Our Sales Deck Sucks

I write a lot about Marketing as a kind of extension of the sales organization. This bothers some marketers but if you’re selling to enterprises (i.e. big companies), it really does help to focus the team on the question, “who are our next 10 customers and what are doing this week to engage them?” Your success only happens if Sales can close. 

Now, we can measure things like “engagement;” my last post got deep into that so I won’t here. But if we believe that good marketing is moving Sales closer to close, the stuff Sales is actually saying and showing to prospects in the room should matter more than pretty much anything else, right? Your hot LinkedIn content just ain’t invited to this party.

“I don’t sell with a deck” - Sales person who is being let down by Marketing / is imperling all your hot LinkedIn content that got them this meeting

I hear this sometimes: Good salespeople don’t need a deck. 

Steve Jobs didn’t need keynotes then. What if he had just gone up there in 2008 and said “we’ve made the thinnest, lightest computer in the world,” instead of this? 

Yes, you need to build rapport and trust and all those things before you just sell at someone with a deck, and some salespeople are guilty of the latter. We’ve all sat in rooms where we’ve asked ourselves “oh my god, are they really going to just barrel through the rest of this deck?” That’s a sign that the sales deck sucks. 

Before I tell you how to have the deck not suck, let’s acknowledge how it usually sucks in the first place. Common reasons:

• Reflects what the company wants to say rather than what the customer wants to hear

Oh, just one. There’s your problem, 99.9% of the time. That’s why there’s so many “technical” slides, diagrams that don’t make sense, walls of text, 100-slide monstrosities. The sales rep who doesn’t use your deck is the smart one in this case. CEOs are often the primary input into these sales decks, and often they can’t differentiate between the vision-y kind of sell that works for VCs and very, very early adopters and the really tactical story you need to tell to the vast majority of potential customers. If I want to please the CEO, I’ll say “hey, you sell the best out of anyone here, I’ll just take notes and you give me the basic pitch.” It’s a fun exercise and helps me understand what they think their pitch is, so that when I hear what customers actually say I can brace myself for the conversation about how far off the CEO is. 

But as you may come to recognize over and over in my newsletter, I’m all about the One Weird Trick of just asking customers to make my marketing for me. I’m lazy like that. If you ask your customers “Why did you sign with us? What are the main reasons?”, whatever they answer is your sales deck. Get completely different answers from different customers? Surprise! You have customer segments and they each probably need their own deck (or you’re fucked if truly every customer has some random different reason - you don’t have product-market fit). But if you’re moderately successful you’ll hear very similar answers from your customers. Talk to 5, and by customer 3 you’ll know exactly what I mean. 

“But what about the architecture? They need to understand how all the moving parts work…” Every tech company thinks they need to show the customer how intellectually and technically adept they are. Look, if your customers say “the reason we signed with you is because of how perfect your architecture is,” then by all means, that’s your main slide. But it’s all just a way of saying whatever your “magic” is, as defined by your customers: show them that. Get out of the way of the magic. Jobs was famously good at this: no feeds and speeds, just pull that grossly underpowered thin piece of aluminum out of an envelope and hold it up in such a way that it almost disappears on stage.

Everybody’s magic is different, so I’ll give you an example. From 2007 through our acquisition by Yahoo! in 2010, I ran marketing for Dapper, a company that let any advertiser make dynamic ads that had live products and pricing in them. The “magic” to our customers was that instead of needing a “feed” of products built from their database (read: needs engineering resources to build and maintain), the marketing team (or their agency) could just point and click on their website to map things like “hotel name,” “picture of hotel,” “price” and voilà Dapper would generate an ad that would dynamically populate depending on the context of the page it was served on or based on some previous search the user had done.

In this case, our deck began with maybe one slide of pleasantries before quickly diving into the interface and literally making an ad out of the advertiser’s website right in front of the customer. 

I honestly don’t remember anything else from that deck. And it didn’t matter. The demo, in this case, was the main story of the deck because it was so easy to show them the magic that way. I’m sure we had some slides with marquee customer references, case studies, but at that point you’re just reinforcing the thing instead of having to convince them of the thing. 

In a future post I’ll get into specifics like how many sections you should have, how you can organize it, how many slides (<10!), which slides you need and which you don’t. But you really need to get this part right first – defining what your magic is, as reflected from actual customer statements, and getting that to be the main story in your sales deck.