#1 On a short, direct flight, the airline loses my bag. I wait until 10pm to see if it will turn up. Next day I have to attend the meeting in the casual clothes I’m wearing now. But despite my worries, I’m lucky, when the others hear about it two of them tell me that the same thing happened to them also.
#2 My colleague will be making an important presentation to invite investors to participate in a new project. When he clicks the mouse on his laptop computer, it refuses to work and he can’t make the presentation he had intended. He tries to improvise what he was going to say, but the meeting is a total failure. It was expensive in both money and time to arrange and now he’s blown it. Don't get into this situation yourself. Work out how to make a presentation which you can give with no sales aids.
#3 Before I bought a digital projector, I used an OHP supplied by the venues. Guess how often it was out of order! As a result I made it my practice to travel earlier so I could have time to check the meeting room the evening before the event.
#4 Allow for the unexpected. Get to the meeting place early in case some disaster has struck.
* A pipe has burst in the room above where we will be meeting and everything is dripping wet.
* A rugby club has had a party the night before and no one cleaned up.
* On a hot summer’s day the heating was stuck on and the windows wouldn’t open.
* The meeting is scheduled for 8.00 and twenty minutes after that time the staff member who should have unlocked the meeting room has failed to turn up.
* The meeting is intended to start promptly; at 8.00 the delegates begin to drift in gradually and do so for another an hour and a half.
* The projector bulb has blown and there is no replacement.
* The meeting room is right next to the staff restaurant and there is a the noise of dishes and peoples’ conversations intruding into my meeting.
* Go for a beer the night before the meeting, and discover that a business companion is a raging alcoholic who leads you astray. Wake up the next morning with a thundering headache.
* Assume that your meeting attendees have been told the wrong start time or was expecting you to talk about a different topic. And that they will have to leave early to catch a flight. So check and then check again.
* My bags have been lost by the airline 3 times and once someone took my case by mistake and I picked up his identical one and didn’t reaize it until I unpacked at the hotel.
* A construction crew begins noisily outside of the meeting room.
* Following the midday break a member of your audience is obviously drunk and starts to heckle.
* You finish the event and go to settle up with the hotel for the use of the meeting room only to find that your credit card is declined, there is no balance on your other one and you don’t have a check book with you. (This happened to me twice. On one occasion, my client helped by coming round with my fee in cash, in an envelope).
* The flight I’m waiting for is delayed, then it’s announced that when the plane leaves it will be diverted to another airport 200 miles from my destination. The only onwards transport at that time being a taxi.
* We wait for 3 hours in the terminal because all landings in the London area are cancelled because of a snowfall. Finally we embark the aircraft, and then have two more hours wait before finally departing. On arrival at the destination it is so late that I miss my train connection, wait all night in a railway station, eventually reaching my hotel at 6 in the morning, sleep until 7.30 and go to meeting for 9.00.
* I’ve been stuck on a busy road miles from the meeting place, no taxis available, no buses and no signal on my cellular phone.
To make a sales presentation persuasive and apparently effortless – ironically what is required is lots of preparation and practice. And a constant awareness of
Murphy’s Law. ‘If it can go wrong, it will’. So be prepared for all eventualities.
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Information on the Selling for Engineers manual and Seminar
Robert Seviour is a sales trainer specialising in business development for technical companies
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