When you meet someone new in person, you introduce yourself in 1 sentence, 1 minute or 1 hour.
You tailor your words to match the circumstances and that person’s interest.

But online…

…on a website, there’s no direct contact or chance to tailor your explanation – so do you stay brief, and risk the visitor not appreciating your full worth – or go for detail, and risk them being lost, confused or not bothering to read it?

Whether you have a large, complex website or just a single page, an audiovisual presentation brings your website to life. You can explain the benefits of your full capability and provide a website guide to take the visitor further. It plays within your webpage, or within a presentation menu that links multiple resources and breaks explanation into chapters. The player puts the viewer in control –to see how long each chapter is – and that’ vital.

Attention span is extremely short online, so a presentation must engage & excite like a TV Commercial, Movie trailer or news sound-bites.

Think about it – would you rather be listening and viewing for 2 minutes, or searching and reading which takes often takes much longer?

With a sense of irony, as I write in the blog… and of course, the written word is mighty powerful… but NOT uniquely. Whilst, for some people “it is all they need”… there are a lot of the population who prefer to see some “photos and images” in the newspapers and books they buy – and there are a lot of people who prefer radio news and iPod broadcasts to reading…because it is convenient and perhaps their perception is are more “audio” based – and still more who regularly watch TV and YouTube –incorporate ‘moving pictures’…

Presentations are fast to implement, available within days, and useful indefinitely and match your style, including logos, colouring and images. There are infinite possibilities with the content style… photographic, conceptual, animated, corporate, humorous…

A Website Introduction can be used a company overview of what you do, to explain your news and the launch of new services – both within your organisation and to your customers.

When you can’t be with the person to know whether 1 sentence, 1 minute or 1 hour is required, then use presentations to engage the viewer and give them the control.

Presenting Your Business  – 5 Tips Effective Company Overviews

1. Express your value from your customers’ perspective, not from yours.

2. And again… Express your value from your customers’ perspective, not from yours.
(Please re-read your presentations, documents & website and take notice where you have begun sentences… “We do this”, ” Our product is great because” … and replace with “You have this problem/opportunity”.

3. Customers generally want to buy your product, not your company – so explain it clearly. They are not inherently interested in you, your history – beyond understanding that you have great credentials and that they can rely on you in the future.

4. Be brief. Attention span is short. Use Headings.

5. What is your objective? Set the outcome depending on the complexity. Can your customers realistically find you and make a decision to buy immediately? If so – then compel them to buy – take them to the checkout. If not, then lead them to take other action… to phone… to download a report… raise curiosity…

Make Website visitors take action

Your website is where, every prospect will review you and compare you with the competition. Converting more website visitors into business leads, by better online marketing is a low cost, effective sales option.

An audio visual presentation will capture visitors attention without the incremental cost of sales each time. Presentations are flexible and far easier to update than printed materials or re-launching your website. You already have the website URL, on every business card, email footers, brochures, every communication… So a sales presentation from your homepage maximises the value of previous expense.

Reduce Travel and the cost of winning customers

In tough economic times, you need to be more effective at Sales & Marketing, but reduce your cost of business. Travel expenses to support Sales meetings, Marketing events & even internal training, really add up.

Self-sufficient Sales qualify opportunities

It is common to send both Sales AND Technical people whilst prospecting -to deliver the same basic introduction, the same sales pitch, the same slides. But if you cut back on marketing, you delay getting updated messages, through Sales, to the market and hand business to your competition.

Flash Intros are re-usable

And the same message can be used in multiple formats – as an email video attachment, in powerpoints, for training, on YouTube & on mobile PDAs. Maximise your impact when doing marketing events, a rolling presentation from a laptop or onto a flatscreen, is an eye-catching way to draw attention and invite discussion. (Paradoxically, you don’t even need to include video in an “online video”. Video from a camcorder is just one medium that can be inserted into a Flash Intro.)

Winning new business is hard these days – work smarter, not harder. An online presentation uses internet technology for sales lead generation, reduces business cost & use the same video/movie for Sales, Training & Customer Services.

Presenting Your Business – 5 Tips to Win Customers

1. Increase sales leads from your website by engaging visitors immediately. Lead them to take action.

2. Phrase Sales Presentations from the customers perspective. Connect to their issues & goals, illustrating the consequences of both – and then clearly explain why you help them more than other options.

3. If your product or service is technical, then don’t use jargon. Use Plain English.

4. Make Sales resources more self-sufficient because the alternatives are costing you business:

• Failure because of varying quality standards within your Sales team
• Sending Sales AND a technical resource to unqualified meetings, just to re-assure the sales person/prospect
• Repeating the SAME presentation and SAME demo … over … and over… and over again

5. Create a pre-recorded version of the BEST possible explanation and Demonstration – and structure the Sales meeting around the customer, requirements gathering & understanding – because you can guarantee that your business explanation generates interest and action.

Do you read the manual?

If your organisation develops software, or if your customers interact with you using online forms or applications, then you already know, that “What is simple to you…” is not to new customers. For potential customers & beginners, simply understanding the layout, terms, concepts, basic features and benefits – is a real challenge.

Developers create software, but overlook customer needs

It is all-too-common that companies work hard on creating the software (or online capability), but then fail to correctly demonstrate the benefits to the sales prospect and new customers. Often, the ‘demo’ is overlooked and left until the last minutes before a meeting – which does not do justice to a thorough Development Process from definition, design, coding and through testing.

Who designs Sales Demos?

Problems begin with the first, “internal” demo, where new features are shown by the “Dev Team” to other people in the organisation. The success of this demo relies on the audience already understanding the specific terms, jargon and basic functionality beforehand. It works because the audience already have a framework understanding and only have to absorb new changes. However, having watched this technical demonstration, the externally facing people (without the in-depth technical knowledge) are not equipped to perform the same demo that they saw (and nor should they because their audience – prospects and customers – don’t have the in-depth background either).

Technical Expertise AND Customer Facing

This gap is traditionally filled by ‘Pre-Sales technical Consultants, with a foot in both a technical and a sales team. They understand the product capabilities in detail and can translate it into “customer language”.

However, this takes real experience and a certain type of person to convincingly fulfil the role. It takes time to reach this advanced position to combine the features, benefits, advantages, technology, along with inter-personal skills required for effective sales, the techniques, answering the right questions convincingly and dodging the wrong questions diplomatically. Not many can guarantee credibility, presenting to an audience consisting of technical wizards, operational pragmatists, non-technical budget holders and executive decision-makers. Typically at a sales meeting, the  audience consists of a combination of the above, each with different levels of interest, different drivers for whether they would value the technology on offer, different perspectives on whether what is already in place needs to be defended or replaced. Such are the trials of Pre-Sales – along with demoing…

Use Senior Consutlants to win business

Organisations become so reliant on the Technical Consultant’s demoing skills, (even though this is only a fraction of their role), so they are “invited/demanded” to many presentations – which is repetitive and not cost-effective (especially in these tough economic conditions) to use such a specialise resource in early-sales-opportunity-qualifying, with the increasing travel & accommodations costs. Problems are compounded, as the initial demo often occurs at first meetings with a prospect and many meetings will fail to progress to the next level – wrong people in the meeting, lack of budget, lack of fit, bad timing…

The Smart Option….

When you capture your software in demonstrations and audio visual tutorials, its possible to combine technical expertise with Marketing Experience and deliver well prepared, informative, persuasive software visibility – without using the Consultant resource every time – which frees them for more important activities.

A recorded demonstration captures live action and combines with a scripted narration that illustrates the key points to a potential buyer and guarantees that a new customer understands on ‘Day 1’. The demo forms part of a Software Tutorial which proves your software is easy to use and avoids you receiving customer support calls from new users.

Tutorials and demos are subtly varied to create overviews, new release feature updates & common-usage scenarios combine to illustrate the story of how your customers use your software. Short, clear tutorials build into a modular library of animated FAQs.

If a picture paints a 1,000 words, then a great pre-recorded software tutorial saves a thousand minutes
- in sales meetings, in training, in reading manuals, in answering support queries.

Presenting Your Business – 5 Tips for Effective Demos

1. First, explain what Business issues your software solves to put your demonstration the audience’s context.

2. Scope the demonstration, indicating what it will include (and what must wait for another time).

3. Start with the basics – Introduce key terminology & display layout – letting the audience settle.

4. Illustrate a real-life scenario that is relevant to them – not a list of  features that you happen to like.

5. Keep it short and simple. Stop. Make sure what they have seen leaves them wanting to see more. Make sure it doesn’t raise concerns or confusion.

It often takes a long time to find and agree terms to become partners – so follow these keys to success to make sure it is worthwhile for you and for them…

Taking on partners (as a sales channel) is a cost effective way of increasing your Sales reach
– but can you be sure that they will give ‘you’ their proper attention and do justice in explaining your value, as well as you would do?

whether they will receive a commission for passing on customers/(qualified) leads, or will sell directly and buy from you at a discounted rate to provide them with margin, it is important to:

1. Make it worth their while – You are competing for their attention, against their own products, and other established partners who have already proved their attractiveness as a revenue stream to the partner. Bottom line – they are in it for the money, so agree terms that provide a valuable commission or discount if they are purchasing and selling on.
2. Make learning about your products or services, easy. If you don’t explain things clearly to them – and excite them, then they won’t remember much. So think through what they need to know to be effective.
3. Don’t try to tell them everything in one go. Think of their learning in modules, starting at a high level with the terms and concepts, and gradually becoming more detailed.
4. Partners don’t need to know as much detail as you. Look at it from their perspective. They need to know what will interest their prospects and how to explain that in the most attractive and engaging manner. They don’t need to understand the past history or every feature, but must know how to explain the value that the prospect will gain.
5. If you can, provide them with your explanations, but branded to match them. It isn’t difficult to create or update existing documents and change the colours, font and logos – but partners can immediately begin by passing this explanation to the client. It means you don’t wait for the Partner’s Marketing resources to prioritise creating “your” materials into their already bursting workload.
6. Think how to distribute information online – it is often the most efficient. Perhaps your website will support a secure area into which you can provide materials. It means the partner always has access to the latest version, so as you update things, they won’t be using out of date material.
7. Look at ways that you can put-words-into-their-mouths. If they had you at each sales opportunity, it would remove the doubt that they can explain the basics (or even more advanced features), so providing the best presentation that you have, in an online format, means that they don’t need to explain at all.
8. Manage their Support queries effectively. If they going to do 1st line Support, make sure they can answer the basics, but re-assure that your team is ready for 2^nd line escalation. If you do a great job in the training phase (or provide online materials) then the number of calls is minimal. Especially, if you apply economies of scale and learn from early partners and provide the commonly the answers to Frequently Asked Questions – before they are raised.

What my clients receive

At Presenting Your Business, I work with clients to identify and develop the best approach for promoting their business or organisation. It is a consultative process, reviewing existing capabilities and objectives, then working together to form simple, under-pinning messages to attract more business, build awareness and become more successful. Clients generally have ideas and my job is capture their personality and value. An external perspective, often recognises elements that are taken for granted and overlooked – or re-phrases expression from the customer’s perspective, rather than the organisation’s own.

Who do I work with?

I work with clients in a wide range of industries, from “beginners” in IT and Marketing, to companies that specialise technology with technical offerings that need explaining, demonstrating and marketing on-line – such as Software and Software-as-a-Software companies – and this is the particular industry in which I have 15 years experience.

I work with all sizes of companies from sole-traders to publicly listed global organisations. Some have IT and Marketing expertise, and some have none. My role is to bring specific value, to compliment your available resources, depending on the objectives.

Online Presentations – A unique deliverable

Attention span is very short via online mediums such as websites, email attachments and mobile phones – which brings specific challenges when creating the story, wording, visual content, production and format. But, you can realise tremendous benefits when you improve how effectively you engage and interest people online – both in sales  generation and in being more cost-effective.

For some clients, I create Online Presentations. These are inexpensive and re-usable, engaging with an audience that the client cannot easily meet face-to-face. A multimedia presentation combines a variety of materials to create more than the sum of the parts – logos, images, storyline, personality, videos, photos. A Corporate Overview or Product/Software Demonstration generates awareness and interest. It increases the effectiveness of using the internet (and online technology) as a sales channel and for customer services.

Initial projects range from a couple of days to a couple of months, and normally we continue on an ongoing basis, extending capabilities, based on the initial success – and I become an outsourced resource within their team, which is most cost-effective for my clients.

My mission is to Present Your Business, so that you effectively explain your value and reach more customers via the online world. Please contact me – I would be delighted to help.

(Your can see some movie examples at www.DemoMaestro.com an uk.youtube.com/DemoMaestro )

Presenting Your Business is run by Jeremy Edwards.

Jeremy combines practical experience in IT and Marketing, and an ability to absorb diverse conceptual & technical material, so that it can be explained simply and accurately to the target audience in an engaging way. It is based on over 15 years working in technology, marketing and as a director, successfully growing a Software Services business.

Win Customers more cost-effectively.

Jeremy combines Sales experience, creativity and a practical, techinical knowledge to make clients more successful.

Consulting and Delivery

I am a hands-on consultant (rather than one who borrow’s your watch!)  and am delighted to implement solutions for you – as your resource.

I create materials that are SMARTER – that use technology to make you more cost-effective and increase sales/awareness. I believe that deliverables should be consistent across mediums and re-usable in many situations, rather than one off’s – and that the “story” is the most important factor.

Web Videos, Software Tutorials & Demos

Working together to make your message is the priority – and using on-line technologies to distribute it is engaging and cost-effective. This blog is a collection of ideas which you can use too, as well as seeing some solutions for clients.