Fearless Presentations

How to Win High Level Shortlist Interviews (Sales Presentations) Part 12

Doug Staneart

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

One of the myths that we tackled in one of the earlier episodes was that the PowerPoint slideshow itself is the shortlist presentation. That one mistake can cause teams to lose the high-level sales presentation more than any other mistake. What we started with last week was a different concept. I began to show you how to create the verbal presentation first. This means that you want to figure out what you want to say first and then create your slideshow last.

So, on today's episode, I'm going to show you how to turn that presentation outline that we created a couple of weeks ago into a fantastic and appealing presentation. We are going to do that with what I call our Impact Ideas. 

Counting the Case Studies that we really expanded upon weeks ago, there are a total of five Impact Ideas. These items will really make your shortlist presentation come to life and make you and the content that you cover more memorable.

Then, finally, we'll show you how to create your visual aids -- which may or may not end up being a PowerPoint slideshow.

Also, in the last couple of minutes of this session, I'll give you a few of my final thoughts. I know that we've 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.