aking a presentation is as much a part of the selling process as cold calling, following up and closing. It's the time when merchants agree to surrender their full attention for at least a half hour, maybe more. You sit them down, open PowerPoint and deliver a solid talk on all the benefits and features of your products and services. The merchants seem interested, so you follow up a few days later but alas, no sale.

What's the problem? According to Jeff Thull, author of "The Prime Solution: Close the Value Gap, Increase Margins and Win the Complex Sale," the problem is the presentation. He says it is an "exercise in futility," a waste of time, and it decreases your chances of making a sale.Thull serves as an advisor for executive teams of global companies, including 3M, Citicorp, IBM, Intel and Microsoft Corp. He wrote "The Prime Solution" for people selling complex products in highly competitive, enterprise-wide business-to-business environments.

Merchant level salespeople in the payment processing industry may feel detached from the organizations that Thull had in mind when writing the book (Global 2000 companies with large IT organizations), but there is still insight to garner from its pages.

He says presentations are lectures in which you spend precious time with a prospect "answering unasked questions." The prospect may not yet understand his own pain, so how could he apply your solution to his situation?

Rather than educating prospects, presentations create a value gap: a misalignment between buyers and sellers and of the value promised and the value achieved. This gap occurs because of a disconnect in the relevancy of the material presented, how well the prospect comprehends it and how much you inflate the product's benefits and features. The gap also hinders a prospect's ability to trust you.

"If we build it, they may not come," is the focus of one chapter. It's not about you as a salesperson; it's about the customer. It's not about closing; it's about making quality decisions. Supreme courtYour focus should be on providing customers with a prime solution. To do this, take a diagnostic approach. Do more research into the prospect's business. What ails it? From your program of value-added products and services, determine the best ones for that business, if there are any.

Show the prospect the cost of his problem, and then show him the cost of the solution."Prime solutions emerge from a holistic approach capable of overcoming crossfunctional dysfunction, isolationism and adversarial selling practices as well as the incomplete value accountability that so often separates businesses from their customers," Thull writes.

The book explains the different aspects of delivering a prime solution, from research to marketing, selling, implementing and support.Selling this enables you to find and engage customers who really need your products, diagnose and quantify their problems, design solutions that maximize return on investment, and deliver on the promises you make.

Thull is President and Chief Executive Officer of Prime Resource Group LLC. He is also the author of "Mastering the Complex Sale: How to Compete and Win When the Stakes are High!" (2003, Wiley).

The Prime Solution
By Jeff Thull
Copyright 2005, Dearborn Trade Publishing, Chicago
Hardback, 215 pages
ISBN 0-7931-9522-5