VisualStory®
Structure and storyboard a talk
Analyze your audience and organize your ideas into a story structure that will move them. Transform content into visual concepts and build a storyboard for your presentation.
“One size NEVER fits all. One size fits one. Period.” This quote, from the highly respected author and management consultant, Tom Peters, perfectly captures my feelings about the problems with sales pitch slides today. My spider senses twitch when we’re asked to create the sales presentation for an enterprise client. “THE sales deck?” I always think to myself. The one and only?
It’s always surprising how B2B enterprise sales teams, with a variety of clients in different industries, can get by with a single-yet-modular presentation. Don’t get me wrong, there’s good intention here to provide optional content to mix and match for different contexts. The unfortunate reality is that sales pitch “megadecks” are too big and too modular. When a newly assembled deck is made, it’s hard to tell a compelling story that’ll match a specific customer’s problem from beginning to end.
To be successful, sales pitch presentation templates need context. And each B2B enterprise salesperson has some degree of context about the meetings they have.
Unfortunately, salespeople are spending a large part of their day building their own content for every call because the sales enablement content they have doesn’t quite fit. It was found that salespeople are spending about 30 hours each month either creating their own content or searching for content.
Throughout thousands of interviews with enterprise sellers over the past two decades, we hear consistent themes about “one size fits all” sales pitch decks, including:
Duarte has built its business around the belief that audience empathy is the way to win hearts and minds, and to influence people to act. This belief doesn’t exist for just mainstage, high-stakes presentations. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that audience empathy in a sales presentation is probably the place it’s needed most — when you are there face to face, trying to persuade others towards a decision in your favor.
So where do we go from here? How do you take your time-consuming sales pitch slides into a scalable, revenue-generating tool that your salesforce will love?
Here are five tips on how to craft the perfect sales pitch presentation for your organization.
Product marketing, content marketing, or sales enablement teams need to include salespeople as co-creators in the room where content happens. When sellers are part of the planning process, and as part of the review cycle, the content will get closer to where your prospects and customers are.
Sales is your best window into your customers. They are the proxies and the messengers. Listen to their opinions on:
This one step is a huge leap toward increased sales deck adoption, usage, and value for successful deal development and customer satisfaction.
Don’t include just any salespeople to help. You need to capture the best practices and sales arguments from your top-performing reps. The ones who make “President’s Club” are the ones you need to replicate so all others can be like them. Find stellar salespeople with a sense of duty to share their wisdom with the rest so the tide lifts all boats.
Additionally, ask new or novice salespeople about what’s difficult in their deals — and make sure the tools you build help them grow and win. Often, your savvy sellers don’t leverage tools, so you need to mine the wisdom of the best to put in tools for the rest.
Remember: facts tell. Stories sell! So don’t build the stories in your sales decks around product features. A story that sparks interest with a Chief Financial Officer (CFO) of a local bank won’t likely spark interest in a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) of a manufacturing company whom you’ve sold into for a decade.
The CFO might care more about price, cost structures, cost of ownership, return on investment, and usage rates, and may know less about your brand, portfolio, and capabilities. The CMO knows you and your brand well but will be laser-focused on how a new solution will gain them competitive advantage, market share, differentiation, simplicity, and productivity. Same solution, different context, and different potential objections and opportunities in each sales conversation. Make sure your sales pitch deck has drag-and-drop stories of different scenarios, different pain points, and different value propositions for each kind of “buyer.” That’s an audience-centric approach!
Categorize all your key selling situations. Examine a combination of details that’ll help you find the story to tell that’ll matter most to them.
Find stories that frame past customers as the heroes of their story. This would typically involve:
When you put customers in the role of hero, it helps your prospects see themselves in that role, so they trust you as their mentor to get them through to the end.
But also, find stories about how the deal happened and the decision criteria used – not just what they bought – so customers can see how others got unstuck and made a purchasing decision. Gather your salespeoples’ best stories and make them available so others can make stronger connections at those moments when customers seek help. Also, this is a great way to unearth relevant objections and opportunities.
Sales enablement content creators looking to uncover winning stories that help sellers better connect to their customers can find training options from Duarte to start you on that path. But whatever you do, dig deeper to give salespeople the right content to support their sales conversations and they’ll be more effective in meeting customers where they’re at to move them forward.
Sales may still need to personalize content a bit more for the unique needs that only they know about. However, if you can get them 80–90% closer to the conversations they’re about to walk into, you’ve helped sellers focus more time on cultivating their deals and less time creating their decks.
If you’re looking to take your persuasion skills to the next level, our training Resonate® designed by communication expert Nancy Duarte will help you do just that – and with your sales pitch deck. Bring your sales presentation with you and come out of the training with a transformed mindset to sales pitch decks.
Or, if you’re feeling pretty good about your sales presentation template and how you handle a sales pitch in-person – how are your sales skills in a virtual situation? Brush up on your virtual selling skills with our Presenting Virtually™ course.