The Anatomy of a Million Dollar Slide
Understanding the one slide that can make or break your deck
As a young consultant at Bain & Company, it was common for our case team to build 60+ slides for a 2-hour client meeting.
Yet even though we were armed with dozens of slides (plus another 100 in backup), we’d spend the actual meeting really diving into only the key slides. And in the best meetings, it only took one slide to light up the room.
At Bain, this “Million Dollar Slide” was somewhat of a legend— a one page visual powerful enough to convince a client that the $1M in fees were all worth it. (This was from the old days, when a Bain case was only $1M…but you get the picture.) It’s the slide that lives on well beyond the 6 month engagement is over, that turns into a poster in the CEO’s office, and that shows up in every employee training manual.
It’s hard to pin down a Million Dollar Slide formula, but here are a few themes from the ones my case teams worked on that I can still see in my mind, 5+ years later. (That’s how powerful they were.) And then, we’ll explore what this management consulting concept can do for your sales deck.
What makes a Million Dollar Slide?
1. It’s Visual
Our Million Dollar Slides were always visual.
If the content is data-based, then we used visual charts (not tables).
If the content is qualitative in nature, we’d use diagrams or concept maps.
Why? Because 65%+ of people are visual learners, and we process visual information 60,000 times faster than text. When you present information visually, your audience understands it more quickly and more easily:
See what I mean?
Artist’s Note: The designer in me has to call out, too, that these visuals aren’t pretty. But that’s kind of the point. They don’t have to be. It’s about clarity and understanding, not “lipstick on a pig” polish.
2. It’s Simple (but you can Double-Click into it)
The Million Dollar Slide is the one clients ripped out of the deck print-out and keep next to them as we dove into details. It’s the slide that drove their curiosity to keep asking questions, asking “Why” not “Why am I here right now?”
To do this, take a Dashboard Approach. Simplify as much as possible, but then have the homework to answer the barrage of questions that are sure to follow. While your client does care that you “did your homework” they don’t want to put your multi-tabbed Excel model up on their office wall. They want a “So What” that they can share with their teams.
One case, I was working on a big tech client who wanted to know how much they should be spending on marketing (as a percentage of their sales). My job, for months, was to build one slide.
It looked (very roughly) like this:
Over those months, I refined this one slide. But I also had a multi-tab Benchmarking Database with data from countless sources across 70+ tech companies split by company, geographies, divisions, and verticals to back it up. (That $50B+ company still uses that model today, 6 years later, as a result of that one Million Dollar Slide.)
3. It shows Stakes
The context of any case differs, but one thing is constant: analysis only matters if it is actionable. A Million Dollar Slide has to be clear (by using simple visuals) but it has to be compelling as well.
Near the end of my time at Bain, I worked for a Charter School to build a more efficient operational plan. The first step was to untangle their finances. Then we had to simplify so we could identify savings opportunities.
After the analysis, though, we had to compel them to act. Without action, none of those savings would be realized. To do that, we showed them where they were today, where they could be tomorrow, and promised to build a bridge.
In the end, they did act to cut cost per student in half (without sacrificing quality of student experience). Why? Because they could see the stakes.
So what does this have to do with my Sales deck?
Consulting, like sales, has the same core: Communication.
No matter how strong your analysis is, or how great your product is, your success still depends on whether you can communicate it effectively — and efficiently.
To put this into practice, challenge yourself to identify (or develop) your Million Dollar Slide. I’ll be sharing some Million Dollar Sales Slide examples in next weeks B2B Sales Deck piece for SalesHacker if you’re looking for even more inspiration.
About the Author: Alli McKee is the CEO and Founder of Stick. For go-to-market teams who need to earn customer attention quickly, Stick is a visual communication tool that builds more effective sales materials more quickly. Join our beta today at www.stick.ai.
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