How to create the perfect sales preso deck

​It happens all the time: You book a meeting with a hot new prospect, and they want to learn all about your company. 
 
Time for the PowerPoint deck. 
 
Only yours sucks. 
 
Sound familiar? 
 
There is so much riding on the quality of that deck. We can’t stress it enough. 
 
And so, in this article, we’re going to give you some surefire pointers and tips to craft that killer presentation deck which ostensibly “tells the prospect about your company,” but which really “helps you close the sale.” 
 
This is not a website
 
We recently worked on a deck like this for one of our clients; they had a first draft which they shared with us. It felt like a website. Which is understandable: they’d copied-and-pasted lots of pages from their existing website into PowerPoint to make the deck. 
 
That might seem like a good idea, but it’s a mistake. A well-designed website acts like… a website. That is, it offers the visitor various options they can choose from (pages, links, buttons), so they can learn about your company and its offerings at their own pace and in their own style. 
 
If you take all those various pages and drop them into PowerPoint, you’ll have a mess. While you can certainly “nudge” a website visitor along via things like sub-pages and even bifurcated home pages (we wrote an entire article on this topic), you can’t control the narrative anywhere nearly as tightly as you can in a slide deck. 
 
That’s not a limitation. That’s an advantage.
 
Their story and yours
 
A PowerPoint deck has Slide 1, and then Slide 2, and so on. You control what the viewer sees, and when. It’s totally granular. 
 
With that in mind, think of what you want to get across. 
 
The usual knee-jerk reactions are: “Tell them what we offer! And why it’s better!” 
 
Ennhhh. 
 
Flip the conversation. Make this about them. Make it about their pain-points, their day-in-the-life problems, the issues they need solved yesterday. 
 
This doesn’t take very long—or many slides. It can be a series of provocative “can-you-relate” questions.
 
You can see where this is going. You’re building up the problem, specifically so that your company appears (in “Act Two”) as the solution. 
 
And since you have slide-by-slide control of the narrative, you can (totally unlike a website) build suspense.
 
Imagine a single slide which reads: 
 
“How can you do that?” 
 
Let that sit on screen for a while. Let ‘em chew on it. You can click to the next slide when you’re good and ready. 
 
Then you can get into the stuff about your own company. It’s Act Two. 
 
This is certainly a case of less-is-more. Select—curate—the vital few wow-facts about your company that you can present in just a couple of slides. “Name-drop” big-name clients you’ve served. (Show logos!) Tout the biggest numbers. Perhaps you have one great sound-bite-style quote to show, either from a client or the press. Use it. The point is to establish as much credibility as possible, as quickly as possible. 
 
And then—again, keeping it short—wrap it with the “Q&A” slide. This is where you’ll stop clicking through PowerPoint, and get to the real business of answering the prospect’s questions, and closing the sale. 
 
Go modular
 
Here’s a great thing about PowerPoint. It’s not a one-off oil painting. It’s a basic computer file that’s saved on your hard drive (or in the cloud, whatever). Thing is, as with any computer file, you can easily “Save as…” to create an alternate version. 
 
Some guidance: Create the biggest version of your deck first. Because it’s always easier to cut than to add. Indeed, you might not ever even use that full-blown version. Not a problem. It’s like a repository for all your best stuff—a “master file.” As new opportunities/sales calls arise, simply “Save as…” and cull the parts you don’t need. 
 
Examples: “Mission and vision” slides are snoozers for prospective clients, but they’re valuable for potential new hires. Specific “client success stories” might work better for some prospects than others, depending upon the alignment of the situation. And some might be eliminated altogether if, say, that prospect can only give you a half hour, and you want to save as much time for the Q&A as possible.
 
Get help
 
We know about this stuff because we work on these types of assignments all the time. Need help with that crucial company-intro sales deck? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help you out. 

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