Besides, with salespeople being so close to buyers, why wouldn’t you involve them?Īt Boston-based Zaius, which has raised over $50 million for its B2C marketing platform, CEO Mark Gally invited one of his sales leaders, Michael Angoff, to be part of the group that would build the new deck. If your marketing team, or even your CEO, builds the new pitch without your sales team’s close cooperation, don’t be surprised when your salespeople shun it like a body rejecting foreign tissue. Nurture advocates for the new deck inside your sales team- before rolling it out Then we went back and showed those slides, and it was like magic-the IT buyers let down their guard and began sharing all kinds of valuable information. Once, with a group of IT buyers, we decided not to show these “change” slides, thinking they would be irrelevant for a technical person, but the buyers were practically silent. As he told me:īuyers open up and share what’s really going on, so much more than when we used to just ask direct questions about their challenges. When unveiling the new deck, SpotMe CEO Pierre Metrailler trained his sales team not just to present these slides, but to stop and ask, “How is this shift playing out for you and your team?” According to Pierre, the information his team gets from these exchanges is gold. For example, Switzerland-based SpotMe, which delivers custom apps for events and training, begins pitches by sharing a change that we heard about from SpotMe’s customers-namely that they now see events not as self-contained shindigs, but as episodes in some greater journey: One of my biggest “aha” moments was when several sales teams I worked with began using their “ change in the world” slides to get prospects talking and opening up. In other words, they inhibit what salespeople call discovery. Make sure your new deck facilitates discoveryĬhristoph's VP’s complaint echoes the most common pushback I hear from salespeople about flashy new sales decks in general-they encourage salespeople to blabber on instead of listening to prospects. (These 5 points are particularly relevant to the Greatest Sales Deck framework, but should apply to any deck you’re “selling” to sales.) #1. So I’ll share an expanded version of my response to him here: With so many B2B teams gearing up for next year’s sales kickoff events, I’m guessing Christoph isn’t the only one worried about his sales team embracing a new version of the pitch. Says he already has a deck, and that buyers don’t have time for a story, they just want to know how we solve their problem.” Christoph was digging his heels into the pavement, one after the other, as a metaphor for his VP’s resistance. I’ve used it with a few prospects, and they engage at a deeper level, they get what we’re about faster, and they’re all moving to next steps.” “Listen,” he said, “I restructured our sales pitch using your Greatest Sales Deck framework and the results have been awesome. He was waiting for a table, but didn’t wait to tell me what was going on. It was fun having my parents think I was some kind of messaging celebrity, but I recognized Christoph as the CEO of an early-stage tech company who had recently attended one of my workshops. (Later, my mom asked, “People stalk you for messaging advice?”) “Do you have time for a quick question about messaging?” Bellies full of beignets, my parents and I were exiting San Francisco’s Just for You Cafe when when a middle-aged man called my name.
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