How non-linear sales presentations save you time and make you money
Industry News
Metal Roofing Magazine recently published its list of the 17th annual Metal of Honor winners, featuring thirty-seven of the best suppliers in the metal roofing industry. The award winners for 2021 span across all categories, from roofing panels to fasteners, underlayment, coatings, tooling, and more, all while demonstrating their “quality products, excellent service, dependable delivery, and competitive prices.” Nominated for and voted on by readers, Isaiah Industries is proud to be included in this year’s class as a leading manufacturer of premium residential metal roofing. For the rest of the winners, check out the complete list in the April Issue of Metal Roofing Magazine.
Isaiah Industries is also proud to sponsor LeadCon 2021, a lead generation event for the home improvement and remodeling industry. Led by Tony Hoty, this two-day event takes place May 19th-20th in Orlando for $595. With Isaiah Industries as your sponsor, that cost drops to $95, so visit https://tonyhoty.com/event/leadcon-2021, select Isaiah Industries as your sponsor, and buy your tickets today!
Welcome back to the Executive Report, your source of sales, marketing, and industry information for metal roofing. If this is your first issue, check out the previous one on word-of-mouth marketing. If not, this time we’ll be discussing how to update your old, overly-long sales presentations.
Sales presentations have changed drastically over the last few decades, from printed pitchbooks years ago to the PowerPoints of modern times. Many salespeople in the metal roofing industry rely on detailed slide decks to educate consumers, and with lots of ground to cover, long talks are the norm. While these sorts of talks provide plenty of detail, they can be cumbersome, with many companies rarely updating them as things change.
A typical sales presentation starts by introducing the company, product, and problem and ends with a solution. This linear progression is time-tested, effective, and streamlines the sales process for both parties. However, with today’s technology, non-linear sales presentations possess some unique advantages, allowing you to jump around from slide to slide or point to point. In the past, if your customer asked a question, you’d say, “I’ll get to that part in a minute” or “I’m not sure we have a slide on that”. You’d then leaf through clumps of pages or scroll through endless slides to track down an answer. Until recently, non-linear presentations weren’t practical with the old way of selling, despite their advantages.
However, with modern software dedicated to non-linear sales presentations, you can skip around between pages, adapting to the customer’s needs. You can answer questions quickly, and with the freedom to move where you want, you can demonstrate the features and benefits you offer in any order. By adapting on the fly, you avoid slowly whittling down your offerings and can ignore options that don’t serve the customer. This makes every sales talk fresh, built to fit each unique customer you meet. You can avoid the fatigue of saying the same thing every time, and customers get what they need most from your company.
Ingage, a solution Isaiah Industries recently adopted, has baked-in video, photo, audio, time-lapses, galleries, and more to showcase your products. This allows your presentations to become dynamic, with stunning video, product shots, and interactive media. One of Ingage’s standout features is a suite of professionally designed templates flexible enough for any situation. Creating the templates and backgrounds for you leaves you free to focus on adding content and refining your sales pitch.
One unique template is a Scrollmotion, which allows you to seamlessly scroll through time-lapse videos, pausing at any point to highlight points of interest. And if none of the templates work for your purposes, you can make your own page with any combination of text, shapes, and media. Speed things up with a custom theme based on your company’s colors, fonts, and logos and apply it to any presentation. All video and image files in Ingage are optimized to decrease size while maintaining quality. You can create gallery pages with your roofing installed on homes, time-lapse videos of installations, or drone footage of beautiful roofs. Once you finish an Ingage deck, it most resembles a webpage, with a navigation bar and a section view to move between slides effortlessly. Best of all, Ingage slide decks are offline, so download them and don’t worry about an Internet connection.
Non-linear sales presentations offer great freedom, allowing you to address customer needs on the fly. You can eliminate the sections that hold no value for your customer and skip right to the good stuff. Take advantage of new software like Ingage to refine your sales pitch with beautiful pages full of images, interactive buttons, and attention-grabbing content.
Todd Miller has spent his entire career in the metal building products manufacturing industry. He is president of Isaiah Industries, an organization recognized as one of the world’s leading metal roofing manufacturers. Todd is currently Vice President of the MRA (Metal Roofing Association) and a Past Chair of MCA (Metal Construction Association). Through his website, he strives to raise the bar on standards and practices to provide property owners with the best possible products for successful roofing projects.
You may pull quotes from this article provided you include a link back to the original article on this site. You may not reprint this full article, or even a significant amount of the article, without explicit permission. To gain permission, click here.
Leave a Reply