Top Virtual Sales Presentation Tips: Close More Deals Online

Virtual sales presentation skills are essential to acquire in today’s selling environment.

Whether you are a seasoned sales professional or someone new to sales, and if you are selling virtually, that is using platforms like Teams, Zoom or other platforms in order to interact with an attempt to sell to your prospects, then there’s some very specific skills you’ll need to master.

Let’s face it, face-to-face selling and face-to-face communication in general is a little bit different than virtual. In this video, I’m going to share with you some of the best strategies you can deploy in order to master your virtual sales presentations.

Now, let’s jump into it.

Top Virtual Sales Presentation Tips

1. Ditch the Presentation Slides (or Use Them Sparingly)

(0:55)
First off, let me start with something that a lot of sales professionals aren’t really aware of. If you are using virtual means to sell, you don’t need to have slides.

In fact, you don’t need to have a presentation. You can actually just use dialogue and questions no different than you would in person.

Now, it takes a little bit of time to learn that skill, but the first step I wanted you to take here is to realize if you’re selling virtually, you don’t want to have a whole bunch of slides to go through.

Now, if you have slides that highlight a few things that are important,

•  maybe you’re selling a very technical product that requires a little bit of explanation, that’s fair.
• Maybe you’ve got some customer testimonials or client testimonials you want to show, that’s fine too.

If you are using slides, if it must be part of your presentation, and that’s fine, then make sure you don’t just put the slides up and leave them there.

What you want to do is pull up the slide, speak to it, maybe ask a question, and then pull the slide back down so it’s just you and the prospect or you and the individuals that you’re attempting to sell to. You want to flip back and forth between the slides and the face-to-face environment.

The main reason is it just keeps the individual’s attention.

When I do virtual sales presentations to sales teams, that’s exactly what I do because that’s what I was taught to do.

If you just put up slides, people can tend to

• doze off,
• they get distracted,
• they get on their phone.

But when you ask questions as you normally would in your sales discussion, and you bring those slides back down and make it just a face-to-face environment, it changes the dynamic and it keeps the attention of your prospect.

2. Key Aspects for Leading Virtual Sales Presentations

There are four critical steps that I’d like you to use when it comes to doing any sort of sales presentation or dialogue virtually.

Maintain Eye Contact

(2:42)
Number one, smile and look at that little guy right there.

Okay? I want you to be looking at that at all times. Look at the green light. Look at the red dot. Kind of depends on what you’re using.

The reason is this: Can you imagine right now if I was trying to have a face-to-face virtual discussion, but I’m over here looking on a computer that maybe has my slides or other information and periodically doing this, do you find that interesting, engaging at all, or does it look like there’s something else more important for me to be doing?

So make sure you always maintain eye contact and the best of your ability. You might be taking notes and can’t do it, but just keep focusing on that camera, that red dot, green dot, whatever you have, because that creates impression.

You’re looking at the person in the eyes, which is what they’re looking for.

Elevate Your Energy Level

The second thing I want you to do is lift your energy a bit.

Now, right now, I’m recording this video in kind of a mini part of my office. It’s set up as a little bit of a studio, but if you were to stand here and watch me, you’d think, wow, Sean is overwhelming with energy right now. And the reason for that is when you’re on video camera, you’ve really got to lift that energy up. Otherwise, you sound pretty darn boring.

And again, your

• voice,
• tone,
• inflection, and
• volume are all the kinds of things that will keep your prospect interested.

So lift up your energy, have a sip of coffee, have some tea, have something, a little sip of pop, some sugar, something that lifts you up a bit.

You don’t want to talk faster necessarily, like I can tend to do, unfortunately. But what you do want to do is have a high level of energy because that’s what’s going to keep your prospect interested.

Use Visual Presentation Tools

(4:15)
The third thing I want you to do is if you’re using Zoom or Teams, many of them have a little whiteboard that you can use. A little area that you can sketch and draw. Oftentimes, it ends up looking like a thick highlighter, but you can use different colors.

If you’ve found in your prospect discussions that you’re often drawing something out for them. What I’d like you to do is make sure you use that whiteboard sketch out, okay, you told me that money was an issue and you told me that time maybe you draw a little stopwatch was an issue.

Remember that people you’re dealing with are often times, not only audible as far as how they consume information, but visual, they like to see things.

And if you’ve got slides, okay, that’s fine. But if you can actually sketch stuff out while they’re watching you, that’s going to capture their attention and keep them motivated.

You know it’s working when they say, “No, no, no, no, you wrote that down wrong. What I said was…”  Oh, okay, let me change that.

Now. Just let me be clear. I’m not saying you write out sentences here. They give you a sentence. You’re going to write a word. You’re going to summarize, but you use this as a way to keep them engaged and involved in the conversation.

Avoid Using the Chat Feature

(5:17)
The last thing I want to mention to you is I would suggest you avoid using chat.

They may use chat. They may drop in comments and documents and all sorts of stuff.

I would hesitate for you to do that. Now, some people get upset, say, rash, Sean, I have to use chat. I have to drop stuff in.

Well, if you drop in a document or a link into chat, what are they going to do? They’re going to go to that link. It takes them away from your conversation.

So I’d rather see you share that before the meeting so they can prepare and review it, or share it after the meeting so they can review it later.

While you’re there together, if you’re trying to sell virtually, the goal is to keep their attention, right? And if I’m dropping a lot of stuff in chat for them, that’s going to take them away from what I really want ’em to focus on, which is

• myself,
• the content I’m sharing,
• the stuff I’m sketching out, and
• the slides.

So try those four different steps as it pertains to your virtual sales presentations.

3. Avoid Using Multiple Screens

(6:05)
Now, I mentioned earlier about the idea of not looking at the camera. What I find a lot of people have gotten a habit of is having multiple screens on the go.

And what that means is exactly what I showed you earlier. They’ll be looking, the salesperson will be looking at this screen that has their slides. Meanwhile, the camera’s pointed at the side of their head, and that is not engaging at all.

So my suggestion is avoid using multiple screens.

I have multiple screens. I can use ’em for virtual presentations, but I run everything through my laptop because I want one screen for me to focus on to keep things simple. But most importantly, I want to make sure that I’m focused on the person on the other side. And as soon as I get multiple screens, it’s easy mid meeting to kind of forget which one is the camera and which one are my notes or my slides.

And all of a sudden you’re spending way too much time over here and not enough here.

So I would avoid using multiple screens if at all possible. And instead, just focus on that one screen that you have in front of you and share any information that maybe requires a lot of discussion before the meeting and follow up again after the meeting.

Use this time to build a dialogue, to have some discussions to share or highlight some key information and to build trust with your prospect.

4. Keep Visuals Dynamic to Maintain Interest

(7:13)
The last tip I want to share with you is what happens if your presentation or the meeting goes long? How do you maintain that person’s attention? Well, I shed some light on this before.

If you think about it, when somebody’s sitting watching a screen, and let’s say you’re scrolling on your phone (I found with my boys, they’ve really gotten into looking at reels. And part of the reason why is to keep your attention, right? It’s a few seconds. You skip the next one, skip that. It’ll even rotate through for you.)

Well, the reason reels are created that way is because they know that the amount of time that reel runs is about our total attention span, if you will. We can pay close attention to something for a very short period of time, but then we get distracted.

You have to remember that when it comes to creating virtual presentations, you want to have lots of different things happening. Not to create chaos or confusion, but to keep the attention of your prospect.

So just putting up a whole bunch of words in a slide that’s not going to cut it.

• If I have an image pop up, then I ask a question, I pull the image down, and I say, so what are your thoughts on that, Sarah? Sarah responds.
• I say, great. I pull back up a different image. Maybe it’s four bullet points. I discuss those. I pull those back down.
• So Sarah, which of those four bullet points you think makes the most sense, this, this, or this, right?

So it’s just changing up consistently or constantly throughout. Change up the screen, move it back and forth.

Don’t make it so it’s overwhelming, but I would say at least every minute at least, you want to be changing up that screen.

If you’re not sure why to do it, just jump onto reels and notice how they work. That’s what you need to do to maintain the attention of your prospect, especially over long periods of time.

Okay, so hope you’ve enjoyed these strategies. Deploy them, try them, test them out in your own virtual. See what kind of results you get.

You’re going to get better engagement and involvement from your prospects.

Make sure you comment below what strategies you use to ensure that your virtual presentations are more effective. So that’s it for this video. If you’d like to see any more, you can check them out here.

And until next time, let’s get out there and go sell something!

© Shawn Casemore 2024. All Rights Reserved.