5 tips for building a badass sales pitch deck
As we covered in our blog 4 Reason Why Sales Presentations Suck, between meeting fatigue, lack of preparation, generic product pitches and the distractions of virtual calls, there are any number of things that can derail our meeting. One key to a successful pitch is building out a deck with a compelling flow and message. We’ll cover a few of the elements now.
START WITH THE END IN MIND
Let’s leave the company overview slide on the sideline for the moment. We should kickoff the presentation by focusing on the outcome we are trying to help our client achieve. Assuming we’ve done our due diligence in the sales discoveryprocess, what specific goal are they trying to attain? This will do a couple of things.
1) Define purpose: All of the elements of the presentation will be aligned with achieving this outcome.
2) Build credibility: This shows our client we’ve got a firm grasp of who they are and what they are trying to accomplish.
FRAME THE CONVERSATION
We’ve talked about what we’re trying to achieve; what’s keeping us from getting there? Let’s go through the top 4–5 challenges that are keeping the client from reaching the end goal. This is a great opportunity to provide some education and share our perspective on the market. Including stats and quotes is a good idea but we should use them conservatvely. It also creates a great lead up to how we are going to solve their problem.
KEEP IT SIMPLE
We have to remember that this should be a presentation and discussion, not an in depth technical document they need to read along with. Too often slides get cluttered with overly complex charts or way too much text which distracts the audience from the conversation. Instead of putting our entire talk track on each slide, we should highlight a few key phrases, use bullet points and reinforce with relevant graphics. We can leave the meat of the information for the presentation talk track.
MAKE IT INTERESTING
We’ve all sat through feature rich product pitches that never seem to end, it has to stop! Even if what we sell is pretty cool, we can all be honest and say CRM or sales automation, or whatever we offer isn’t the most exciting thing in the world. Let’s do our best to make it compelling. Make the presentation a story; we should walk through the presentation several times before ever delivering it to a client. Is everything in the right sequence? Another thing to keep in mind is flow, don’t sit on one slide too long. Just because the presentation is slotted for 30 min or an hour, we don’t need to use the entire time to talk. The purpose of the meeting is to create and develop further conversation.
CALL TO ACTION
That went great! Ideally we’ve already defined the next step when we scheduled this meeting, but now what? Assuming the presentation went well, we need to move along in the sales process. This could be a deep dive technical call, formal proposal, etc but make it specific.
In a nut shell, focus the presentation on the clients challenges, make it interesting and try to create a conversation. If you liked this blog, check out our free step-by-step guide on How to build a badass pitch deck. As always, thanks for joining me for another blog!
Cheers,
Colin
