentation. And we'll follow the same strategy that we used last week to help them create a compelling speech-within-a-speech, so to speak.

We'll also show you how to help them turn that outline -- that blueprint -- into a compelling presentation by adding in case studies.

Then, next week, in the final episode, we'll show you how to help them jazz up the entire presentation with what we call our "Impact Ideas." These are ways to enhance the presentation to an even higher level.

I know that, counting these last two lessons, we will have covered 12 different steps in this process. And, at this point, you may be thinking, "This sounds very complicated." The exact opposite is true, though. 

This process will save you so much time. It will also drop the stress level of your presenters a lot. The first time going through the whole process, it can be time-consuming. 

You have to get each presenter really good at determining what the absolute-most-critical, most-important things are to the audience. You also have to get your entire team to get really, really good at telling captivating success stories.

But once you get your team skilled in these areas, the actual designing of a new shortlist presentation is very, very fast. For instance, I've been able to get experienced teams (meaning teams that have already done at least one shortlist presentation with me before) ready to present in a single three-hour morning.

The process is very fast once you get the basics down. And hopefully, by the end of this episode, you'll be able to see that very easily.