A few weeks ago, I attended an industry show with one of my sales teammates. We arrived before the vendor exhibit time to catch some golf and extra networking. The weather was perfect and we were a couple of lucky guys, to say the least.
We woke up early our second day to watch all of the presentations and see what we could learn for our own. After the first few, I started to notice a bit of an unfortunate trend…
Nearly every vendor walked up to podium, fired up their laptop, barely looked at everyone in the crowd, and delivered a monotone presentation. Their slides were full of charts and graphs about how awesome they were – and focused not one bit on the people in the audience, their potential customers.
Now that’s not to say the presentations weren’t informative and full of accurate facts. They were. But looking around the room, you could see that the important things were getting lost.
Watching this was painful.

As it was about my turn to present, I sensed that anything close to a 45 minute presentation about our product line wasn’t going to be a good way to connect. Instead, I walked up on the stage, thanked the audience for having us, and gave a brief company overview. Rather than opening myself up for questions right then, I invited everyone to stop by our vendor booth where I’d answer any question they had individually. Then I walked back to my seat.
By the sound of the applause, you would have thought I had promised them free units for a year!
Because of my approach, or rather, because I took a second look at my audience, many of them stopped at our booth to get more information. I made great connections, was asked engaged questions, and left with a bunch of business cards.
Simple? Yes. Rocket science? No.
I knew…
–        What my audience wanted to hear.
–        What had already been said to them.
–        How long they were willing to listen to me.
By focusing on the people in front of me instead of all of the ideas I wanted to throw out at them, by putting myself in their place, I gave a talk that was mutually beneficial. Best of all? We were invited to speak again next year.

Like many of you, Captain Reman’s King of Core & More, Pat Gerbyshak, is a student of sales and customer service. Join the conversation below or share your feedback with Pat via email.