The Sales Powerpoint – Earn The Right

If you have not read Steve Martin’s Heavy Hitter Sales Wisdom you should. There are a lot of good insights for marketers and sales people on appraoching sales and marketing for B2B and more complex sales. One topic he covers is the corporate presentation. More recently he framed the dicussion around how Ronald Reagan would change your sales pitch.

In general Steve outlines the general and common flow of the pitch: company background, wanting to “partner”, slide of customers logos, etc. Too many of the presentations I have seen focus on the selling company and not enough on the prospect.  How can you change this?

1) Earn the right to talk about your company? How? Tell the prospect how you are going to help solve their problems. Start with problems you can solve. Make sure you can relate them to the prospect’s business. Leave the company background on your firm to the end, after you have earned credibility.

2) If you have a slide of customer logos, this can be OK. Make sure you can articulate how you have solved similar problems for other customers. If you cannot outline specifics on your customer logo slide, throw it out.

3) If you claim some leadership – prove it – with facts and data, not just marketing giberish. 

One of the best concepts he outlines is the concept of a “cow catcher” slide. One slide that will make the prospect remember your company. What should you cow catcher slide cover? Examples might include market share, customer growth, a series of market firsts, etc.

Review the following as a simple test to check whether your deck is prospect focused (earning the right) or inside out focused (focused too much on the selling company):

1) How many slides do you have to go through before you can engage on the prospects problems? If more than 3 start again.

2) If you do not cover concrete customer examples that validate your claims, get some.

3) Is your market leadership based on reality (facts and data) or an ivory tower marketing view?

Look forward to good and back examples.