The Relevance Quotient (RQ) for Sales Presentations

The phrase "making the most of every opportunity" is no longer cliché as many organizations stare at thinner sales pipelines, looking for creative ways to push reluctant buyers over the proverbial hump. 

1. Take any sales presentation in the house and count the number of slides where at least 80% of the content on the slide is about your buyer.  Examples include market trends in the buyer's industry, CEO initiatives in the buyer's company, the buyer's current business practices/processes, operational goals, growth opportunities and challenges of the buyer, etc.  In other words, count the number of slides that are 80% focused on the business of the buyer?
2. Divide the number of buyer-relevant slides by the total number of slides in the presentation.  The result is your RQ.  For example, a .80 RQ would mean 20 of 25 slides are buyer-relevant. 

Use the following as a guide to evaluate the RQ of your sales and marketing presentations.

• .70 or higher:  green zone - highly relevant
• .50 - .69:  yellow zone - borderline irrelevant
• Lower than .50:  red zone - not nearly enough buyer-related content to nail the issues

If you're questioning how a presentation that's only 30%  product content can sell the product, the answer is simple. 

Psychologically, most buyers aren't actually buying your product.  In fact, they really don't care much about your products.  They only care about finding the easiest way possible to deal with their top priority issues.  So what they end up buying is your ability to clearly articulate their issues in a pure business context prior to discussing product solutions.  Your products are merely proof points that substantiate solutions to business problems.  If you articulate the business issues better than your competition, buyers subconsciously assume your products and services are superior, otherwise, you'd be avoiding the issues.

Make life easier for your sales people by educating them more on the business of your buyers.  When combined with reasonable product knowledge, it's an unbeatable combination. 

If the relevance quotient for your sales presentations is in the yellow or red zone, there's good news:  it's one of the easiest problems you'll ever fix.  This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it or call us at 866-797-3647 and we'll have you in the green zone in a day or two.   We can teach you how to do it, do it for you or some combination of both.

No one makes it easier than ZIGZAG Marketing.

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