How interesting. Just as I was working on this series about pitch decks, I get invited by one of my clients to, you guessed it, a sales pitch! Time to see if anyone is paying attention to all my helpful advice about pitching.
Clearly not.
In the room: a CFO, a controller, a VP of Operations, two directors and a bunch of subject matter experts who couldn’t get away fast enough, all of whom are about to be pitched by a Sales Squirrel, a VP of Business Development, a director of something and a solutions consultant.
Hands are shaken, water is found, projectors are fired up, cables are fiddled with, business cards are swapped and ten minutes into the hour, we begin. First there is a handout. Good lord, this is almost 40 slides. They have 50 minutes. This ought to be good.
The VP of Business Development is up first and he’s well into the very busy slide about Today’s Business Challenges. As he rounds the corner on why we all just need to do more with less, the CFO reaches for his buzzing phone.
“Here’s a little bit of a keynote by our global CEO on today’s challenging business climate,” our Biz Dev Wiz says, starting up the video he hopes will break the ice. It doesn’t start right away. The CFO keeps looking at his phone. Once the sound and picture have more or less caught up with one another, he starts to pay attention. Three boring minutes in, even the poor solutions consultant is looking for the exit.
Panicking a little, our speaker punches the button, ends the misery and we land on the About Us slide, saying “So…we’re a big multinational, Fortune 500, in a bunch of countries, yadda yadda, you get the picture…” Yadda yadda? We get the picture indeed.
On to the slide full of logos we go. He has the sense to stop speaking at this point and let the impressive gallery of brands strike us dumb, at least until the VP of Operations spots both his logo and one from a previous gig. You know what’s coming, don’t you? Of course he asks what this company has done for both of these logos. Of course the sales guy doesn’t really know. We’re now on slide 5 at minute 35. I’m trying to calculate the cost of this meeting for both parties. I’m pegging it at around $3500, not adjusting for opportunity cost or productivity.
The rest of it went as you’d expect and the only ray of hope was the CFO who finally, at minute 54, sat forward and said “The thing I’m really struggling with is how to make this a predictable cost over the next three years…”
In case you are wondering, that was a golden ticket inside a pretty wrapper, put in a box with tissue paper and then put in another box and wrapped up very neatly with a giant frigging bow on top!
It was a gentle lob over the centre of the plate.
It was the fruit that hangs at eye level.
It was the deer dumb enough to walk across the firing range.
I’m out of metaphors because neither the VP of Business Development nor the Sales Squirrel nor anyone else on that side of the room saw it for what it really was – a Closet Monster. The CFO just put his problem on the table and all they had to do was say the following six words:
“We can solve that for you”.
They did not say that. They said, “we can get back to you with a quote.” That, boys and girls, was not what these expensive people were after. They wanted a conversation; they got a promise of an email and never did make it to the Big Reveal on slide 30.
Last week we looked at what should be in a great pitch deck. Today, I want to pull apart what should not be in there and why:
Nobody Cares About Your About Us
You would not be in that room full of expensive people unless someone in there thought you were credible enough to be worth that cost. The expensive people depend on the less-expensive people to do that vetting for them. They do not expect to meet with unqualified vendors. Period. If you simply must talk about your company, do it in the leave-behind.
Videos Don’t Break Anything But Your Soul:
I have not yet seen a video in a pitch deck that did anything but waste time, elicit a chuckle and make everyone sad. Video has its place in the sales cycle to be sure. They are great for testimonials, product demonstrations, technical support, branding and adorable cats, but they are not for breaking the ice on a meeting. You know what is? Sales people. If your sales people can’t warm up a room in two minutes by themselves, you need to trade them in on better ones. Yes, I know the video cost $15,000. Yes, I know it won an award. No, you still can’t use it in a pitch.
Slides With Logos are a Rearview Mirror
You are not in the room to sell the past; you are there to sell the future. A slide full of logos is right up there with your About Us stuff: it got you this far, but it will get you no further. You should absolutely talk about your other customers, but only in the context of how that experience applies directly to the problem or opportunity this company is facing.
Plus, logo slides are, in my view, inherently risky. As we saw above, sooner or later one of your prospects is going to spot a logo that interests them, and then ask about it, and your poor Sales Squirrel will likely have not one clue what your company did for that logo. Know what’s even more embarrassing? When a prospect sees the logo of a place they used to work and can’t ever remember meeting you. I have cornered any number of sales people on this one. I don’t doubt that at some point they did some work for all of the companies whose logos are on the slide, but the connection is often pretty tenuous and you are setting your Squirrels up for an awkward conversation, an apology or a big fat lie.
The other risk of those pesky logos is that it can pull your team into a detailed discussion about work for other companies, chewing up the time they should be spending talking about work for the company whose money they are currently wasting.
You Are Not Oprah Winfrey
Oprah gets to give away cars. Tim Cook gets to pull the sheets off new iPhones and the Queen is allowed to launch ships. That’s about it for the big reveals. The rest of us need to get to the point and quickly. Here’s why: very senior people are very busy people whose time is in constant demand. Just because your Outlook calendar and theirs agree that they will be your hostage for an hour, does not mean they won’t get up and leave half-way through. It doesn’t prevent them from being called away and never returning. It doesn’t even obligate them to show up in the first place.
I know we’re supposed to talk in stories and weave narratives and all that but this is real life and in real life we have conversations. Expensive people invest a bit of their time in your pitch not because they want to give you money, but because they want to learn something. The something they learn can be helpful, enlightening, cheese-moving, blue ocean stuff or it can be that your company wastes their time.
Your Demo is Killing Your Deal
Remember that solutions consultant who was cringing in the corner of the sales pitch disaster? You know why she was there? She was there to demonstrate the super cool product that was the subject of the Big Reveal on slide 30. In hindsight, it is a very good thing for her we never made it that far, because they can’t now blame her for blowing the pitch.
Product demonstrations, or even detailed discussions about features and functions and widgets and code bases are all well and good and have no place in a pitch to Corporate Overlords. Overlords may be interested in how efficient the product is, how productive it makes their people, how pretty the reporting it spits out might be, but rest assured, they are not the people using it day to day. That’s the functional people (the F-Word) and the people who get stuff done (the G-Spot). At some point, you will need to show someone much less expensive than an Overlord that your product is awesome. You will absolutely need to take the P-Cube through every last little deliverable and module, but once again, you would not be in the room with the expensive people if someone hadn’t first sat through your demo or at least done enough homework to satisfy themselves that you were not going to pose a risk to their career.
There are lots and lots of other things that just don’t belong in your pitch deck. Weed them out and give your team the white space to start a real conversation.
Related Posts
It’s Time for a New Pitch Deck
P-Cube Rising
Interesting Things I Found This Week
Here’s the interesting thing about interesting things. I keep finding so darn many, it’s hard to pick just one or two. Plus the links have this habit of expiring and sometimes the things just stop being interesting.
Starting this coming week, I’m going to do a second weekly post rounding up the interesting stuff I’ve found along the way. I hope you like it and please feel free to add your interesting stuff to the list.
BizMarketer is written by Elizabeth Williams
I help companies have better conversations
Drop me a line at ewilliams@candlerchase.com
Or follow me @bizmkter
Please tell me in detail what a “sales squirrel” is. I would be very interested to know how this term helps companies have “better conversations” with both their internal teams as well as current and prospective clients. It would seem to me to be slightly off-putting at best and extremely offensive at worst. Unless, I am mistaken. I would love some clarification.
Hi Jan,
Thanks for your comment. Great question. I really should get a little glossary posted on the blog with all my creatures defined for easy reference.
Sales Squirrel is something I came up with a few years ago to remind marketers that while we are sitting in our warm little cubicles, our colleagues in sales are out there in the cold hustling for acorns (the metaphor was a lot better in context). While it may not be appropriate for an internal conversation, it’s meant with respect and admiration (both for sales people and squirrels). It’s my belief that brands spend a lot of time and money talking to, at, around and over their customers, but never actually speak with them. Squirrels, whose job is basically to have conversations, are not always well-served by the rest of the company when it’s shouting or, in the case of this post, giving them the wrong tools to build a conversation.
Hope that clarifies and thanks for reading!