There is nothing quite like a shiny new year in the Sales Department to get your blood pumping. The Squirrels are back from their long schmooze in December and ready to start all over again with a fresh quota, right?
Maybe not quite. If you’re like most B2B shops, your poor Keebler Elves are still chasing down those last sales agreements so they can book the revenue; the Dementors in the legal department are mucking around with the contracts, and the quotas and territories are still circulating someplace high above us all, awaiting Corporate Overlord approval.
Now, good sales teams use this slice of ambiguity to start setting up calls, do a bit of training and work at getting the cranberry sauce out of the shredder.
Marketers may want to use this time to take a look at the sales pitch deck, and I mean really look at it, because bad pitch decks create bad presentations, which create really bad meetings with people you are hoping will give you money.
When was the last time you pulled that sucker apart and gave it a good cleaning? Oh, sure, you’ve tweaked your builds and put in some amusing transition noises, but when did anyone last check to see if that poor old thing is still hunting?
Most pitch deck structures were figured out sometime in the last century. They followed a predictable arc with a splendid punchline buried in the middle. Something like this:
- A video to break the ice (or to demonstrate that the speakers, monitor, projector and mouse don’t work)
- A slide or five About Us
- A video about something else
- A slide about the client’s business, as we understand it (which is usually not that well)
- A bunch of slides about how our solution works, its many, many modules, all of the features and a bit about the benefits
- A slide full of logos that demonstrates unequivocally that other people think our solution is pretty great too, maybe another video embedded in the slide just because we can
- A bunch of crappy analyst charts
- A slide with a question mark so the client knows it’s time to look at their phone
- The bit at the end where we promise to get back to you about that
And in the room, lined up on the supplier side: a Sales Squirrel or two plus the product dude, the other product dude, the lady who knows how the database works and the other one who once worked in a company a lot like the one you’re pitching. These are your subject matter experts (SMEs) brought along in case there’s a Hard Question.
On the table, we find stacks of content: white papers, analyst reports, brochures, fact sheets, infographics (that were never meant to print but are inexplicably and illegibly produced on a piece of legal-sized paper), and, of course, a hard copy of the terrible pitch deck itself.
I think we all know what happens next, don’t we? The executives turn up late, interrupt constantly and then leave promptly at the end of the hour to get to their next thing. The poor Squirrels don’t even get as far as the middle, unless they panic at minute 48 and start skipping through to their punchline slide; not really knowing which one it is, but hoping to land at least one decent thought before it all unravels.
When you have an hour of a very expensive person’s time, do you really want to spend it looking at videos in the dark or do you want to spend it finding out what is scaring the crap out of them and showing them how you can fix it?
Next time we’ll look at some pitch deck alternatives and why this should all be so much simpler.
Related Posts
Six Ways to Not Suck at Selling Things to Me
Why Marketing Should Staff Off the Pitcher’s Mound
Interesting Things I Found This Week
Here is why you are never, never, never going to stop being asked to work on the United Way campaign, the holiday party and the damn staff picnic. It would appear that marketers are the new cruise directors for corporate culture. You didn’t get the memo? Me either.
Ready to launch? Here is a good product launch checklist from A Maqsood. It’s aimed at entrepreneurs but I think it makes a pretty good planning document for the rest of us too. I’ve pasted it down below in case you are too lazy to click.
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
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