Your sales presentation sucks. Here’s how to fix it.
There’s a good chance that your sales deck is not helping you sell more - here’s how to make it better.
Obviously, b2b startup founders and their sales/marketing staff put a huge amount of importance on sales presentations (with good reason - it’s the most controllable touchpoint between the company and the prospect). However, many make a series of crucial errors that undermine the success of these documents. Here are my top 3 b2b startup sales presentation mistakes (and how to overcome them):
1. Too much focus on features
99.99% of the time, the first draft sales I see are completely focused on a company’s technology or software and it’s specific technical capabilities. This is the biggest mistake you’ll make. I’m telling you right now - no one cares about your fancy new widget, dashboard, battery, software package, etc.
While it’s incredibly important to love your product and want to share that passion with the world, you have to remember that your prospects only care about benefits. When it comes to b2b marketing, sometimes more so than in B2C, your marketing messages have to focus on how you’re going to make your client’s lives better (i.e. how you’re going to make their jobs easier, help them save money, or get home to their families earlier). Yes, features are important, but they’re only the supporting points which rationalize the benefits you’re promising. Features aren’t the stars of the show, they’re the supporting cast.
Structure your sales presentation around the key benefits of your product or service and you’ll notice an immediate increase in its effectiveness.
2. You’re trying to appeal to everyone & everything
You’re a startup, I get it - you need to put food on the table. You want to appeal to the primary, secondary and tertiary markets with a groundbreaking presentation. Big mistake #2 - trying to be everything to everyone is impossible.
It’s true what they say, keep it simple - your sales deck should be focused on one target audience and one specific set of benefits (see above). Having such a narrow scope enables you to keep your messaging laser focused on the specific needs of that audience group, helping you to position yourself in their minds as a bonafide solution for their challenges.
Pro tip: create multiple sales decks to address multiple markets, audience groups and, potentially, specific problems you’re capable of solving. This is worth the effort and, in fact, will help you better engage these prospects.
3. You’re building it wrong
I’ve literally sat through months of meetings during which the entire sales and marketing teams reviewed each word of a sales deck one by one, line by line, slide by slide - reviewing, revising and overhauling each slide as we went. The ultimate result was a bloated, convoluted and utterly unusable sales deck which did nothing but confuse those unlucky enough to have to sit through it. After 6 months of development we scrapped the sales deck after just four weeks because it wasn’t working. Input, like most things, is only good in moderation.
The point here is simple: you’re a startup, act like one and be lean when developing your sales deck. Never build a deck in isolation, but don’t ask everyone and their grandmother to the table either (you’ll never leave the table).
Generally, you want to develop a project team with one member from the following departments in your company: founders, sales, marketing, account management and product development (note: the point here is to have representation from all the key areas of the firm - regardless of your size).
This team can now collect and distill input from their department peers (if applicable), as well as provide their own direct input. Without going too deep into the presentation development process (post on that coming later), use that input, as well as your collective knowledge of the target audience, to develop your first skeleton of the deck. From there, if needed, secure approval of the skeleton with your external stakeholders in the organization; build out that skeleton into a bullet point draft, securing approval again; then finally, build the full version of the presentation complete with images, securing final approval once complete.
Now, there is one final thing to keep in mind moving forward: a sales deck is never finished. What the heck does that mean? Simple: you’re a startup, your business is changing every day, every week. It’s natural that as your business evolves, so to will your sales deck. You’ll have new benefits to discuss, branding to rollout and initiatives to launch - change is inevitable. Schedule a monthly check-in with the project team (see above) to review the success of your sales presentation and outline future changes as required.
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