231. World's best sales deck 🙏
The 5 lessons I've learned about writing great sales decks (spoiler: it's all about storytelling)
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Links that are worth your time:
The thinking behind HubSpot’s engineering-as-marketing playbook
Status Hero: A new tool some Oyster teammates are trying (it’s like idonethis 2.0)
Otta: Cool new job board … Accept a new job, and they’ll donate to a social mobility cause of your choice
Hi there 👋
Many of you already know this, but at Buffer we did not have a formal sales team. We grew to almost $25 million in annual revenue purely through a freemium, product-led growth motion. So when I moved on from Buffer, I was interested in companies with a sales motion (which is almost all B2B companies). Needless to say, I’ve been learning a ton. Polly had a robust sales engine — half of revenue came from sales. Oyster has a sales team of 20+ and an incredibly dynamic sales motion.
So you might see me writing every so often about what I’m learning in the marketing + sales world (this week’s newsletter about sales decks, for example). In particular, I’d eager to explore the ways you can stitch together sales-led growth and product-led growth …. Give me a few more months, and I’ll probably have some more articulate thoughts 😂
Wishing you a great week,
Kevan
The art of the sales deck
Surprise, surprise, one of the most important things I’ve learned about creating a good sales deck is also the most important thing I’ve learned about marketing …
Storytelling is where it’s at.
One of the premier sales-deck gurus out there, Andy Raskin, is a huge believer in storytelling (see video below). Article after article talks about the virtues of telling a great story when you’re pitching your product.
(Or if you prefer to read, here’s a recap on Medium.)
How you go about telling that story can vary based on your preferred storytelling framework. This is the framework that Andy reverse-engineered from what he believes is the “best sales deck ever:” a sales deck from subscription company Zoura.
#1. Name a Big, Relevant Change in the World
#2. Show There’ll Be Winners and Losers
#3. Tease the Promised Land
#4. Introduce Features as “Magic Gifts” for Overcoming Obstacles to the Promised Land
#5. Present Evidence that You Can Make the Story Come True
Another popular storytelling framework is Donald Miller’s StoryBrand framework, which you can see below:
Sidenote: These frameworks are great not just for sales decks but also for website copy, brand messaging, and more.
Overall, these are the five sales deck / storytelling takeaways that are driving the creation of new sales decks at Oyster:
1. The opening slide must make a connection
This could be something that gets people thinking or that draws a connection between them and you. In what might be the most extreme example of this, here is the opening slide from Reddit’s ad pitch deck from 2013:
2. Use real customer examples
These are useful not just for the added boost to storytelling but also to show real-life examples of how your product works, which pain points it solves, and the social proof of who uses you. Speaking of social proof …
3. Go easy on the logos
Gong has a really great sales deck template (you can get it here in Google Slides), and they advise to ditch the social proof slide completely.
Delete your social proof slide. Sellers who use social proof techniques in their sales calls have a 22% lower close rate. That's because name-dropping a few big customers makes buyers think "I'm nothing like them".
Instead, they recommend that you bring in two or three examples of customers and the tangible benefits they receive from your product. Plus, if you really want to show off some social proof, the best way to do it would be in a slide that shows the logos of companies that switched to your product from a competing product.
4. Be aware of your persona, and build a deck especially for them
As I’ve been sharing the Oyster deck week after week with potential customers, I’ve realized that each of them have a different perspective that they bring to the conversation.
So why not build them all a unique deck?
There are lots of articles that advocate for a unique deck for each ICP and/or a customizable deck based on the demographics of the person you’re pitching to. Here’s one way to think about it:
C-level executive: Tell a high-level strategic story like the now-famous Zuora deck and use Andy Raskin’s framework as your guide.
Budget Holder (VP/Director level): Make your case with the pragmatic framework laid out by Pete Kazanjy in Founding Sales.
Practitioners (or a technical buyer): Rely on defining your category and executing a well-framed demo. You can flex this depending on the size of your prospect, as well.
5. Keep it under 15 slides
Not only does a long deck make for a long presentation (with you talking for most of it), it’s also hard to train a sales team to speak uniformly about a loooong deck.
Over to you
What are your go-to moves for putting together a great sales deck? Anything from the list here you would agree with / disagree with / want to add?
About this newsletter …
Each week, I share playbooks, case studies, stories, and links from inside the startup marketing world. If you enjoy what’s in this newsletter, you can share some love by hitting the heart button at the top or bottom.💙
About Kevan
I’m a marketing exec who specializes in startup marketing and brand-building. I currently lead the marketing team at Oyster (we’re hiring!). I previously built brands at Buffer, Polly, and Vox.
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