MASTERING Q&A – Sales Presentation Skills In The Moment

SPOOKED would be a good word to describe the sales team Pete Machalek and I were helping prepare for an hour-long Q&A session for a contract worth millions. We had their presentation well under control, but these professionals were turning on each other as they cringed at the responses within our mock Q&A session. They snipping, correcting, and accusing each other of not being prepared when they needed to be pulling together as a team.

A decade and over a billion dollars in client wins since first coaching a sales team, we had some ideas about how to get them past the uncertainty of Q&A, using sales presentation skills for after the presentation.

The first thing in their way was the idea that winning is giving the right answer. Not so, or at least not necessarily. It depends on how you define “right.” Some questions are about the answer. Others are asked just to see how the team collaborates. Do they like each other? Do they like us? Will they be open or evasive? Do we want to work with these people? How will they handle being put on the spot?

There are a lot of reasons to ask a question, so you can never be sure what they’re looking for in an answer. Adding to your tension is the blank, poker-faced stare in response to your passionate answer. As the pencil scratches on the paper in the silence, it’s hard to maintain your groove.

There is a poker game going on, but it’s not with you. They’re trying to hide their reactions from each other. It’s to each panelist’s advantage that they conceal who they like. An air of objectivity preserves their power in negotiations later. So if a panelist really likes you, they’re likely to ask their questions more sternly, to help cloak the fact that they’re throwing you a bone.

Once you recognize the poker game they have to play with each other, you can accept the awkwardness of Q&A, and tackle it with a strategy that makes the whole process easier.

I think of Q&A like my great uncle Harvey used to think about his sheep. Uncle Harvey had a fence that needed a gate, but instead of building one, he would just lift the sheep across one at a time so they could get to the grass. As the summer progressed, the sheep got bigger, and Uncle Henry got stronger. His strength came from helping the sheep, who trusted Uncle Henry to get them what they needed.

Q&A is a lot like that. Your prospect has a challenge on one side of their fence, and on the other side, a better place they’d rather be. Your job is to describe both sides of the fence, and speak to an action that would take them across.

INTERVIEWER
How are you going to manage all the storage when our site
is so small?

INTERVIEWEE
Right now, there’s a tremendous amount of raw materials that
have to come in, and that really threatens the usability of the
workspace everyone is going to need to share. We recommend
building key components off-site, and leveraging our off-site
storage facility. We can bring in materials and finished components
as needed, and only at night. That way we can preserve seventy
percent of the site for working crews.

Look at the story structure here:

• The challenging situation is the limited space, where raw-material storage is threatening usable workspace.
• Off-site building and storage is the action that takes you across the fence.
• Preserving 70% of the workspace is the greener grass.

Just like Henry was a hero to the sheep, and he got stronger and stronger by lifting them to the greener side of the fence, you want to speak to the tough situations your prospect is in, and lift them across the fence with your answer, so they can be in a better place.

This is simple Beginning, Middle, and End, and it shifts you from worrying about giving the right answer to a focus on answering completely. You are the hero in the middle, leading them to better places.

You’ll also notice that the story is a “we story,” speaking to the issue the team is going to face, or that the client was going to face, with a specific recommended action that could benefit everyone. This allowed the Q&A process to be “other centered.”

Story-structured thinking turns you from a salesman to a “consultant” who is helping them get where they want to go. We practiced this with our sales team, and most of them got the hang of this pretty quickly. It removed a lot of the defensiveness and kept them from just jumping to the fix.

Instantly, the team started answering questions better, demonstrating an understanding of the prospect, and taking a leadership role toward guiding the prospect where they wanted to go. They seemed more confident, and passionate, where they had been defensive and stressed.

Practice this in a handful of the questions you face today. The best place to practice story-structuring answers will be the less critical questions you’ll face. As you get better at answering with other-centric stories, you can try bringing them into more important moments, and we’ll continue this subject in future posts to explore how we brought even higher-levels of team-collaboration and presence into the Q&A process to help this sales team win over its client.

Please forward this post to anyone you think could benefit from its content, and be sure to register on our announcement list for the SagePresence Book, when its release details are finalized. THIS POST SERIES CONTINUES WITH MASTERING TEAM Q&A.