Sales Presentations

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.

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.