Presentation Tip: The one question a sales presentation must answer | Dave Paradi's PowerPoint Blog

Excellent column!

After briefly describing a failed sales presentation, Paradi writes (to answer the question mentioned in the headline):

The presentation I describe above is typical and it suffers from the one problem that will doom a sales presentation to failure: not answering the one question a prospect absolutely needs to have answered. What a prospective client really wants to know is, “Can you solve the big, hairy, ugly problem I have?” Until you answer that question, they don’t care about the rest of what you have to say.

He then describes how to put together an effective presentation and concludes his column this way:

Don’t make your sales presentation all about you and your firm. Make your sales presentation about how you can solve their problem. Only include information about you when it relates to proving that you can provide a good solution to the problem. Structuring a sales presentation in this way would improve a large percentage of the sales presentations done each day.

That's good advice for much more than a sales presentation. It works for purposes ranging from describing a new government program to answering questions during a job interview.