Stuck in a Rut? Seven Steps to Get Out of It

Have you ever driven home from work and wondered how you got there? You remember leaving the office, you are fully alert as you pull in the driveway, but you’re darned if you can remember anything in between. A lot of sales presentations are like that. The salesperson, after having given the same presentation more times than a teenager asks for the car, walks through his slides on automatic pilot. He’s bored; the audience is bored. In short, he’s in a rut. And Lenn Millbower knows the way out.

“People in show business struggle with this issue every day,” says Millbower, founder of Offbeat Training, a company that creates training infused with showbiz-based “Learnertainment” techniques (www.offbeattraining.com). “Actors in a play must deliver the same exact lines night after night while appearing that they are saying them for the first time. Comedians must deliver the same joke every night while acting as if they made it up on the spot.” How do they do it? Millbower says these performers use the following techniques to keep their material fresh and interesting. Salespeople can use these same techniques to breathe new life into their presentations:

1. Play for the audience. Always remember that you’re not there for you, you’re there for your audience. By shifting your focus from your words and your slides to the audience’s reaction to those words and slides, you’ll find every presentation becomes different and interesting.

2. Experiment with subtleties. Actors have some tight controls on where they stand, where they look, and what they say. And yet, as Millbower points out, “great actors, through subtle variations in the inflection, movement, or look, vary their performance greatly.” So try varying your performance with subtle changes. Try putting emphasis on different words or pausing in different places. Substitute a more precise or more interesting word for a mundane one. Play around with your words and with your delivery to make your presentation better each time.

3. Hone your delivery. You probably have a basic script from which you must work, but you can look for alternatives within that script. Try opening the presentation in different ways – see whether a startling fact, a dramatic story, or a compelling metaphor works best. Once you’ve found the most effective opener, tweak the words you use and your delivery until it works every time. Try standing in different places, using your hands differently, wearing different clothes. “Through this continued search for refinement, boredom can be conquered,” says Millbower.

4. Focus on emotion. Most salespeople start getting bored with their presentation when they’ve given it so many times they could do it in their sleep. But when you know it that well, you’re liberated to stop focusing on the mechanics and start focusing on the emotion of what you’re saying. You can feel rather than think, and you’ll find that by shifting your focus in this way, each presentation becomes a more absorbing, rewarding experience.

5. Own the material. Bored actors are easy to spot. They go through the motions but they don’t own and believe in the words. Critics call it “walking the part.” Are you “walking the part” in your presentations? If so, Millbower says you need to find a way to get excited about and believe wholeheartedly in your product and its ability to solve a crucial problem for a customer. “When you own the material, you’re no longer separate from the message,” he says. “You are the message.”

6. Reconnect to your purpose. In the day-to-day hustle, it’s easy to forget why you do what you do. What attracted you to sales? Was it simply the thrill of chasing the deal? For most sales people, that’s a big part of it but many reps also find great satisfaction in helping people solve their problems. When you reconnect to that purpose and think about every presentation as an opportunity to help and serve people, you’ll find yourself completely tuned in to the audience, which not only will help you enjoy giving presentations again, it will ultimately help you close more sales.

7. Move on. Performers are always moving on to new jobs and new roles not because they object to working but because they fear losing their creative edge. If you’ve tried tips #1 through #6 and you’re still bored or feel uninspired, consider moving on to another job. Whether it’s another sales job or an entire career change, you owe yourself the chance to pursue your passions. “The difference between performers and other people is that others get locked into their corporate world and they may be flat-out miserable, but they don’t have the courage to make a move,” says Millbower. Take the leap of faith and you’ll re-ignite your enthusiasm.