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How Much… or How Memorable?

My first job after graduating from college was in sales. This was in the early 90’s, so it was a few years before I was introduced to PowerPoint presentations… but I eventually succumbed to the siren song and was guilty of crushing the souls of customers and prospects with bulleted PowerPoint decks. But along the […]

20 Questions to Answer Before You Craft Any Message

We think we know everything we need to start crafting a message or pitch. But the obvious questions — who are you talking to, what’s the topic, etc. — aren’t the only ones. To really connect with a customer or audience, we need to know much more about them, what they already know, and what […]

Why your sales kickoff sucks…and how to stop it sucking next year

It’s that time of year…Sales kickoff (SKO) season. All over the country, in premier resort cities, companies are sinking mind-boggling quantities of time and expense to gather their sales forces – hoping to wind them up like clockwork toys, ready to explode on their new sales year. The problem? Most SKO’s suck, and many times […]

Product Pitch or Solution Sale: Are You Setting the Sales Force Up for Success or Failure?

If your company has a sales force, maybe you’ve said this to yourself: “Our salespeople aren’t solution selling, they tend to make everything a product pitch.” It always seems that salespeople get blamed for pitching products, which at first glance makes sense. After all, they’re the people in front of the customer. But should all […]

Ending the Hostility between Sales and Marketing

It’s a sad fact of life that when we don’t understand another person, we tend to assign negative motives to them. Rather than see them as different, we see them as ‘difficult’, ‘obstructive’ or even ‘stupid’. History is rife with examples of division flowing from misunderstanding – and in today’s society we see it most […]

Would Your Message Pass the 8th Grader Test? The Curious Case of “Blank Van Blank”

We are dear friends with a delightful a family in Ohio: wonderful parents, blessed with several rambunctious young children. Like many of us, these parents are very mindful of protecting their impressionable young kids’ minds from Internet content that would be potentially harmful. And with this aim, one of the things they’ve done is to […]

How to Slim Down Your Presentation. Or, Having Your Appendix IN

I was sympathizing with some sales guys at one of our workshops recently. They were showing me some sales collateral that Marketing had created for them – and this was the old joke… that wasn’t, and isn’t, funny: It was an unbelievably dense deck. A bewildering quantity of material. It was the kind of deck that […]

The Beating Heart of Sales Messaging

Despite our best intentions, almost all presentations tend to revolve around the priorities and interests of the presenter. There are many reasons why this happens, but the deepest root is the natural self-orientation that sits firmly at the core of the human psyche. We are most interested in ourselves and we struggle to see the […]

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Talk with one of our Oratium team members to see how we can help your business build and deliver a better message. To reach our Office directly, call (406) 272-4368.

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