Win the Sale by Treating Your Presentation Like a Play

The curtain rises: a customer walks through your door.

This is your cue. You have a line. What is it?

Seriously, what’s the line? You do have one, don’t you?

Sales is a performance art. You are a salesperson and, therefore, an artist. Like a play, every sale follows a plot and you get to pull double duty as both the performer and the writer of this play.

My son, Kevin, spent a lot of time in college acting in plays. I dabbled in theater myself and one day we shared a conversation about the rehearsal process. Kevin mentioned something about memorizing lines for a play that I thought was incredibly applicable to our sales presentations:

I wanted to get my lines memorized as soon as I could so that I could focus on the acting more. If I didn’t have my lines memorized by the time the show would come around, my performance would be nothing but standing on stage waiting for my cue, and then simply reciting the line I had just memorized.  That makes for a very wooden and dull performance. But if my fellow actors and I memorized quickly and practiced often early in the process, then we had valuable time to spend mastering our technique.

If you know your go-to sales lines inside and out before the customer comes in, you can follow a clearly designed path to the sale – just like the plot in a play. Memorize, and then rehearse.  Practice with a colleague or manager. Eventually, your performance will wow any audience.

Now I’ll let you in on a little acting secret: the purpose of the line is more important than the line itself.

In your sales office it is perfectly okay (actually, better than okay!) to allow for organic, off-book dialogue.

You can still follow the pattern of your “plot”, as long as you ask the right questions for the purpose of understanding the answers.

My son, Kevin, went on to say:

“When we had our lines down solid, when show time came our focus wasn’t on ourselves, but on each other. We, as our characters, were listening to what the other characters said. We responded naturally, and it was as if our rehearsed lines were the most sincere things we could say at the time. Acting is reacting, not reciting.”

In a play, you do not just wait for your acting partner to stop talking so that you can say your next line. You truly listen so that your next line makes complete and perfect sense.

In sales, whether or not you follow the “script” word for word, you demonstrate to your customer that you truly understand.

Stephen Covey put it this way:

“Most people don’t listen with the intent to understand, they listen with the intent to respond.”

Don’t be that salesperson! Focus on soaking up every answer and learning more about your customer before moving on to your next question.

Your job as a performer in a play is to draw them in. So empathize. Show them that you understand.

Your customer will feel it and appreciate you on a much deeper, and more deeply connected, level. And then … you get to change their world.


FREE TRAINING:
Get BRAND-NEW episodes of Jeff’s 5 Minute Sales Training sent to your inbox every Saturday!

Sign up below.

 

About the Author: Jeff Shore

Jeff Shore is the Founder and CEO of Shore Consulting, Inc. a company specializing in psychology-based sales training programs. Using these modern, game-changing techniques, Jeff Shore’s clients delivered over 145,000 new homes generating $54 billion in revenue last year.