the death of selling with decks

Liz Sweet
Liz Sweet
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

I am drowning in a sea of salespeople… a thick, seaweed-infested ocean of salespeople that are clinging lifelessly to PowerPoints, Keynotes, and PDFs. And I’m completely over it.

I am a sales training & development professional in the tech space, dating and living with a salesperson, and an ex-seller myself. I talk about sales all day long : strategies, behaviors, productivity metrics, ROI. Just as thrilling as it sounds.

The thing that I actually love about my career in professional development is that I get to focus on behaviors. All types of learning, from pre-school through adulthood, is based on shifting desired behavioral outcomes. Lessons and curriculum are developed backwards from these outcomes. L&D is truly as simple as that.

Tech sales, however, has become more a more complex beast, due to the way sales organizations are built out. In my experience, tech companies have started to shift budget and headcount to support teams that are meant to provide sellers with the “tools they need” to close more business. And yet, I’ve found that these teams spend the majority of their time building slides. This, in turn, puts pressure on sales training organizations to teach sellers how to use these slides throughout the sales process. To me, this is not sales training. This is teaching a behavior that creates a monstrous, heavy “sales collateral” barrier between the client and the rep.

Here’s the problem : If your clients are busy reading a slide, then they’re busy not listening to you.

In sales training, we strive to teach the art of the sale through conversation and consultation. The sales trainer’s holy grail : teach sellers behaviors that will build trust, expertise and loyalty with client and industry partners. Sellers that acquire and practice these skills are better able to think on their feet and recommend solutions that are impossible to resist. In order to do this, sellers need to learn the behavior of deep, meaningful conversation and trust building — which immediately goes out the window when Powerpoints and Keynotes become the focal point of the meeting.

Don’t get me wrong — decks have their place, as do these storylines and sizzle reels. I’m just exhausted by the misnomer that tweaking a sales marketing deck is appropriate meeting prep. Sellers should be able to take this collateral, as-is, and use these materials as talking points and takeaways, not a custom visual show that’s tailor-made for the client they’re pitching that day.

Here are some suggestions of ways to use sales marketing collateral more effectively, instead of hours of edits and reading off of them in meetings:

  1. Send your deck as a meeting follow-up (or via proposal beforehand)

This is the perfect follow-up to your meeting. You can have the deck on-hand if your client needs a visual crutch while you’re sharing ideas. Don’t “present” it during the precious time you have with them. Focus on asking questions, listening actively and tailoring your verbal POV to their needs.

2. Print out a key slide as a meeting takeaway

I get it — clients love, and oftentimes expect, fancy visuals. Print out a key takeaway slide for them to hold and take notes on — it will not only be a welcome change to their monotonous meeting routine of staring at a wall, but will also help you to drive home the most valuable information you’d like to have stick.

3. If you MUST have slides, then use them more wisely.

Your client fully expects a deck, and has requested one. What do you do now? Here are a few tips and tricks to make your slides, and subsequent meeting time, as powerful as possible:

  • Eliminate words on slides — again, if they’re reading your slides, they’re not listening to what you have to say
  • “Clear” the slide — this is a simple tactic to learn. Talk about what’s on the slide (a statistic, a proposal, a quote, etc), and then move on. Explain what they’re looking at, so that they can immediately shift their attention back to you, and not be wondering what the point is.
  • K.I.S.S . — whether you’re emailing a deck as follow-up, or actually presenting one on stage or at a meeting, keep it short. Ten slide max should be your rule of thumb. No one will ever look at more than that anyway.
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Liz Sweet

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Liz Sweet

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