The February Edition of the Mastering Technical Sales Edge newsletter will be published on February 8th. This month I'll be looking in detail at two aspects of how to make your presentations better - going back to the series about The Perfect Pitch.
The lead article deals with How to Practice a Presentation/Demo, and the inside page provides some interesting ideas about how to apply the theories of imrov to the craft of an Sales Engineer. You'll learn some intriguing team games and icebreakers for those quarterly team meetings.
My review book is Drive by Dan Pink. It's a fascinating look into what motivates us and why - I found it to be a great read and highly recommend it. You'll probably want to give a copy to your boss and to your compensation analyst!
Back in September 2010 I wrote an article about Handout Happiness, which dealt with best practices for hand-outs and that eternal question of “do I hand-out my handouts before or after the presentation?” The topic has been getting some play around the globe. Oliver Adria of ReThink Presentations over in Germany riffed on the slide-ument model of handing out a hard-copy of the slide deck before the presentation – he’s not a fan. (I’d recommend his weekly newsletter – it’s short, sharp and to the point).
Meanwhile – Olivia Mitchell from New Zealand writes a Speaking About Presenting Blog. Also back in the summer of 2010 she published 13 Best Practices for Handouts – many of which are amazingly similar to Oliver’s and mine – proving that handout horrors are global!
I believe that handouts can be a powerful weapon in the arsenal of any SE – particularly when conducting a remote demo or presentation – if only they were used correctly. Check out my article, and Oliver’s and Olivia’s and decide for yourself.
For those of you who have been asking about the electronic availability of the MTS Book - Good News at last. Mastering Technical Sales: The Sales Engineers Handbook is now available at the Google Bookstore. Also - according to my publisher - it is now with Amazon in the process of being Kindle-ized. Stay tuned.
OK. One of my New Year's Resolutions is to increase my blogging frequency over 2010 - which shouldn't be too difficult. First up for 2011 is the January website update and newsletter. The newsletter will be distributed on Wednesday January 5th due to the holiday in the US.
For a sneak preview of the content I'm featuring an updated list of Sales Engineering New Year Resolutions for 2011- all focusing on your personal Performance, Promotability and income Potential. After five years of Newsletters and Talking Points I'm finally touching on the art and science of Discovery. I reveal the one thing you need to know about Discovery - which is Care's First Law. The January "Ask John" deals with the topic of handling high salesrep turnover and what to do when you are introducing the ninth salesrep to handle an account in six years (hey - maybe the sales manager should actually be doing that?).
All the best for 2011 from Mastering Technical Sales
