COVID-19 has drastically changed the way organizations communicate — especially with one another. Without being able to conduct in-person meetings and presentations, sellers must employ socially distant alternatives such as conference calls and screen-sharing.

We’ve spent the past few months reckoning even more with the challenges of remote selling, one of which is online presenting. Sellers depend on skills such as building personal relationships, reading the room, and physically being in front of clients to close deals. When it comes to virtual presentations, however, these things become much more difficult. Shifting to a virtual environment means sellers must be able to switch things up in real time and customize messages in order to better engage their prospects.

For a sales presentation to be effective, sellers must realize that prospects are expecting a hyper-personalized presentation. Without understanding their pain points and curating a presentation for their specific needs, sellers are likely to experience a slower sales process or even have prospects shut down entirely.

In fact, 95% of B2B buyers want sellers to be prepared with insights about the needs of their company, meaning a brochure paired with a generic product description or irrelevant content isn’t going to cut it. Sellers need to show their prospects direct solutions the product provides, including the details that can entice audiences without overloading them with information.

How Can Companies Sell Online Effectively?

Online sales presentations are certainly challenging, but they’re still a great way to reach your prospects effectively at the right moment. And even in a post-pandemic world, digital selling will likely stick around. Here’s how you can make the most of your online presentations:

1. Be willing to adjust questions and pivot during presentations. A good sales presentation requires sellers to ask questions about pain points, decision-making processes, and budgets. Without a relationship already in the works and careful wording, however, these types of questions can cause awkwardness (or even friction) between you and your prospects. Prepare yourself with a set of strategic, open-ended questions you can use to establish rapport and get to the bottom of these topics. Here are just a few you could use:

• What problems have you experienced?
• What are your top priorities for this project?
• What does your evaluation process look like for this solution?

Asking these more strategic questions during presentations can guide your prospect toward a commitment by gathering smaller commitments through the presentation. These questions can be included in various slides and should aim to start a conversation between sellers and prospects. Likewise, sellers can use the answers they receive to further hone and personalize their follow-up questions.

2. Use analytics to hyper-personalize your presentations. The key to creating compelling presentations is personalizing the content to your prospect’s needs, pain points, and business objectives. Sellers can do this by creating personas that include different use cases for the product depending on the prospect’s industry and business needs.

Once you’ve focused on the prospect’s unique needs, tailor your messaging by utilizing a platform that tracks engagement — especially during presentations — and allows you to come up with tailored responses or respond with approved messaging. This saves you time on sales calls and can help shorten the sales cycle.

3. Set an agenda for every pitch. More than half of corporate meeting time is wasted, so anybody who ends up feeling like your presentation wasn’t valuable might not see the value in your product. An agenda will help you stay on track and maximize everyone’s time. After all, the last thing you want to do is overload prospects with mountains of information. Set an agenda with your main talking points and share it with your audience in advance to ensure the right people will be in the room.

How ClearSlide Can Help

ClearSlide isn’t just any old tool in your sellers’ arsenal. With our platform, you’re able to offer your prospects the most engaging, interactive experience possible through high-quality audio conferencing, screen-sharing, and multimedia presentations.

With ClearSlide, sellers can deliver powerful presentation experiences. Our platform allows you to see which prospects are engaged and which ones have lost focus and navigated to a tab away from your presentation. When your meeting ends, our service can automatically log analytics and meeting details within your CRM for later use.

For example, a client of ours recognized the difficulty of getting prospects to set aside time for an in-person meeting. To ease this problem, the client switched to conducting online presentations through ClearSlide’s live pitch function, which requires only 20-30 minutes of the prospect’s time.

It’s easy to say, “I’m going to send you a link. I just want you to sit back and watch. Don’t worry about taking notes — I’m going to send you a recording of the presentation when we’re done.” This lessens the commitment of prospects, meaning they’re more willing to agree to these meetings. Incorporating digital selling helped our client better reach its prospects, especially amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Wondering how sales presentations can be made easier for your sellers and prospects? Try out our online presentations feature on your next sales call by requesting a free trial today.