Sales • Selling • From Issue #24 •10/7/20
I used to hate decks. But that was back before I learned how to use them efficiently. The turning point for me was when I was introduced to the concept of the explainer deck. An explainer deck is a set of slides built to visually describe a concept -- be it a product or a project or an investment or whatever.
The slides themselves are individually concise. They're arranged to work together, either as a complement to a live pitch or to be reviewed on their own as a light introduction to the concept. They're never meant to replace a pitch, in the sense that they should not be full of words that are better spoken or explained elsewhere, but rather augment the pitch with facts, charts, and visuals. No matter which way you use it, the deck should tell a compelling story from beginning to end, with a cohesive theme throughout and, in the case of a sales pitch, a direct ask at the end.
I've written about using a series of explainer decks as the basis of an investor pitch deck. An explainer deck can also be used as the foundation or a component of a sales pitch. The key to a solid explainer deck is that you start building it from the end backwards, beginning with the action you're looking the recipient to take. So for an investment, you want them to write a check. For sales, well, you still want them to write a check, but a different kind of check.
Question: The question I'd love you to answer is this: How to put together a customer pitch deck? Some context: Me and my co-founder are working on a product within the tech infrastructure space. We are bootstrapping and validating the idea by doing what the product will do manually via freelancing and consulting.
Great. Let's use that information to talk about the deck's overarching theme. A lot of tech products start life this way. There's no easier field in which to automate than technology, and the lower level you go, the more valuable that automation is, in terms of time and cost savings. The first startup I ever joined was a tech consulting firm that switched to developing frameworks that could be dropped in to handle a lot of the infrastructure coding we needed to do. We leaned heavily on automation as our theme -- and every slide at least hinted at the time and costs savings that our product provided. Since you're doing this manually today, you'll have a lot of different angles to attack your theme, and you should be able to pull real numbers that you can chart up for the sales deck.
More Question: We want to get a couple more gigs to figure out the details and see whether we can actually find more clients with the same problem. The idea is to put together a customer pitch deck for the outreach. The way we want to structure it is to present the value of the product, rather than just us building custom solutions.
I love your strategy here. You can definitely go with a hybrid approach, and the explainer deck you use to pitch the consulting/product hybrid will eventually evolve into the explainer deck that will eventually sell the product. You'll learn along the way which automation points to attack, in a live setting, with the ability to be able to ask questions like:
"Why is this important to you?"
"How much time will this save you?"
"What if we did it this way (the product instead of the manual work)?"
More Question: I found your answer on investor pitch decks very interesting and I think that a similar approach could be applied to customer pitch decks too. What are your thoughts on the topic? Any tips are highly appreciated.
Yes, a similar approach could and should be applied. Let's work backwards from the ask for the sale.
Step 1: Ask for the sale. If you have options as to how to fulfill (i.e. tiers or programs or whatever), this is where you explain each one in a short couple sentences. Don't include pricing here, because you'll be forced to stick to anything you put in print. Even if your pricing is known, don't put it in your deck, link to a pricing page on the web.
Step 2: How fulfillment works. Summary highlights of all the benefits the customer gets when they sign.
Step 3: Any testimonials and/or backing information on your company and product. This could include the credentials of your team or any current or previous customers.
Step 4: Who benefits most from your product? Paint a picture of the company case, not necessarily the use case, but a broader description, i.e. "Banks, Dev Shops, Government Agencies" with a brief sentence or two on why your product is critical to that industry or segment.
Step 5: What you product is and does. This should be mostly visual, and no more than 5-6 slides that you can swap out. Each slide is a selling point, not an instruction manual.
Step 6: Data. Quantify the benefits of your product, how good it is, and why, using big, bold-face numbers and charts.
Step 7: Mission and value proposition. Who you are, what you sell, and why what you sell "makes the world a better place."
Now that you're on Step 7, it looks funny backwards, right? Trust me, work backwards, like any good author writing a book. No one cares about the first page if the ending doesn't make sense.
Start simple and pitch and learn. It'll take a few tries before you're comfortable with what's in the deck. But once you get it to near-perfection, don't rest on it. Customize it every time.