beecherbowers.com

I sat in on a “webinar” (I REALLY hate that word) the other day for a very large company that was presenting its application virtualization product. The salesperson had told us he would even have an engineer on hand to answer questions we may have. Well, they did, but they didn’t mention the engineer would be giving the presentation.

I don’t believe the guy presenting had ever actually been through the set of slides before, since he was constantly correcting himself on what the slides depicted. As an engineer, he may have known how it worked very well, but he couldn’t describe it clearly. I bailed on the presentation after listening to the first thirty minutes of “uh”s and “om”s.

The lesson to learn from this is to be sure the people selling your product are actual salespeople, not the people who designed or manufactured the product. High-level presentations are meant to simply clarify what the product is and why the client needs it. Oh, and make sure the people selling your product aren’t just reading the presentation, the prospective client can do that on their own.