Are your team members working for you or against you? Discovering the answer to that question might start with uncovering the root of their motivation.
How does your marketing department get rewarded?
- Forecasting optimistic sales projections
- Creating nice looking marketing materials
- Winning marketing awards from marketing associations
- Spending money on expensive advertising campaigns
- Creating, and policing the sacred brand
- Addressing politically correct and hot issues
- Appearing to be green or following other popular fads and trends
- Convincingly explaining why the last marketing campaign didn’t work
How does your sales department get rewarded?
- Sales
Well that looks simple.
Often, your marketing department prepares or hires a marketing agency to prepare the standard sales PowerPoint presentation.
The PowerPoint slides were prepared in response to the expressed desire of senior executives to present a consistent message to prospects.
Because marketing is less concerned about selling and the needs of the prospects – the slideshow becomes a marketing feel-good show.
Because a marketing agency will charge several thousand dollars to produce this slideshow, the focus of their presentation is to appease the person signing the cheque – often the business owner.
So, the beginning of the slideshow will talk about the business, the business owner and his childhood trek across the desert. But, your prospects don’t care about this- at least not at the begging of the presentation.
Your prospects are still asking themselves important questions like:
- Why did I agree to look at this presentation?
- What’s in this for me?
- How much money did they waste on this slideshow?
- Why is this sales person wasting my time?
If the sales person blindly follows the marketing PowerPoint presentation, often the deal will fail. Marketing will blame the sales person. If the customer buys, it will most likely be because of the relationship between the prospect and the sales person. Yet, marketing will claim the success.
Sales can’t win and marketing never loses.
Can you really trust marketing to produce sales presentations that they never deliver? Can you really trust marketing to produce sales presentations that are not about selling?
This might sum it up.
The speaker at a small business conference stated, “I’m from marketing. I’m not here to sell you anything.” Either he was lying or he didn’t understand his real purpose.
Can we really trust your marketing department with your sales presentation?
I’m a marketing guy. But more importantly I'm a business owner so I know the importance of sales. If it doesn’t sell, it’s bad marketing.
Executive Speech Coach, Business presentation tips from George Torok, the Speech Coach for Executives
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