28. Baiting the Salesperson: Selling Is about In-Person Communication

In the pressured world of business, multitasking and repurposing are equated with efficiency. These practices result in the inefficient use of Microsoft PowerPoint for both presentations and documents, with multiple variations of the latter: leave-behinds, speaker notes, uniformity of corporate messaging, and send-aheads.

Of all the many shortcuts, the worst and most common offender is the last: using PowerPoint for both the presentation and a preview of the presentation, as in “Send me your slides in advance.” The primary perpetrators of this duality are the solicited, the people in a position to make “yes” or “no” decisions. These power players, who are sought after to become investors in or customers of the presenter’s line of business, wield so much weight that their requests are difficult to refuse.

One such decision maker wields his power differently. He is a senior vice president of a Fortune 500 company, and he spends 7 million or 8 million euros every month buying products and services for his organization. Whenever he is solicited by a vendor seeking an appointment, his standard reply is, “I don’t have a lot of time for meetings; just email me your slides with information about your product/service and I’ll see if I’m interested.”

If the vendor agrees, the vice president deletes the email when it arrives, without opening it. His reason: “If a salesperson succumbs that easily, either he can’t be a very good salesperson or he hasn’t much faith in his own product or service. That person has yielded the selling process to an incomplete impersonal summary. Selling is about person-to-person communication.”

The vice president responds differently if the vendor doesn’t take the bait. If the vendor offers to send a fact sheet or an executive summary—a true document created in Microsoft Word—as a preliminary to a face-to-face meeting, the vice president accepts. When the meeting occurs, the presentation—created in PowerPoint—functions as an illustration of the presenter’s story. Then the vice president can get a complete picture, ask questions, and truly evaluate the salesperson and his or her product or service.

Don’t take the bait. Send a document ahead, and bring the presentation along.