Key Scenarios for Narrative 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.

While you’ll iterate your slide deck continually, in alignment with your sales narrative and feedback from the market, there are some particular things you should keep an eye out for in certain sections.

The Problem and Who Has It

Starting with the problem section is helpful to your sales deck in the same way it helped start off your larger sales narrative: if the person to whom you’re presenting, when shown the problem your solution addresses, says, “Huh, I actually don’t have that problem,” then delightful! You’ve saved yourself and them the trouble of presenting a solution that doesn’t fit their business pain.

Of course, even better if you didn’t get all the way to the presentation before realizing that key piece of data (more on that in Early Prospecting. But better late than never to save your and your prospect’s time.

This section of your deck is a great place to document not just the problem that you’re seeking to resolve, but also other validators of that problem and its importance. This could be things like stats from industry analysts—for TalentBin, these slides address the extremely low unemployment rate of technical, creative, and healthcare talent—press clippings, and so forth. That way, you’re not only further describing the problem but showing that many others agree that it is a problem.

Consider the following problem statement slide made when TalentBin was first getting into the healthcare space. The following slide documents the pain that recruiters trying to hire doctors and nurses have in a low-unemployment environment.

Figure: Problem Statement Slide with Pain Points

Source: TalentBin

This can be done via anecdotal examples (or anecdata) as well.

Figure: Problem Statement Slide with Clips of Real-World Examples

Source: TalentBin

Below is a good slide demonstrating the problem case that e-commerce providers face in the poor conversion rates of mobile shopping.

Figure: Specific Problem Statement for Mobile Shopping Conversion Rates

Source: TalentBin

The Cost of the Problem

As with the problem section, the cost section is a great place to make the case not only that this problem exists for your target audience, but that it’s a costly one that merits resolution. And as before, this is a good time to trot out validated metrics from studies, analysts, press, and so forth, and to generally cover the various ways that the problem in question is creating business issues for people like your prospect.

As you trot these out, it’s best to append metrics to each, as possible, to allow for at least a directional notion of the actual dollars-and-cents cost of these problems, ideally in a way that can be applied to the business you’re addressing. That might look like ~Y cost per manager, per month. Z deals per month not won, which, with your average contract value, would be ~$A per month in foregone revenue and, with your fifty sales reps, adds up to ~$50 x A per month in foregone revenue. Make it easy to understand the ongoing cost the prospect is encountering.

Existing Solutions and Their Challenges

Slides on existing solutions are a bit of a tightrope walk. On the one hand, it’s typically a good idea to stay away from talking about the competition unless prospects bring it up themselves, so baking that into the core of your presentation can be dicey. However, in the case where existing solutions are pervasive—and if you’re selling a new, upstart solution, there will generally be “market standards” that everyone is familiar with—then it can be good to address them directly. It helps you take control of framing how you’re different from the existing solutions, what their shortcomings are, and how you surmount those.

At worst, if, for whatever reason, you find out from discovery questions that your prospect doesn’t use these standard solutions, you can choose to skip over those slides.

At a minimum, this could be a single slide that groups the existing solutions into buckets so you can address how you are not like the things sitting on the page—maybe with a headline identifying them and a summary subtitle of their key issues. In the case of TalentBin, traditional solutions include job postings on boards like Monster.com or CareerBuilder, resume search in resume search databases from, again, traditional job boards, talent search in professional networks like LinkedIn, and, for corporate organizations, working with professional service providers like staffing agencies.

For that reason, we had a couple slides on the particular challenges of LinkedIn Recruiter as relates to technical, creative, and healthcare recruiting—pairing those categories with our particular value propositions of Discovery, Qualification, Outreach, and Pipeline Management. Take the challenges LinkedIn Recruiter has around discovery: Software engineering, design, and healthcare talent often does a poor job of even having LinkedIn profiles, and certainly of embellishing them with proper skill information. As such, those profiles can’t be found by searching on LinkedIn Recruiter. This is a problem for recruiters, as demonstrated by the sparse results that come from a search for a particularly valuable skill or title like iOS Developer or Nurse Anesthetists. Moreover, because of the hundreds of thousands of recruiters using LinkedIn Recruiter, outreach to candidates via InMail is a decreasingly effective means of engagement, as demonstrated by the number of InMails technical candidates get weekly, and declining response rates. These points, of course, correlate to the key value metrics that clients are familiar with (which is something you will want to have converged on in your narrative construction)—in this example, directed at technical and healthcare recruiters, those metrics include talent pool richness, contact information density, and candidate responsiveness.

Keeping that extensibility mindset, use your best judgment as to how much of this information you’d like to have in your primary presentation. The rest can go into the appendix.

Below are some examples from the TalentBin sales deck.

Figure: Characterizing the Challenges Faced by the Industry Standard

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Existence Proof of the Challenge

Source: TalentBin

Figure: The Extension of the Challenge at Scale

Source: TalentBin

The next slide provides further implications of this core challenge, and another set of challenges around outreach and candidate responsiveness (another value bucket that will resonate with customers).

Figure: Additional Challenges for Outreach and Candidate Responsiveness

Source: TalentBin

If you have multiple segments, you can speak to that too.

Figure: Same Challenge, Different Segments

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Specific Example for Different Segments

Source: TalentBin

You can then provide even further extension of a common pain point that the client would recognize.

Figure: Further Concrete Details of the Specific Pain Point

Source: TalentBin

Wrap up with a summarization of these unit pains at a macro scale.

Figure: Summarize Individual Pain Points at a Macro Level

Source: TalentBin

There are a variety of ways to approach this, and varying levels to which you can dig into the challenges of existing solutions. But including at least some slides to frame your solution in contrast to existing solutions will be helpful in demonstrating why your product is so much better, and thus worth the investment.

What Has Changed

The worst sales meeting? It’s the one where the client actually had no clue what was being discussed but, because he didn’t want to admit that, just politely nodded along, committed to follow up, and promptly disappeared. Of course he disappeared. He never understood what was going on.

I find that the best way to prevent this is to include a section in your deck on what has changed in the market and how it impacts clients and created the opportunity for your solution. As you walk through it, with the help of a visual, you can check in on comprehension and agreement and confirm that the prospect is actually, indeed, following along and building consensus.

The TalentBin deck looks at how the process of finding talent online has changed, plotted on a timeline. This allows a quick (not deep! This isn’t a history lesson!) review of resume search and job postings, followed by profile search databases masquerading as professional social networks, and then talent search on the larger web. As you go through your version of this catch-up slide, you can make sure that the client is following you and is familiar with the market and the technology changes that have driven this new opportunity. If they are, fantastic! Applaud them for being students of the game, and move on. If they are not, dig in and make sure that they are on board with the required contextual information before progressing. Either way, you’re guaranteed to avoid a scenario where prospects blindly nod along to your presentation while they do email on the other end, totally not buying into your argument.

Figure: Example Catch-up Slide

Source: TalentBin

How Your Solution Works

We already looked at examples of these slides when we were discussing extensibility, so no need to do it again here.

I do want to add one point, though: I find it key to include a conceptual visualization of how your solution works—to clearly establish the correct understanding—even before you get into specific pain points and their associated solutions.

In TalentBin’s case, as so much flows from the aggregation of candidate profile data from across the web into a unified profile, it was very important to ensure that prospects comprehended how that process worked, or else they would have difficulty with the information that was built on this concept.

Figure: Conceptual Visualization of Your Solution

Source: TalentBin

Another way to help structure this high-level understanding is in contrast to other solutions in the market.

In TalentBin’s case, as I mentioned, most recruiters are very well aware of LinkedIn’s recruiting tools, especially LinkedIn Recruiter. Articulating that TalentBin is a recruiter-facing talent search engine and recruiting CRM like LinkedIn Recruiter, but where the database is the entire internet, really hits home for clients.

Figure: Visual Comparison with Your Competitor(s)

Source: TalentBin

Below is a how it works slide from the consumer finance company Affirm on how they work with e-commerce merchant partners, and how the payment flows work. Rather than hoping that the prospect understands the verbal articulation of how this payment flows this way and that, a nice diagram really nails the core concepts, so their sales staff can focus on the business value that then derives from this approach.

Figure: Conceptual Visualization From Affirm

Source: Affirm

Quantitative and Qualitative Proof of a Better Solution

Once you’ve made the case that existing solutions have problems—and that there are real opportunity costs of not solving them—the next step is presenting proof of your superior solution. If you’ve done a good job, you’ll make adoption of your solution look like a complete no-brainer by comparison. This should be done with both quantitative and qualitative means, but the overall goal is to answer one question, “Why you?”

When building this argument, I like to have proof of superiority bucketed by value proposition, the same way you likely bucketed pain points by value proposition. In your narrative, you keyed in on specific metrics that prospects track to gauge business success—this is where you can demonstrate how your solution impacts those relevant metrics.

This is also where you build your case for, “Why now?” The biggest challenge founders selling young products have is motivating any change at all. This is why you have to demonstrate a large cost or opportunity cost that the prospect is encountering every day that he doesn’t adopt your solution. These slides are the ones that really bring this point home. You’ll see below the crystallization of different types of opportunity cost related to TalentBin’s features, but you can also imagine a roll-up of these that succinctly states, “This is why this solution is so much better than what you’re doing. It’s a no-brainer to act on this now.”

Quantitative Proof

​important​Extensibility is key here. You can share the most basic proof of superiority for a set of key metrics in a single slide, or you can go deeper on each section. The goal is for customers to look at this information and agree that your solution, as measured along a particular value vector, is far superior to their status quo. You can achieve this with both granular and higher-level information.

It’s important that this information is presented clearly, as prospects are faced with a variety of potential solutions they could be implementing to various other problems in their business. One means by which prospects choose where to spend their time is by comparing potential return on investment—both money and time—between solutions. That is to say, you’re not only competing against other solutions to the problem you solve, but also solutions to different problems your prospect faces. Quantitative proof demonstrating the large magnitude of benefits—whether increased revenue, more hires, better quality of hires, reduced costs—flowing from your solution ensures your solution goes to the front of the line of things to spend time on.

Quantitative Examples From the TalentBin Deck

Figure: Superior Search Results Compared to Industry Standards

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Segmented Search Results Compared to Industry Standards

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Profile Availability Compared to Industry Standards

Source: TalentBin

The next slide contrasts enhanced candidate responsiveness via drip-marketing functionality with the opportunity cost of one-and-done candidate outreach:

Figure: Enhanced Candidate Responsiveness via Drip-Marketing Functionality

Source: TalentBin

The next slide compares enhanced candidate responsiveness via superior targeting and email content to InMailing and generic messaging:

Figure: Enhanced Candidate Responsiveness via Superior Targeting

Source: TalentBin

Next, contrasting recruiter time savings via automation to time cost of proper recruiting follow-up behavior without automation:

Figure: Recruiter Time Savings via Automation

Source: TalentBin

Figure: Drill Down on Recruiter Time Savings via Automation

Source: TalentBin

This slide compares a prototypical customer hiring funnel driven by TalentBin best practices with a LinkedIn InMail–driven funnel:

Figure: A Prototypical TalentBin Customer Hiring Funnel

Source: TalentBin

Qualitative Proof Examples from the TalentBin Deck

While quantitative proof is usually the most impactful for B2B sales cycles, qualitative proof points can be helpful as well—and together, they make for an excellent one-two punch that hits both the left and right brain of your prospect. Traditionally these qualitative points come in the form of customer success materials. Like with quantitative proof points, they should correlate to your value proposition buckets, but can do so at a level of granularity that is up to you. The best way to do this is to have good relationships with some early customers and offer to write the testimonials for them; then all they have to do is approve them. The argument is that being made famous as a “thought leader” is the quid pro quo for them, in addition to helping out a nice early-stage founder. Also, it helps to have good schwag like hoodies or T-shirts to send them. Or, shoot, a ~$100 dinner gift certificate for them and their significant others.

Here’s a customer success example of a one-woman show, focused on time-savings benefits:

Figure: Customer Success Example of Time-Savings Benefits

Source: TalentBin

This example focuses on the staffing vertical, specifically candidate discovery and contact-information density:

Figure: Customer Success for a Specific Vertical

Source: TalentBin

Company-Centric Proof Points

You can also throw in company-centric signifiers of why your solution is superior—perhaps because it has been covered by third-party reputation providers, like press or analysts.

This example of a Why We Are Legit slide is less about, “Aren’t we hot” and instead says, “See, you will be in good company when you partner with us, and we will be around for the long term.”

Figure: External Validation of Your Solution

Source: TalentBin

Many companies use a logos slide for this purpose. If you go that route, make sure to include examples of all the segments that you care about. In TalentBin’s case that was small to large business, and both commercial enterprises and staffing agencies. The goal is for the prospect to look at that list and say, “Ah, I see others like me. And I see others whom I aspire to be.” While you might be worried about getting permission to share this information with prospects, when you’re very early, and trying to go from 5 to 50 to 100 customers, you have bigger issues. Just make the slide, share it in live presentations, but don’t send it via email. Additionally, just bake publicity rights into your Master Service Agreement that customers agree to when they sign a contract. Most customers won’t review your MSA in detail, and poof, you have publicity rights. If they end up unhappy after the fact when their PR organization realizes, you can always remove the logos. In the meantime, though, use the social proof as wind at your back, and ask forgiveness instead of permission.

Figure: Customer Logos Slide

Source: TalentBin

Why This Will Be So Easy

While the monetary cost of your solution will of course be a topic of great interest to your prospect, so too will be the potential time cost required to implement it. Most of your prospects, especially the more sophisticated ones, will have experience being promised the moon, stars, and the sky by sales reps. But then when reality ensued, they were eventually faced with all kinds of delays and implementation headaches and so on, all of which blocked their ability to capture the promised return on investment. So they’re going to want to know: how do you make this easy? How do you make it such that they say, “Yes” and then magically everything proceeds from there?

Following are some examples of slides that speak to this, giving comfort to the prospect that not only will this be easy at the start, but that there will be lots of support and engagement all throughout their relationship with you.

Figure: Demonstrating Ease and Support

Source: Affirm

Figure: Additional Ease and Support

Source: TalentBin

It can even be as simple as something like the below slide.

Figure: A Straightforward Message of Support

Source: TalentBin

Pricing

As you go through your presentation, if you have qualified well and are drawing customers along, gaining their agreement throughout, they’re eventually going to want to talk financials. Having a slide that presents your solution’s pricing, and any potential variations, helps here, and also helps for when you send your slides along later for reference by the client.

If you have a variety of permutations but there’s one that you want to push clients to, just present that one. You can always bring up the other ones at another juncture.

Figure: Example Pricing Slide

Source: TalentBin

Appendices

One of the things you want to be mindful of when presenting is to not cover things that are unnecessary. If your solution integrates with a particular piece of software that only 10% of your customers use and you’ve decided to have a slide on it, don’t include it in the main deck. Put it in the appendix. Do you have a specific slide comparing your solution and a competing one that doesn’t need to be addressed with everyone? Don’t bring up the competition unless asked. Put it in the appendix. When the customer says, “So, how do you compare to XYZ?”—boom, you can flip right to it. But it won’t be in the main presentation to muddy things up and drain attention from your essential points.

As you execute more presentations, you will invariably find new cases that need their own appendix slides. I generally try to add an appendix slide anytime I have a question asked for a second time. It’s a 30-minute investment, and you know that at scale (doing dozens of these demos) you’re going to hear that question a lot. Having a slide with the relevant messaging at the ready ensures that you nail that response and impress the heck out of the prospect.

Have One Deck for Presenting, Another for Sending

When you’re putting your deck together, remember that there’s the one you present (along with an appendix that you pop into as necessary) and then there’s the one that you’ll send later. This is where content management and presentation solutions like Docsend, Showpad, and others can be helpful. You can have your full-on deck that you use for your live presentation and an abridged version to send along after the fact.

When you’re thinking about the one that you send, it can, and usually should, be a pretty heavily abridged version of your main presentation deck. A deck sent after the fact is not a substitute for incremental presentations to other stakeholders (more on this in Sales Pitches for Startup Founders but rather a reminder of the key topics that were covered. It can also be a teaser for other potential stakeholders with whom it gets shared, in the interest of driving further presentations. Moreover, sending your materials using something like DocSend or Showpad will allow you to see prospects’ interaction with your materials, something that is helpful in distinguishing between those who have more commercial interest and intent than others. For instance, did they spend time on the pricing slide? Did they send it to a bunch of other people who reviewed it?