5 slides to use in sales calls
In this week’s newsletter I will show you five slides that I use in my sales calls to help with discovery or to explain a part of our offering.
Today we work in a world where the vast majority of our customer interactions are digital.
Gartner predicts that by 2025 80% of the buyer journey will be digital - so we have to assume that for most of our synchronous interactions the customer will be on a video screen in front of us.
“Discovery” calls can feel like interrogations - whether done by an SDR or an AE.
“How does this work"?”
“Why is that a problem?”
“What have you tried before?”
For the customer it feels like they are being shot at by a question machine gun.
I find that by flashing up a very simple slide with a graphic that I have drawn to explain what I am asking and why helps the customer to understand more easily, and gives them a reference point to think through their answer.
Here are five simple templates I work from.
The process
So much of business is a journey.
The way things were, to the way they will be.
I use a simple set of arrows and put a word under each.
Let’s say I wanted to talk about the shift to remote selling - I might have in-person, pandemic and virtual listed under each arrow.
This simple graphic allows me to explain what we’re seeing, and enquire if the customer sees a similar trend.
The comparison
As a seller you are a guide for your customer.
Option A versus Option B
One year versus three years
One module versus a platform
It can be easy to drop all of this information into a table or document - but for a video meeting that level of detail is hard to consume.
Instead I use very simple bar charts to illustrate some of the decisions that a customer might want to make as they compare different options.
I’m not making an actual graph with a detailed scale - just large rectangles with a representation of the differences to frame the discussion.
The graph
Customers find it very helpful to understand trends in their industry or their usage of products.
You might have a graph showing rates of inflation over time, or their product adoption by different teams.
A graph tells a story, and gives you the ability to tell that story to your customer with the image as a backdrop.
Pie charts are OK, but line graphs or barcharts introduce time as a variable which brings the story to life.
Relationships
Customers are interested in two types of relationships - teams and technology!
Teams are org charts - either in their own company, your company, or a mixture of both.
For my key customers I always build out a simple org chart of who I know (or want to know) in their company and show this on the call. It validates that I am right, or more likely, I get corrected and can fill in the blanks.
Technology is architectural diagrams - but not super complex ones built by a solution architect. I think of simple concepts that show how systems might interact with each other or data might flow.
As an example - for many years I worked for an early cloud anti-virus company, and I used to draw this picture to show how email flowed into one of our “Towers” and through five different scanners before being sent onto a customer’s network.
Overlaps
The final simple slide is to show the overlaps between two concepts - you’ll know it as a Venn diagram from school.
I use these to show how what I know about the customer’s company or industry overlaps with what I know about our company, our solutions, our partners, our other customers.
This allows me to demonstrate my unique perspective and that I have some insight that the customer cannot get from anywhere else.
Five simple slides
I have these five templates in a single deck, and I’ll copy and make small edits before each customer call so they are relevant to this customer’s business.
I don’t ‘present’ them, they are there as a backdrop, just as if I would have drawn on a whiteboard in a meeting room.
“Sarah, while you are answering that, let me just flash this graphic up as it may help guide what you are explaining…”
So that’s it, until next week!
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