Early-Stage Sales Materials Basics

You’re reading an excerpt of Founding Sales: The Early-Stage Go-To-Market Handbook, a book by Pete Kazanjy. The most in-depth, tactical handbook ever written for early-stage B2B sales, it distills early sales first principles and teaches the skills required, from being a founder selling to being an early salesperson and a sales leader. Purchase the book to support the author and the ad-free Holloway reading experience. You get instant digital access, commentary and future updates, and a high-quality PDF download.

While there’s a galaxy’s worth of different sales materials that you could create and use for pitching prospects, we’re going to focus on the very basics in this chapter. What you need at this early stage is a set of materials that you can use to engage, pitch, and close your first set of customers: slides for a sales presentation, email templates and phone scripts for prospecting and appointment setting, demo scripting, and basic video content. It’s a necessarily limited set of materials, but it will set you up for later success in creating more varied and more involved collateral items, as you’ll start building a set of reusable and customizable assets for use across other materials.

​caution​Before we get started, I want to take a second to talk about a common misconception among new sales professionals that can hamper critical early-stage progress. Because their prior experience with sales comes from what they’ve seen in movies and the materials they’ve seen on mature organizations’ websites, they often believe that everything they produce has to be spit-shined and sparkly before it can get in front of a customer, or must be triple-checked and signed off on by everyone before they can present it, or that it has to be reviewed by legal. And so on.

While these constraints may be necessary for larger organizations with slower-moving offerings (and even then, I don’t buy it), this mindset is extremely damaging for an early-stage sales organization. When you’re getting started, speed is key. The shorter the feedback loop between hearing an objection from a customer and building a slide to combat that objection, the better. The less time between shipping an amazing new feature and recording a rough-around-the-edges video demo of it, the more appointments you will set. The faster you build a new slide documenting the feature and how it supports your value prop, or update your Why We Matter slide when a prestigious publication mentions you, the more mileage you will get. This is how you will win.

When there is a trade-off between a “perfect” deck and one that is good enough to persuade the customer, opt for speed. Having a handful of five-minute screencasts explaining each of your major features up on YouTube—recorded directly from your laptop while you speak into its microphone, complete with “ums,” “uhs,” and sneezes—will be more impactful for your efforts, to start, than one sparkling, pristine explainer video.

Sales Presentations

For the more visually inclined, I have put together a presentation of this section on sales presentations (Ha!), complete with lots of examples.

​important​You’ll note that we’re starting with slides. While a killer demo and a great verbal description are no doubt helpful, and explainer videos are nifty, nothing works in a sales context like slides. They’re visual, so you can mix in images, charts, and so on that underscore your point, alongside text that explains it.

You can speak over them, live. You can send them to someone who missed the presentation. You can use them in prospecting, to send to someone who isn’t sure they want to take a demo. You can record an overview video in which you talk over them. You can post them online to generate leads. You can screenshot one and email it to make a point. You can chop a deck down to a smaller mini-deck to make a more targeted point. You can remix slides to create presentations with different thrusts.

And importantly, a slide deck is what customers expect to see. It’s the means by which they’re used to consuming commercially oriented product information. This is not unlike how VCs are used to consuming would-be investment information via a pitch deck. There are just certain patterns of information presentation and consumption that have become standards, and in the B2B enterprise sales world, the go-to format is your sales presentation.

Often technical founders have a tendency to think, “No way, I should just do a demo.” While a demo is important, it’s not the whole story. It’s a sub-chapter, and if you jump straight to it without ensuring the proper context is set, you’ll injure your ability to communicate the value of your solution as a means by which to solve a problem your prospect has. A good presentation tees up a great demo.

Structuring Your Deck for Extensibility

As with all of your marketing and sales collateral, your slide deck will be an implementation of your sales narrative. And much like your sales narrative, it will pretty much always be a work in progress. The more you embrace this notion of always shipping marketing collateral, kind of like your product, the better off you will be. It will drive the correct behavior—not thinking about a deck as being done—and remove the onus for a perfect deck. It will also compel you to think about your deck and other materials in an extensible fashion. As you build right now, think about how you will build on top of this later.

At a bare minimum, you should structure your sales deck to correspond to the various steps in your sales narrative—what is the problem, who has it, what are the associated costs of the problem, what are the existing solutions and their shortfalls, what has changed to enable a new solution, how does it work, is there qualitative/quantitative proof that yours is a superior solution, and how much does it cost.

The minimum viable product is a slide on each of those steps, with bullet points elucidating the elements of your narrative. Now, that wouldn’t be very riveting—but remember, like your narrative, and your product itself, this will always be a work in progress, getting better and more involved with each iteration. So when you get to the point where you want to break, say, your solution slide from a single slide with four bullets on your product’s value propositions into a series of individual slides on each value prop, great, go for it. But before you do that, using a single slide is just fine.

Something like this:

Figure: Single Slide with Value Proposition Points

Source: TalentBin

As that bare-bones solution section evolves, it can be broken into sub-sections by adding a single slide on each major value proposition. One of TalentBin’s value props is, “Scalable, impactful outreach that helps recruiters engage with candidates and drive them down the hiring funnel.” The corresponding slide speaks to how TalentBin enables recruiters to:

1. integrate their existing email systems with the product

2. use mail-merge templates to quickly send email through that integrated email system

3. leverage open and click tracking in those emails to see who’s interacting with their messages and who’s ignoring them

4. send up to thirty messages at once through a mass-mail system

5. implement drip marketing to would-be candidates with campaigns that send follow-up emails without any additional recruiter effort.

In the deck, that sub-section looked like this:

Figure: Additional Value Proposition Detail

Source: TalentBin

Each slide for your product’s value propositions should include the features that speak to a key selling point, as bullet points, perhaps with a small screenshot or icon signifying each. Now, rather than a single solution slide, you have a top-level overview and several additional, focused slides with the additional level of detail on each value prop. This evolution of the deck will allow you to speak to key features—or, if sent stand-alone, encourage the customer to review and understand how those features support your value proposition.

Then, later, when you want to go to the next level of detail, you can create a dedicated slide for each of the bullet points on those slides. To help the user buy into the value of key features, dedicate a slide to each one, with screenshots and subtitles that offer a more detailed explanation and supporting metrics. Of course, all the while, be sure to retain the summary versions of these sections; you’ll want them later so you can choose the level of granularity you use in a given presentation and appropriately customize it for customers, press, analysts, investors, or whomever.

These are some of the slides we developed at TalentBin to highlight those scalable recruiting outreach features:

Figure: TalentBin Feature Detail Slide on Integrated Email

Source: TalentBin

Figure: TalentBin Feature Detail Slide on Merging Fields

Source: TalentBin

Figure: TalentBin Feature Detail Slide on Mass Emailing

Source: TalentBin

Figure: TalentBin Feature Detail Slide on Automated Follow Up

Source: TalentBin

How would you bucket your solution? What features would you drop into each bucket? And how would you describe the value of those features in a slide? Take a second to think about what this looks like for your product.

Now imagine this approach applied across the rest of your slide deck, not just in your solution section. Start with the minimum viable coverage of each piece of the narrative, and then build out as appropriate. A helpful metaphor is: Zoom in, zoom out—start at a higher level, and if you want to zoom in on a section, build more slides for it. But you can start at the broadest level and still be fine. The important thing is to have at least a coarse version of your end-to-end narrative that can handle those cases we mentioned earlier—speaking over the slides during an online presentation, sending them to someone, and so on.

Production Value of Your Slides

​important​On the note of starting with a minimum viable product and then embellishing as you go, let’s talk about production value as relates specifically to your sales deck. As with all things startup, don’t mistakenly believe you need to have “big company” materials before you get started. Even the starkest slides with no branding or shine, when loaded with impactful, persuasive content that presents a transformative, innovative product, will still close business. Never let worrying that it’s not flashy enough block your ability to create content (whether slides, videos, or other forms.). The goal is communication of business meaning, and that can be done with a minimal amount of flash. This isn’t to say that you can’t add flash later, but it should never be viewed as a gate. Also, flash without a valid narrative is actually worse than nothing—you just look like an idiot with nothing to say who wastes people’s time. I’ve seen plenty of these sales decks. Don’t be that person.

That said, there are some basics that, with minimal effort, can help boost your production value in support of your messaging. A simple slide template with background coloring, font theme coloring (headline text of a certain color, smaller subtitle text of a different color, all correlated to your brand coloring), and your logo in a corner can do remarkably much to spruce things up. Conveniently, a lot of this stuff may already be built for fundraising materials. If you have a slide deck with a theme, logos, and so on that was used for raising money for the company, just steal that, and iterate on it. Be sure to include title slides in your template—full-stop slides to define a new section of your presentation (even if that’s just Demo or Appendix). And as you progress, have a templating mindset. If you create a new type of slide—like one that shows images of features along with subtitles to support a value prop—make sure that you clone it as you’re making new versions of that slide for other value props.

Lastly, a great way to spiff up your MVP slides is to find a designer on Upwork or similar, and have them give your slides and templates a glossy coat of polish, which you can now use on new slides. Again, this is after you’ve made them yourself, and to enable you to make higher production value slides going forward. Never should design be a blocker on you creating a new slide to explain a new feature, document an ROI proof, and so on.

Below are some examples of good template slides.

Figure: Title or Section Slide with Logo and Title

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Overview Slide with Headline, Sub-Headline, and List of Concepts

Source: TalentBin

There are other pretty basic things you can do to help with your production value in a minimally viable way. Bullets that use your logo as an icon. Drop shadows on screenshots to make them pop out. You can use tools like Camtasia to take videos of certain use cases and make them into animated GIFs for inclusion in the deck—in effect adding mini demos to the relevant slides. Pay attention to information architecture, too, by varying text size and formatting like bolding and italics to put emphasis on more important things and diminish less important things (like subtitles on screenshots and footnotes).

But remember, the best production value in the world can’t dress up a story that doesn’t address the business pains of your audience and present how your solution is positioned to solve those pains. So nail that first.

Content Management and Deployment

As you create your deck—starting with the minimally viable slide-based version of your narrative, and then extending out as you embellish various sections—you’re going to need to pay attention in order to bootstrap content management. As more and more content is produced, the best way I’ve found to manage it is in a single large slide deck that lives on the computer (or in a Dropbox/Google Drive folder) of the person responsible for its creation, editing, and extension. I started a TalentBin Sales Master_tip_of_the_branch.pptx file at the company’s inception, then expanded and refactored it every step of the way.

That isn’t to say that this is a deck you’ll be presenting to customers—with all 120 slides, covering every possible angle of the product and market. It is simply the repository from which you’ll produce sales-ready versions of the deck, or even press-centric versions, analyst-centric versions, or others. Every time I make edits, I like to fork off a copy of the deck and save it to whatever content-sharing mechanism my team is using (whether Docsend, or even just Google Drive, Dropbox, or SharePoint).

​important​This way, nothing is ever destroyed, even as you extend and refactor, and you’ll still have a record of all prior slides, even if they’ve been dropped from the master as no longer necessary. Later, when you have dozens of sales reps using your materials, separating the master from a version that has been pushed out to production on Docsend or Showpad is also important, so that you don’t have others hacking at your canonical deck.

It’s far from elegant, but until we have GitHub for PowerPoint, it’s the best approach I’ve found. Building a master slide deck will ensure that you’re not reinventing the wheel and that the totality of slides that could be used to tell your sales story are always ready to be deployed or remixed.

Have a Customization Mindset

A sales presentation is focused on identifying each customer’s pain points (via discovery questions and pre-call planning) and presenting your offering as the solution to those pain points. Nothing does that better than using specific customer information in your sales presentation (and later, your demo) to help show that prospect exactly what your solution could do for them.

If your offering is web-based, then good examples of this could be screenshots of your solution dropped into screens of your prospect’s website, or examples of their current pain points gathered from third-party data sources.

All it takes is a little templating and some screenshotting to make a world of difference in how clearly you communicate your value to a prospect.

Key Scenarios for Narrative Sales Presentations

While you’ll iterate your slide deck continually, in alignment with your sales narrative and feedback from the market, there are some particular things you should keep an eye out for in certain sections.

The Problem and Who Has It

Starting with the problem section is helpful to your sales deck in the same way it helped start off your larger sales narrative: if the person to whom you’re presenting, when shown the problem your solution addresses, says, “Huh, I actually don’t have that problem,” then delightful! You’ve saved yourself and them the trouble of presenting a solution that doesn’t fit their business pain.

Of course, even better if you didn’t get all the way to the presentation before realizing that key piece of data (more on that in Early Prospecting. But better late than never to save your and your prospect’s time.

This section of your deck is a great place to document not just the problem that you’re seeking to resolve, but also other validators of that problem and its importance. This could be things like stats from industry analysts—for TalentBin, these slides address the extremely low unemployment rate of technical, creative, and healthcare talent—press clippings, and so forth. That way, you’re not only further describing the problem but showing that many others agree that it is a problem.

Consider the following problem statement slide made when TalentBin was first getting into the healthcare space. The following slide documents the pain that recruiters trying to hire doctors and nurses have in a low-unemployment environment.

Figure: Problem Statement Slide with Pain Points

Source: TalentBin

This can be done via anecdotal examples (or anecdata) as well.

Figure: Problem Statement Slide with Clips of Real-World Examples

Source: TalentBin

Below is a good slide demonstrating the problem case that e-commerce providers face in the poor conversion rates of mobile shopping.

Figure: Specific Problem Statement for Mobile Shopping Conversion Rates

Source: TalentBin

The Cost of the Problem

As with the problem section, the cost section is a great place to make the case not only that this problem exists for your target audience, but that it’s a costly one that merits resolution. And as before, this is a good time to trot out validated metrics from studies, analysts, press, and so forth, and to generally cover the various ways that the problem in question is creating business issues for people like your prospect.

As you trot these out, it’s best to append metrics to each, as possible, to allow for at least a directional notion of the actual dollars-and-cents cost of these problems, ideally in a way that can be applied to the business you’re addressing. That might look like ~Y cost per manager, per month. Z deals per month not won, which, with your average contract value, would be ~$A per month in foregone revenue and, with your fifty sales reps, adds up to ~$50 x A per month in foregone revenue. Make it easy to understand the ongoing cost the prospect is encountering.

Existing Solutions and Their Challenges

Slides on existing solutions are a bit of a tightrope walk. On the one hand, it’s typically a good idea to stay away from talking about the competition unless prospects bring it up themselves, so baking that into the core of your presentation can be dicey. However, in the case where existing solutions are pervasive—and if you’re selling a new, upstart solution, there will generally be “market standards” that everyone is familiar with—then it can be good to address them directly. It helps you take control of framing how you’re different from the existing solutions, what their shortcomings are, and how you surmount those.

At worst, if, for whatever reason, you find out from discovery questions that your prospect doesn’t use these standard solutions, you can choose to skip over those slides.

At a minimum, this could be a single slide that groups the existing solutions into buckets so you can address how you are not like the things sitting on the page—maybe with a headline identifying them and a summary subtitle of their key issues. In the case of TalentBin, traditional solutions include job postings on boards like Monster.com or CareerBuilder, resume search in resume search databases from, again, traditional job boards, talent search in professional networks like LinkedIn, and, for corporate organizations, working with professional service providers like staffing agencies.

For that reason, we had a couple slides on the particular challenges of LinkedIn Recruiter as relates to technical, creative, and healthcare recruiting—pairing those categories with our particular value propositions of Discovery, Qualification, Outreach, and Pipeline Management. Take the challenges LinkedIn Recruiter has around discovery: Software engineering, design, and healthcare talent often does a poor job of even having LinkedIn profiles, and certainly of embellishing them with proper skill information. As such, those profiles can’t be found by searching on LinkedIn Recruiter. This is a problem for recruiters, as demonstrated by the sparse results that come from a search for a particularly valuable skill or title like iOS Developer or Nurse Anesthetists. Moreover, because of the hundreds of thousands of recruiters using LinkedIn Recruiter, outreach to candidates via InMail is a decreasingly effective means of engagement, as demonstrated by the number of InMails technical candidates get weekly, and declining response rates. These points, of course, correlate to the key value metrics that clients are familiar with (which is something you will want to have converged on in your narrative construction)—in this example, directed at technical and healthcare recruiters, those metrics include talent pool richness, contact information density, and candidate responsiveness.

Keeping that extensibility mindset, use your best judgment as to how much of this information you’d like to have in your primary presentation. The rest can go into the appendix.

Below are some examples from the TalentBin sales deck.

Figure: Characterizing the Challenges Faced by the Industry Standard

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Existence Proof of the Challenge

Source: TalentBin

Figure: The Extension of the Challenge at Scale

Source: TalentBin

The next slide provides further implications of this core challenge, and another set of challenges around outreach and candidate responsiveness (another value bucket that will resonate with customers).

Figure: Additional Challenges for Outreach and Candidate Responsiveness

Source: TalentBin

If you have multiple segments, you can speak to that too.

Figure: Same Challenge, Different Segments

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Specific Example for Different Segments

Source: TalentBin

You can then provide even further extension of a common pain point that the client would recognize.

Figure: Further Concrete Details of the Specific Pain Point

Source: TalentBin

Wrap up with a summarization of these unit pains at a macro scale.

Figure: Summarize Individual Pain Points at a Macro Level

Source: TalentBin

There are a variety of ways to approach this, and varying levels to which you can dig into the challenges of existing solutions. But including at least some slides to frame your solution in contrast to existing solutions will be helpful in demonstrating why your product is so much better, and thus worth the investment.

What Has Changed

The worst sales meeting? It’s the one where the client actually had no clue what was being discussed but, because he didn’t want to admit that, just politely nodded along, committed to follow up, and promptly disappeared. Of course he disappeared. He never understood what was going on.

I find that the best way to prevent this is to include a section in your deck on what has changed in the market and how it impacts clients and created the opportunity for your solution. As you walk through it, with the help of a visual, you can check in on comprehension and agreement and confirm that the prospect is actually, indeed, following along and building consensus.

The TalentBin deck looks at how the process of finding talent online has changed, plotted on a timeline. This allows a quick (not deep! This isn’t a history lesson!) review of resume search and job postings, followed by profile search databases masquerading as professional social networks, and then talent search on the larger web. As you go through your version of this catch-up slide, you can make sure that the client is following you and is familiar with the market and the technology changes that have driven this new opportunity. If they are, fantastic! Applaud them for being students of the game, and move on. If they are not, dig in and make sure that they are on board with the required contextual information before progressing. Either way, you’re guaranteed to avoid a scenario where prospects blindly nod along to your presentation while they do email on the other end, totally not buying into your argument.

Figure: Example Catch-up Slide

Source: TalentBin

How Your Solution Works

We already looked at examples of these slides when we were discussing extensibility, so no need to do it again here.

I do want to add one point, though: I find it key to include a conceptual visualization of how your solution works—to clearly establish the correct understanding—even before you get into specific pain points and their associated solutions.

In TalentBin’s case, as so much flows from the aggregation of candidate profile data from across the web into a unified profile, it was very important to ensure that prospects comprehended how that process worked, or else they would have difficulty with the information that was built on this concept.

Figure: Conceptual Visualization of Your Solution

Source: TalentBin

Another way to help structure this high-level understanding is in contrast to other solutions in the market.

In TalentBin’s case, as I mentioned, most recruiters are very well aware of LinkedIn’s recruiting tools, especially LinkedIn Recruiter. Articulating that TalentBin is a recruiter-facing talent search engine and recruiting CRM like LinkedIn Recruiter, but where the database is the entire internet, really hits home for clients.

Figure: Visual Comparison with Your Competitor(s)

Source: TalentBin

Below is a how it works slide from the consumer finance company Affirm on how they work with e-commerce merchant partners, and how the payment flows work. Rather than hoping that the prospect understands the verbal articulation of how this payment flows this way and that, a nice diagram really nails the core concepts, so their sales staff can focus on the business value that then derives from this approach.

Figure: Conceptual Visualization From Affirm

Source: Affirm

Quantitative and Qualitative Proof of a Better Solution

Once you’ve made the case that existing solutions have problems—and that there are real opportunity costs of not solving them—the next step is presenting proof of your superior solution. If you’ve done a good job, you’ll make adoption of your solution look like a complete no-brainer by comparison. This should be done with both quantitative and qualitative means, but the overall goal is to answer one question, “Why you?”

When building this argument, I like to have proof of superiority bucketed by value proposition, the same way you likely bucketed pain points by value proposition. In your narrative, you keyed in on specific metrics that prospects track to gauge business success—this is where you can demonstrate how your solution impacts those relevant metrics.

This is also where you build your case for, “Why now?” The biggest challenge founders selling young products have is motivating any change at all. This is why you have to demonstrate a large cost or opportunity cost that the prospect is encountering every day that he doesn’t adopt your solution. These slides are the ones that really bring this point home. You’ll see below the crystallization of different types of opportunity cost related to TalentBin’s features, but you can also imagine a roll-up of these that succinctly states, “This is why this solution is so much better than what you’re doing. It’s a no-brainer to act on this now.”

Quantitative Proof

​important​Extensibility is key here. You can share the most basic proof of superiority for a set of key metrics in a single slide, or you can go deeper on each section. The goal is for customers to look at this information and agree that your solution, as measured along a particular value vector, is far superior to their status quo. You can achieve this with both granular and higher-level information.

It’s important that this information is presented clearly, as prospects are faced with a variety of potential solutions they could be implementing to various other problems in their business. One means by which prospects choose where to spend their time is by comparing potential return on investment—both money and time—between solutions. That is to say, you’re not only competing against other solutions to the problem you solve, but also solutions to different problems your prospect faces. Quantitative proof demonstrating the large magnitude of benefits—whether increased revenue, more hires, better quality of hires, reduced costs—flowing from your solution ensures your solution goes to the front of the line of things to spend time on.

Quantitative Examples From the TalentBin Deck

Figure: Superior Search Results Compared to Industry Standards

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Segmented Search Results Compared to Industry Standards

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Profile Availability Compared to Industry Standards

Source: TalentBin

The next slide contrasts enhanced candidate responsiveness via drip-marketing functionality with the opportunity cost of one-and-done candidate outreach:

Figure: Enhanced Candidate Responsiveness via Drip-Marketing Functionality

Source: TalentBin

The next slide compares enhanced candidate responsiveness via superior targeting and email content to InMailing and generic messaging:

Figure: Enhanced Candidate Responsiveness via Superior Targeting

Source: TalentBin

Next, contrasting recruiter time savings via automation to time cost of proper recruiting follow-up behavior without automation:

Figure: Recruiter Time Savings via Automation

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Drill Down on Recruiter Time Savings via Automation

Source: TalentBin

This slide compares a prototypical customer hiring funnel driven by TalentBin best practices with a LinkedIn InMail–driven funnel:

Figure: A Prototypical TalentBin Customer Hiring Funnel

Source: TalentBin

Qualitative Proof Examples from the TalentBin Deck

While quantitative proof is usually the most impactful for B2B sales cycles, qualitative proof points can be helpful as well—and together, they make for an excellent one-two punch that hits both the left and right brain of your prospect. Traditionally these qualitative points come in the form of customer success materials. Like with quantitative proof points, they should correlate to your value proposition buckets, but can do so at a level of granularity that is up to you. The best way to do this is to have good relationships with some early customers and offer to write the testimonials for them; then all they have to do is approve them. The argument is that being made famous as a “thought leader” is the quid pro quo for them, in addition to helping out a nice early-stage founder. Also, it helps to have good schwag like hoodies or T-shirts to send them. Or, shoot, a ~$100 dinner gift certificate for them and their significant others.

Here’s a customer success example of a one-woman show, focused on time-savings benefits:

Figure: Customer Success Example of Time-Savings Benefits

Source: TalentBin

This example focuses on the staffing vertical, specifically candidate discovery and contact-information density:

Figure: Customer Success for a Specific Vertical

Source: TalentBin

Company-Centric Proof Points

You can also throw in company-centric signifiers of why your solution is superior—perhaps because it has been covered by third-party reputation providers, like press or analysts.

This example of a Why We Are Legit slide is less about, “Aren’t we hot” and instead says, “See, you will be in good company when you partner with us, and we will be around for the long term.”

Figure: External Validation of Your Solution

Source: TalentBin

Many companies use a logos slide for this purpose. If you go that route, make sure to include examples of all the segments that you care about. In TalentBin’s case that was small to large business, and both commercial enterprises and staffing agencies. The goal is for the prospect to look at that list and say, “Ah, I see others like me. And I see others whom I aspire to be.” While you might be worried about getting permission to share this information with prospects, when you’re very early, and trying to go from 5 to 50 to 100 customers, you have bigger issues. Just make the slide, share it in live presentations, but don’t send it via email. Additionally, just bake publicity rights into your Master Service Agreement that customers agree to when they sign a contract. Most customers won’t review your MSA in detail, and poof, you have publicity rights. If they end up unhappy after the fact when their PR organization realizes, you can always remove the logos. In the meantime, though, use the social proof as wind at your back, and ask forgiveness instead of permission.

Figure: Customer Logos Slide

Source: TalentBin

Why This Will Be So Easy

While the monetary cost of your solution will of course be a topic of great interest to your prospect, so too will be the potential time cost required to implement it. Most of your prospects, especially the more sophisticated ones, will have experience being promised the moon, stars, and the sky by sales reps. But then when reality ensued, they were eventually faced with all kinds of delays and implementation headaches and so on, all of which blocked their ability to capture the promised return on investment. So they’re going to want to know: how do you make this easy? How do you make it such that they say, “Yes” and then magically everything proceeds from there?

Following are some examples of slides that speak to this, giving comfort to the prospect that not only will this be easy at the start, but that there will be lots of support and engagement all throughout their relationship with you.

Figure: Demonstrating Ease and Support

Source: Affirm

Figure: Additional Ease and Support

Source: TalentBin

It can even be as simple as something like the below slide.

Figure: A Straightforward Message of Support

Source: TalentBin

Pricing

As you go through your presentation, if you have qualified well and are drawing customers along, gaining their agreement throughout, they’re eventually going to want to talk financials. Having a slide that presents your solution’s pricing, and any potential variations, helps here, and also helps for when you send your slides along later for reference by the client.

If you have a variety of permutations but there’s one that you want to push clients to, just present that one. You can always bring up the other ones at another juncture.

Figure: Example Pricing Slide

Source: TalentBin

Appendices

One of the things you want to be mindful of when presenting is to not cover things that are unnecessary. If your solution integrates with a particular piece of software that only 10% of your customers use and you’ve decided to have a slide on it, don’t include it in the main deck. Put it in the appendix. Do you have a specific slide comparing your solution and a competing one that doesn’t need to be addressed with everyone? Don’t bring up the competition unless asked. Put it in the appendix. When the customer says, “So, how do you compare to XYZ?”—boom, you can flip right to it. But it won’t be in the main presentation to muddy things up and drain attention from your essential points.

As you execute more presentations, you will invariably find new cases that need their own appendix slides. I generally try to add an appendix slide anytime I have a question asked for a second time. It’s a 30-minute investment, and you know that at scale (doing dozens of these demos) you’re going to hear that question a lot. Having a slide with the relevant messaging at the ready ensures that you nail that response and impress the heck out of the prospect.

Have One Deck for Presenting, Another for Sending

When you’re putting your deck together, remember that there’s the one you present (along with an appendix that you pop into as necessary) and then there’s the one that you’ll send later. This is where content management and presentation solutions like Docsend, Showpad, and others can be helpful. You can have your full-on deck that you use for your live presentation and an abridged version to send along after the fact.

When you’re thinking about the one that you send, it can, and usually should, be a pretty heavily abridged version of your main presentation deck. A deck sent after the fact is not a substitute for incremental presentations to other stakeholders (more on this in Sales Pitches for Startup Founders but rather a reminder of the key topics that were covered. It can also be a teaser for other potential stakeholders with whom it gets shared, in the interest of driving further presentations. Moreover, sending your materials using something like DocSend or Showpad will allow you to see prospects’ interaction with your materials, something that is helpful in distinguishing between those who have more commercial interest and intent than others. For instance, did they spend time on the pricing slide? Did they send it to a bunch of other people who reviewed it?

Sales Outreach Materials

Once you’ve got your deck nailed, the next step is going to be driving opportunities to present it to potential clients. And the precursor to that will be emails and phone calls. So having some basic templates there will be helpful.

A set of basic emails that handles inbound inquiries, and can be used for targeted outreach, is a key piece of your sales materials.

As with your deck, these emails will be medium-specific encapsulations of your narrative, whose end goal is to drive recipients to an online or offline presentation and demo. And as with your deck, these can start at the most basic and extend from there as your messaging gets more specific.

We’ll start with the idea of outbound outreach. While inbound leads (that you heavily qualify) are the highest-quality source of potential deals, it’s unlikely when you’re first starting out that you’ll have inbound demand of any merit before you start doing outbound.

Cold Outreach Emails

To start, you simply need a couple of outreach templates that you’ll use to contact decision-makers to whom you want to present your solution. The benefit of prospecting (again, we’ll get into this more in another chapter) is that you are able to select prospects that have the business pain characteristics that your solution addresses. (Remember the people and businesses we talked about when building your narrative? These are those folks.) So conveniently, when you’re writing these templates, you can be very specific in assuming that readers have the pain points that you’re solving and, moreover, talk to them plainly about their business pains and your solution.

As you read the following email templates, you should recognize parts of the master narrative: the problem and who has it (the recipient!), the differences between existing solutions and yours, and proof points of superiority. You’ll note the subject lines are often customized— there’s information in there to show the prospect that this message was specifically made for him or her—and include qualification information (for example, “Hiring Ruby devs? That is NOT easy.”). You’ll also see that the templates include click targets, which are hyperlinks pointing to pieces of collateral (I like YouTube demo videos in particular) that draw clicks from the prospect. These are important not just because they can provide more context and persuasion, but because, with the sort of email instrumentation you’ll have implemented, they will allow you to see which prospects are clicking and thus demonstrating interest in what you have to say. And they don’t have to be just text links. You can embed a screenshot of a slide or—one of my favorites—a thumbnail of a demo video that’s hyperlinked to the source to drive click-through for more compelling information. Email templates should also include links to your website. This helps with the click-target question, but also allows the prospect to see more and potentially come inbound as a demo request through your inbound lead capture.

You’ll also note that these sample templates are very specific about what the solution addresses and take pains to demonstrate to the prospect that research was done to confirm that he or she has those business pains. In TalentBin’s case, that’s hiring technical talent. These emails don’t talk about social recruiting. They don’t talk about recruiting in general. They don’t talk about interviewing. They talk about the pain points of finding and recruiting technical talent and potential solutions to those problems. And the messaging continually comes back to the prospect’s point of view. Prospects don’t care about you. They care about them. So as with your narrative and slides, prioritize the prospects’ point of view; even as you present information about your solution, ground it in how it helps them.

​important​The best templates do all of this in a plainspoken, dare I say fun, way that speaks to the prospect candidly, authoritatively, and as a peer. They avoid meaningless jargon-speak and unnecessarily business-y communication patterns. Same with over-involved designs; the templates should be 100% text, avoiding marketing images—with the exception of screenshots and slides, if you like. But avoid high-sheen logos and such. It makes your outreach look like a robot sent it, like there’s no qualification behind it and it’s therefore inapplicable spam rather than highly targeted consultative outreach. Don’t let your emails get mistaken for that other rubbish.

You’ll notice that there are strong calls to action at the conclusion of each email, asking to set up a one-on-one interaction (whether via telepresence à la Join.me or Zoom, or face-to-face). That is the ultimate goal of this outreach: to drive to a synchronous presentation and discussion of the prospect’s business pains and your solution—a demo, in the vernacular.

Below are a few examples of cold-outreach emails.

TEMPLATE: Short and Sweet—Quick Pain Documentation and Request

Source: TalentBin

TEMPLATE: A Bit Longer—Quick Pain Documentation and Request

Source: TalentBin

TEMPLATE: A Little Longer—the Basics of TalentBin

Source: TalentBin

TEMPLATE: Quick Summary of TalentBin—Focused on How It Will Save Time

Source: TalentBin

Lastly, when you build these templates, you want to build them with a concept that they’ll eventually be dripped out over time in a multi-week cadence. So think about how you can split your message into more than one email, as this has a number of benefits.

I wrote an example drip email series for a Sales Operations salon that I run, which has the same call to action—“Join this group”—but approaches it with different value propositions along the way.

Warm Outreach Emails

In Prospecting, we talk about how in your prospecting efforts, when you identify an account and the relevant decision-making contacts internally, you may be able to identify a professional contact of yours that is a LinkedIn connection of the target contact, or at very least, works in the same organization as them. This can be a very effective means of engagement, but it takes a little bit of extra footwork than pure compelling argumentation, as a social component and social graces are involved.

In this case, your initial outreach will be to the intermediary, asking them if they’d be willing to forward something along to the target. An email template detailing to them who you’re trying to engage, why you think that they might know them (always authenticate this, because sometimes LinkedIn connections can mean not a lot!), why you want to engage the target in question, and why you think it would be valuable to the target. This is the part that tells the potential introducer whether it will be worth their time to assist you—as in, will they be a bringer of compelling information, or just helping an annoying gadfly? They are a lightweight gatekeeper who has split allegiances—some to you and some to the other contact. So you want to show them how there is social benefit to them as an introducer—a great way here is to include some sort of specialness, like maybe it’s a closed beta and no one else knows about it, and you prospected the target especially.

If they’re willing to help you, send them an easy-to-forward email template with all the relevant information detailed in, customized to the target contact, along with the rationale as to why you thought they’d be really excited to hear more. Don’t ask the introducer to email introduce you directly, as you want the other side to opt in to engaging rather than being dropped blindly into their lap. And don’t rely on the introducer to execute the outreach on their own, since she doesn’t know much about your pitch and argument. You simply want her to be in charge of passing your message along, with commentary about your great qualities. Your email should have parts of your pitch in it, like the templates above, because it’s going to be making your argument for you when your introducer forwards it along—it’s a call to action for the target to respond back to you directly if they’re interested in hearing more. Send that to your introducer, making sure to instrument it with an email-tracking pixel (for example, Mixmax, Yesware, HubSpot Sidekick, or others), so you can see when your introducer forwards it and it gets opened (or not). Set a reminder to yourself to follow up directly with the target if you don’t hear back (once your introducer has sent this first email along, they’re out of the loop.) At this point, you can just treat the target like a standard cold outreach target, but with the added social context benefit of that initial warm introduction. And of course when the target gets back to you, make sure to thank the introducer!

As with your slides, you should approach these email templates with an iterative mindset. As your solution extends, you’ll extend them. In fact, as you add slides, you can often add a correlating outreach email, maybe even with a screenshot of the slide embedded! As you find permutations in your customer base, you can fork off templates that are specific to sub-genres of your customers. As with your slides, you should keep email templates in some sort of repository—which can be as simple as a Google Document or, eventually, a more complicated content management system, like Yesware, SalesLoft, or some other email-prospecting tool.

Phone and Voicemail Scripts

While targeted email outreach for appointment setting is one of the most scalable means by which to put your message in front of qualified prospects, you’ll likely be getting on the phone—either dealing with inbound calls (perhaps engendered by your outbound emailing!) or doing out-and-out cold-calling.

While there’s little chance that a phone call will directly follow a script, having at least some bulleting in place can be helpful to ensure that you’re nailing your messaging points. Again, these should be a reformatting of your core narrative, designed to be delivered in thirty to ninety seconds. This is not the kind of phone script that you’ll have when you get to 10+ sales reps; instead, it’s some guideposts to help you when you get on the phone and are trying to drive to a demo.

Below are some appointment-setting phone scripts from a company named HIRABL, which makes revenue-acceleration products for recruiting agencies. These are for a product that helps agencies know when candidates that they’ve submitted to clients may have been hired, even though the client hasn’t reported it.

TEMPLATE: Cold-Calling Scripts

Source: HIRABL

The following is a more involved call script for TalentBin, which encapsulates more of the sales narrative than the succinct ones above. It is unlikely that all of the information in this script would be utilized in a given call, but having the information available to the caller can be helpful.

TEMPLATE: In-Depth Cold-Calling Script

Source: TalentBin

When we built this next script, we also included some reaction permutations to help guide the next steps of the call:

TEMPLATE: In-Depth Cold-Calling Script with Reaction Options

Source: TalentBin

Next, we have some example voicemail scripts to elicit callbacks. As covered in Prospect Outreach and Demo Appointment Setting, voice mails should generally be paired with emails; while listening to a voicemail can be easy (especially in the age of transcription to email), prospects will rarely return messages. Better to think of them as audio emails. However, an email that is paired with a voicemail that has piqued a prospect’s interest is ripe for a reply.

Source: TalentBin

Sales Demo Scripts

We’ll talk more about the actual process of giving a combined sales presentation and demo later. But before we get into the blocking and tackling of presentation and demo, it’s good to have a concept of the content you want to demonstrate when your prospects agree to a formal sales presentation.

As with the other materials discussed, this should be done with a mind toward your narrative. And because a live demo will typically come after you’ve shared some initial slides from your sales deck, follow the framing you presented in your deck. Your demo will reiterate much of it, but with much better context, customization, and visuality.

What is that framing? Well, as with your sales deck, it’s the bucketing of key use cases and the features that enable them. Ideally, you should already have those use cases identified, as they are likely referred to in your sales deck. But think about the combination of most common, most important, and most impressive use cases your solution enables. Then rank them, such that you start with the most important and most compelling ones—because you never know when a demo will have to end early! Beyond that, I like to think of a demo as telling the story of how your solution is used, again starting with major pain points.

Customization

We’ve already looked at customizing sales presentation content for a given prospect, but your demo is where this sort of thing can really be done in earnest. In fact, as you’re developing your product, think of ways you can make it easier to demonstrate using prospect content—it could be something as simple as ensuring that a prospect name and logo can be quickly embedded, or as complicated as making it easy to import customer data to use in a live demo. But the purpose of the demo is not to be a cold rehash of the features that you may have just touched on in your sales presentation. Rather, it’s an opportunity to demonstrate the potential value the product could provide to the prospect, richly, before their eyes. More customization will raise close rates and shorten deal cycles—both things you want!

The simplest version of this customization is knowing the prospect’s business context—either from prior research or from discovery questions at the beginning of your call—and using that to guide the demo.

If your demo is non-contextual and not tied directly to the business realities of the prospect, it will always smell like you’re running the demo to make the product perform at its peak attractiveness, rather than showing how it will work when used by the client. You can avoid that by focusing on the prospect’s business context first and foremost. It will make your materials more believable than other vendor demos they see and raise the trust factor. It also helps to do this research yourself. Because if you simply ask clients what they want to do, they may not know or may ask to go in the wrong direction.

Figure: Customized User Data in HIRABL’s Demo

Source: HIRABL

Obviously the latter case is far more advanced, and by no means should you say, “Well, we don’t have the ability to hyper-customize a demo environment, so we can’t start selling.” Not at all. However, when you work with product management, providing feedback on features you’d want to see in the product, remember that there are features that will make selling easier via a more customized demo. And even if those features don’t necessarily provide post-purchase value to customers, they can still be very valuable from a revenue-generation standpoint, in that they raise close rates and bring in more money!

Example Demo Script

As you read through it, imagine what it would look like to walk prospects through all the ways TalentBin fits into their day-to-day, and solves their pains at each step, while screen sharing the product. And think about what your demo would look like! What are the natural workflows that your prospect works through on a daily basis? How does your solution fit into them and make them better, faster, stronger?

Search

Enhanced candidate discovery was TalentBin’s first value proposition, and one of the most easily comprehended by prospects. This section was where we touched on the importance of being able to discover engineering candidates who were previously undiscoverable in traditional recruiting databases—or at least super hard to find, requiring far too much manual effort.

We knew nothing would capture the attention of a technical recruiter like showing them the potential candidates they could find and engage using our solution, especially as compared to standard databases, so we started with that.

Figure: Scaled Search Results for Desired Skills in the Prospect’s Region

Source: TalentBin

Qualify

This is where we would cover why having access to all of this aggregated professional activity was fantastic for qualifying that a candidate had the characteristics recruiters were looking for. Moreover, we looked at how using that contextual information, both professional and personal, in outreach could dramatically impact response rates and recruiter efficiency.

Figure: Search Results and Preview Information

Source: TalentBin

Profile View

Understanding that a candidate fits the bill and is at least worth reaching out to is a core recruiting workflow. Whether basing their decision on a resume or a LinkedIn profile, recruiters are used to doing that. So showing them how they could do that with a TalentBin profile, but with data aggregated from all over the web, was important.

Figure: Aggregated Web Profiles

Source: TalentBin

Interest Details

Understanding why a given candidate has the relevant professional skill is also important for recruiters. Often they spend time cross-correlating resume claims with sources of professional activity on the web. Moreover, they know that using contextual information in outreach is a valuable way to raise responsiveness but often takes too long to do in a scalable fashion manually.

Figure: Showing Off the Skills Viewer

Source: TalentBin

From here, we would cover the key remaining buckets, Reach Out and Automate. We continued to follow the recruiter’s natural workflow—using a real-world candidate that matched that prospect’s hiring needs—and highlight features that would boost efficiency at every step. Importantly, we would tie parts of the demo to prior elements, making sure to create a holistic understanding of how the product would impact the entirety of the recruiter’s workflow for the better.

In TalentBin’s case, the product was fairly evolved, so there was quite a bit of bucketing and a good amount of ground to cover. But that doesn’t mean that this has to be the case with your demo. The goal is to connect the known pain points to the solution and its benefits, step by step, so your prospects can truly see how it fits into their workflow and makes their lives better. You know you’re doing it well when prospects are saying things like, “That’s awesome” or, “You have no idea how much this will help me with XYZ.”

Think about the right way to go about demoing your offering. Is there a natural workflow to walk the user through? Is there a chronology? Are there specific key use cases that correlate to the value that you’re providing that you would want to start with? Think about the story of your product in the hands of the person you’re presenting it to, or the person that reports to her. What things will they care about, and what will make them better, faster, stronger, smarter, and more successful? Focus on those things, and you’ll be in a good spot.

Video Materials for Early-Stage Sales

I’m a big fan of video to help accelerate appointment setting in early-stage sales. Internet video is a fantastic tool; it’s highly accessible and provides for a richness of communication that far outstrips email templates or even visual exhibits. And thanks to mobile phones with fast data plans, video collateral can be watched anywhere, at the moment it shows up in a prospect’s email inbox or Twitter feed. As such, having a one-, two-, all the way up to five-minute overview of your offering to share with would-be prospects is extremely helpful.

MVP Overview Video

​important​The goal here is not to sell the product. Rather, as with your email templates and phone scripts, the goal of these videos is to sell the prospect on the next step—getting on the phone for discovery, presentation, and a demo. And as with your slides and email templates, your video overview does not have to be perfect. It just has to exist. One of the easiest ways to create a viable overview video is to put together a highly shortened sales presentation and demo and record it on your laptop, while you narrate.

I prefer YouTube as a means of deploying videos for a variety of reasons. First, YouTube is mobile-friendly. So much email is read initially on smart phones nowadays, so if you include a link to a video, you want it to actually play when the prospect clicks through. Second, YouTube is a trusted URL. If the link in your email is clearly from YouTube, the prospect knows what’s on the other end! A video! On YouTube! That place where delightful videos live!

There are other benefits as well, but they’re mainly secondary. YouTube itself has lots of traffic and does a good job of cross-marketing video content based on title, description, tags, and such. So someone watching a related video can discover yours. For that reason, make sure you title your video well, and include a rich description and good tags. And in that description, add a link back to your website so that people can get from the video page to your website and into your lead capture form! YouTube also has a great Google search engine optimization rank. Often when someone searches for your brand, Google will pepper in videos from YouTube—so make sure they’re your videos. Lastly, because YouTube is the biggest video-sharing site around, your prospects are used to dealing with it. They know how to grab the hyperlink and email or text message it to their colleagues. Or post it to Facebook and Twitter. Or embed it with an embed code somewhere. Previously it was popular to use Vimeo because of better replay quality, but YouTube has largely caught up on this front. For all the other reasons above, I highly recommend posting all your marketing videos on YouTube.

Figure: YouTube Demo Details

Source: YouTube

The production value on that healthcare video is not the greatest. There are times when I stumble on my words, or say “um” and “uh” more than I would like. However, this is a perfectly viable recording to send to thousands of potential customers who have the business pain that TalentBin for Healthcare addresses. If your prospects have the pain point you’re addressing, and the pain point is actually one that people care about, they’ll get over a couple “ums” and “uhs” and instead focus on the fact that your solution fixes their problem! (If they don’t have that pain point, you’re prospecting wrong. More on that in the next chapter. And if they have the pain point, but it’s not a substantial one, that’s a product management problem, not a sales one!)

Further Viewing on MVP Overview Videos

• Atrium Sales Performance Analysis Demo Video

• Immediately: Comprehensive Product Overview

Explainer Videos

This more advanced cousin of the video overview is typically a more abstract presentation of the sales narrative, oftentimes animated and voiced-over and made with a higher level of production value. I find that these videos are very helpful both as a first explanation for prospects who show up on your website and as an excellent piece of collateral to deploy via prospecting email. (Note that there were links to videos in some of the appointment-setting email templates above.) You can use your explainer video for outreach beyond email too, deploying it, for example, on monitors at events and conferences.

Typically these explainers work really hard to be shorter than two minutes in length—in large part because their primary use is on a website, and you don’t necessarily have a lot of time to grab the attention of the visitor. But even though you see these things all over the place, and they are valuable, they don’t have to be your first piece of video collateral. In fact, because they tend to be a bit of a project, especially if you want to do them with a professional third party, they can end up getting delayed over time. Don’t fall into that trap. Get something going ahead of your explainer—remember, something is better than nothing—even as you work on your delightful, pixel-perfect masterpiece!

At TalentBin, my co-founder and I worked our butts off on our first explainer video.

Figure: Screen Shot From Initial TalentBin Explainer Video

Source: TalentBin

Additional Examples of Explainer Videos

• Atrium explainer

• HIRABL explainer (Created in conjunction with Simple Story Videos

• Lawn Love explainer

Other Types of Early-Stage Sales Collateral

As you might imagine, there is a whole universe of other types of marketing collateral that you can invest in. PDFs! Webinars! Infographics! Blog listicles! Content marketing! Oh my! What we’ve covered are the basics that you want to get going before you start in on anything else. This isn’t to say that you can’t start selling if you don’t have a video overview. But it will make it easier for you to set appointments if you can embed one in your email templates. And you don’t need to have a formal demo script in place before you start taking customer meetings. But it can help make them more effective. You should be thinking about collateral as features in your go-to-market plans—each one involves time, energy, and cost, and that should be weighed against how frequently it will be used and the value its use provides.

One-Off Requests

Often you will get a request from a prospect for some sort of collateral that you don’t have. “Do you have a one-pager overview on this?” “Do you have customer success stories?” Most of the time you should think about the question under the question (more on this in Handling Objections. Consider whether an existing piece of collateral already handles their request before running off and manufacturing something new. Often that will be the case, so you can simply reply, “You’re looking for what others who have used the product have said about it? Great! We have a number of testimonials on slides near the end of this deck I’m attaching!” or “The first ten slides of this attached deck give a great overview for anyone you’d like to share it with. Oh, and this video overview is quite helpful too.”

On-Demand Collateral

The one place where one-off collateral makes sense is when it is highly customized to the prospect. I’ll say it once again: customization of marketing materials, whether a live demo or something that is recorded and repeatedly consumed, is very powerful. On-demand collateral to respond to prospect requests, or even to anticipate them, can accelerate sales conversations dramatically. One of the best ways to accomplish this is screenshotting and screen capturing. At TalentBin, our market development reps would often take screenshots/screen captures of search results to send to prospects.

Or account executives would do one-off five-minute Jing recordings of a certain search, creating a walk-through that was hyper-specific to client needs, maybe both covering comparative search counts and digging into profile data and contact information. The recording only took five minutes to do, could be shared with a hyperlink, and, importantly, could be shared across the entire prospect recruiting team—maybe 20 people or more. Five-minute investment, potentially massive impact.

What would this look like for your offering? What is the customized screenshot that you could send to prospects to make them sit up and pay attention? What is the customized five-minute walk-through that your prospects need to convince their CFOs that this is worth taking a look at?

Equipped with a smart deck, irresistible outreach templates, a prospect-focused demo, and a burgeoning video library, you should have no problem getting into the market and starting to sell. Each asset will require iteration as you learn from your prospects, but the important thing is that you have a full quiver of the basics you need to close your first few dozen customers. Next, we’ll discuss how to find the folks you’ll target for that selling!

Further Reading on SDR Email Templates

• Leading SalesDevelopment (Alea Homison and Jeremey Donovan)

• The Sales Development Playbook (Trish Bertuzzi)

• Fanatical Prospecting (Jeb Blount and Mike Weinberg)

• Predictable Prospecting (Marylou Tyler and Jeremey Donovan)

• Sales Development (Cory Bray, Hilmon Sorey, and Ryan Reisert)