INDIANAPOLIS, IN The Indiana Chapter of The Society for Marketing Professional Services (SMPS) recently hosted Robby Slaughter, a Principal at AccelaWork, who gave a presentation on mastering the "perfect pitch" when presenting to prospective customers.

Slaughter is a workflow and productivity expert and founder of AccelaWork, a company that provides speakers and consultants to a wide variety of organizations including Fortune 500 companies, regional non-profits, small businesses and individual entrepreneurs. Slaughter is also an author. His latest book is "The Battle for Your Inbox."

He maintains that there are two elements to a perfect pitch: confidence and craft.

"Most people fail with regard to confidence because they don't truly believe that they have the capacity to deliver the right information and to provide value that truly represents the product or service that they have to offer," he said.

"We can all feel people who lack confidence in their voice or in their stance or in the way they dress or the way they approach us so a lack of confidence can really undermine any pitch."

One key to exuding confidence according to Slaughter is to, "have an open, positive body language as opposed to being crossed and closed. This is an excellent way to put your brain into the mindset of being an open and confident person."

"Another key is to speak slowly, precisely and giving the other person space to hear each word, pausing to wait for them to say, "˜I understand.'"

With regard to crafting a presentation, he stressed the need to economize.

"So much of the way that we interpret information is about our individual experiences. Many of us are busy or rushed and we don't have time for a lot of the preliminary details. We want to get right to the meat of the content and so it is very important that you find ways to economize your words.  Say as much as possible in as little space as possible."

The event was held at Gleaners Food Bank and many SMPS members brought canned goods to support Gleaners.