Too many salespeople prepare a PowerPoint deck for a virtual sales meeting and spend over 95% of the time with the prospect sharing the slides. This makes the slides the focus and the video of the salesperson and the prospect small beside the slides.
While the slides are important, they shouldn’t be the only focus. A simple change you can make is to consciously stop sharing your slides when you want to connect better with the prospect. This might be when you share a customer success story or ask a question to promote discussion.
When you are done building a more solid connection face-to-face, you can start sharing your slides again and move to the next point you wanted to make.
This will require you to practice stopping the sharing of the slides and restarting again. You will need to know where to click in the meeting platform and whether there are shortcut keys to jump to the sharing dialog or panel (for example, Alt+S opens the sharing dialog in Zoom on Windows). Once you are comfortable with stopping and restarting your slides, it will feel more natural during a call.
Make this one change to improve your connection with prospects in virtual sales meetings.
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Where to go next
–>More articles on virtual presenting –>Training for your team on presenting virtually
–>More articles on virtual & hybrid sales presentations –>Training for your sales team
Dave Paradi has over twenty-two years of experience delivering customized training workshops to help business professionals improve their presentations. He has written ten books and over 600 articles on the topic of effective presentations and his ideas have appeared in publications around the world. His focus is on helping corporate professionals visually communicate the messages in their data so they don’t overwhelm and confuse executives. Dave is one of fewer than ten people in North America recognized by Microsoft with the Most Valuable Professional Award for his contributions to the Excel, PowerPoint, and Teams communities. His articles and videos on virtual presenting have been viewed over 4.8 million times and liked over 17,000 times on YouTube.