Spicing Up The Brown Bag!

Are you tired of making sales presentations to blank or disinterested faces? Are you fed up with buying lunch for people who are not the slightest bit interested in your product?

Well its time to put an end to the waste of time and money that is the traditional brown bag lunch presentation!

I would like to introduce to you a radically different approach to this worn out and abused sales tool, which quite frankly is not viable in these tough economic times!

In my article I will explain:

• What is a brown bag sales presentation and why sales people give them,
• Why I think the traditional brown bag is such a waste of time,
• Then I will introduce you to a new approach to the brown bag that I believe will give you a much better return for your time and money.

For those of you who are not in sales or are not familiar with the ‘brown bag’ term, a brown bag, is a sales presentation at a potential client’s office over lunch where the sales person orders in lunch. A more politically correct description is the “lunch-n-learn”. I have refused to use this term because lets get real – I am using lunch as bait to get some people to listen to me and most of the attendees are only there for the free food.

The target audience for Brown Bags in the water industry is engineering consultants. The objectives of the brown bag, for me, are to inspire a consultant to consider my product for an active project they are working on or get them to remember to consider the product when a suitable opportunity arises.

So what led me to rebel against the traditional brown bag?

It was last year in Washington State when I was travelling with a new regional sales manager that I was handing over the territory to. As part of the handover we were sharing the presentation load. This gave me the opportunity to watch the sales presentations and also watch the audience.

I saw little engagement from the audience and we didn’t get many quality questions. I realized that just about everyone in the industry was caught in the same brown bag rut – Delivering a 45 minute information dump covering every possible topic in the hope that something sticks and they get a lead.

With a considerable amount of our precious time, effort and travelling expenses put into these presentations we can’t afford to get very little return on this investment. I would therefore like to introduce you to a radical new approach to the brown bag. It is based around spicing up the process in which the content of the presentation is delivered.

New Approach:

In executing the brown bag there are three major objectives you should pay attention to;

• Focusing your content on the interests of the audience,
• Getting the audience actively engaged in your content, and
• Getting interaction from the audience so you can flush out new opportunities or get feedback on your product.

These objectives can be achieved as follows:

1/ The critical first step in preparing for your brown bag is not deciding what to eat, but breaking your presentation up into Discrete Modules.

This allows you to let the audience to select what information they want presented – I call it the ‘sushi menu’ approach. Your presentation can then be more focused and provide more depth on the specific areas of interest rather than be a general information dump.

2/ Getting the audience to select the topics goes a long way to helping get the audience engaged. Right at the start, before they eat, ask the audience to select what modules they would like you to present! Limit it to about three of up to 10 minutes each.

The audience has to pay attention, and by selecting topics, they will feel more obliged to listen and ask questions.

3/ Greater engagement then promotes audience interaction:

I want to ensure the brown-bag is a two-way meeting.
Without feedback you have pretty much wasted your time.

There is nothing more deflating than as soon as you have finished your 45 minute information dump, everybody immediately evacuates back to their offices without providing any feedback…

By presenting in modules, it allows you to:

• Break the presentation into chunks, keep the audience more alert and take questions while the topic is fresh (and check that the audience still has a pulse...), and
• Start with the topic of most interest so if you do run overtime, at least you have received feedback on the most important topics.

The proof in the pudding is in the eating.

One of our sales reps who recently used this approach at CH2M Hill said that he felt it was the most productive presentation he had given and the audience provided a rare compliment saying it was one of the most useful product presentations they had seen.

Our time is too precious to spend talking to uninterested audiences or to make a presentation that is a treasure hunt where we hope the listeners will stumble upon something of value.

I challenge you to stop going through the motions and spice up the brown bag presentation to better focus your content and ensure engagement and interaction from the audience and the results will speak for themselves.