This is step 3 to the 7 steps to building a highly effective sales presentation.

Step 3 is about, Why you? Why the customer? Why should you pay attention to me? So this comes back to the research we do before we do any presentation.

What we’re looking for is a hypothesis of needs, like what’s going on for them. So if in our research we figured out that they have a lot of turnover in their sales staff, one of the needs could be to find the right salespeople and make them radically productive, that would be a game changer for them.

So during the research, I would do some Google searches, might even call up their sales department and talk to one of their salespeople and just say, “Hey, I’m trying to sell to the company and hopefully you can help me out.” In that conversation, you start asking, “So what’s it like working there?”, “How many salespeople?” or “What’s the turnover like?” and many times salespeople want to help other salespeople out. So that could be one way to figure out what’s important for them and why we picked them to make a presentation to.

If it was an HR or a team management problem, you could also go to the HR department and start asking questions there. Make friends with the receptionist. Get the data you need. One of the gems out there is going to LinkedIn and looking for past employees that worked for the organization. Contact them and they would be a lot more open to tell you what’s going on so it really helps you get the right hypothesis of their needs to that when you go in there, what you’re answering is, “This is why I selected YOU! And this is why you should pay attention to me!”