While many keynote speakers offer canned presentations of generic information, Steve Martin’s keynotes are completely customized to your unique sales situation and specific areas of need. To ensure topical relevance, extensive pre-presentation interviews and background research is conducted to understand your market, competitive position, products, and salespeople. Presentations are customized to address your critical sales challenges and use the terms and nomenclature of your company and industry. Below, are a few sample presentation topics.

Persuading the C-Level to Buy
Every salesperson claims their product will help the customer save money, become more profitable, or improve efficiency. As a result, these claims are seldom believed and very rarely acted upon by senior executives. Today, it takes a comprehensive strategy to winover the CEO, COO, CFO, and CIO. The strategy should enable the salesperson to differentiate himself from the competition through value—Strategic value, Operational value, Political value, and Psychological value. In this presentation, we review the following:   

• The Grand Strategy to Winover the C-Level
• The Four Different Types of Departmental Buying Types
• Penetrating the Organization at Various Levels of Responsibility
• Navigating to the C-Level: Identifying the Bully with Juice
• Tactics to Defeat Arch-enemies
• Strategies When You’re Stuck at the Wrong Level
• The Human Nature of the C-Level: A Personal and Psychological Profile
• Selling the Four Values of Your Solution: Strategic, Operational, Political, and Psychological
• Presenting Your Solution: Using Logical Arguments, Emotional Appeal, and your Character
• Organizing the Presentation to the C-Level: How to Gain Credibility and Consensus
• Connecting with The C-Level through Sales Neurolinguistics (how the customer's mind uses language)

The Psychology of Selling
Why aren’t we selling more? Everyone's got an opinion. Some may say the economy, the marketplace or lack of functionality. Others will say it's the competition. Perhaps, it's actually the customers. For a moment, put yourself in the position of your customer who is going to meet with multiple vendors, listen to their presentations, read their marketing collateral, and take a look at their web site. Given that, how will you behave with each vendor? Most companies are well versed on the logical arguments for selecting their product and we typically equate persuasion solely with satisfying the analytical mind. However, even the most well-thought-out decision is ultimately determined by emotional and subconscious influences. This presentation reveals the true decision maker --human nature-- the people, personalities, and politics of companies.

• Rapport and Relationships Fundamentals
• Understanding How People Communicate
• Recognizing How Your Customer is "Wired" to Communicate
• Mastering Sales Linguistics (how the customer's mind uses and interprets langaue)
• Conducting Sales and Calls Presentations
• Messaging to the Executive’s Mind (letters, emails, phone calls)
• Product, Fantasy, and Politics Themes
• Customer Fantasies and Political Realities
• Understanding and Anticipating Your Customers' Thought Process
• Strategies to Uncover all the Information and Discern the Truth
• Maximizing Your Sales Intuition

Sales Warfare Strategies
How salespeople spend their time ultimately determines their success. In this presentation, strategies to penetrate complex organizations and dovetail with their internal politics are discussed. Salespeople learn how to influence key decision-makers and Tactics for building winning relationships at all levels of the organization along with real-world techniques to defeat competitors (and stop wasting precious time). This presentation is perfect for companies that must build long-term customer relationships.

• Should We Pursue the Deal?
• Understanding the Organizational and political Structure of the Account
• Determining Departmental Buying Types
• Formulating the Grand Strategy to Win the Account
• Translating the Grand Strategy to Tactics
• Assessing Account Position
• Account Maneuvers to Improve Competitive Position
• The Five Steps to Ensure Victory
• Win-Loss Analysis

How to Become a Heavy Hitter Persuader
Without language you really wouldn’t exist. You wouldn’t be able to share your ideas, display your personality, and express yourself to the world. The words we speak truly define who we are. However, since we are talking all the time, we underestimate the complexity of communication and take the process for granted. The conversations we have with customers are quite complex. They consist of verbal and nonverbal messages that are sent consciously and subconsciously. Successful customer communications is the foundation of all successful companies, and in this presentation we explain how Heavy Hitters speak in the language of customers.

• Understanding the Deeper Meaning of Language
• Structuring the Persuasive Corporate Presentation
• Advanced Rapport Techniques
• Group Presentation Tactics
• Types of Metaphors
• Constructing Metaphors for Winning Over Customers
• The Subconscious Decision Maker

Ten Natural Laws of Sales
Natural laws govern our world. The power of gravity and laws of motion are universal and inescapable. Similarly, there are natural laws that determine how products and solutions are bought and sold. Heavy Hitters intuitively incorporate these laws into their account strategies and win bigger deals more predictably. In this presentation we review the ten fundamental laws of sales cycle management.

• Premises of the Complex Sales Cycle
• Survival, Successful, and Significant Customers
• Categories of Buyers
• Creating a Turning Point
• Bonding with the Bully with the Juice
• Strategies to Find and develop a Coach

Tales From The Field: Interview Session with Your Top Salespeople
“Tales from the Field” is similar to a roundtable talk show where top salespeople are interviewed about their major wins and losses. However, this session goes far beyond discussing sales strategies and tactics. The psychological and intuitive aspects of selling are translated into common themes and models the entire sales organization can understand and emulate. The sharing of this “collective intuition” stops salespeople from chasing bad deals, helps create a more predictable forecast, and gives each participant (from novice to expert) tactics they can use immediately.

Customer Win/Loss Study and Results Presentation
The complex nature of the enterprise sales process requires huge investments of resources (manpower, time, and money) in order to win new accounts. Therefore, it is critical that deals are managed effectively. True win-loss analysis that is based upon extensive customer interviewing is the best way to understand the political, organizational, and technical aspects of prospective customers’ decision-making process. This valuable information is presented at your sales meeting along with recommendations to improve new win competitiveness. The price for the win/loss study will vary based upon the of scope research and number of customer interviews.