Sales Presentations 101: The Must-Know Basics for Founders

Today’s Skill: Structuring a Sales Presentation

Have you ever gotten lost in the weeds, talking too much about your product while your prospect’s eyes glaze over? You’re not alone. A sales presentation can quickly turn into a monologue if you’re not careful. Then, when we lose the deal we think it’s because of price or a feature but a lot of time it’s because we made everything about our product and never tied it back to their problem.

A great sales presentation turns into a two-way dialogue. You’re helping the buyer see how your solution relieves their headaches.

Full disclosure: I realized putting this edition together that I could write for days on this skill. There is so much to presenting. So, this is the 101 version. I want to get you started in the right direction. When learning new skills, we have to get the basics down first!

Crawl, walk, then run.

With that in mind, below are the baby steps you can follow to keep your presentations focused, engaging, and impactful.

Step 1. Recap & Confirm What Is Important

What Founders Often Miss: They dive straight into “Let’s jump into our product” instead of reviewing the problem areas to focus on and getting “buy-in” that these are still accurate. When you do that, you can now focus on what’s important instead of clicking away at “features”

101 Skill: Start by recapping the big challenges and/or priorities they have at the beginning of the call.

By summarizing and discussing these upfront, you set the tone for a clear direction with the rest of the call.

Step 2. Tie Everything Back To Those Items

What Founders Often Miss: They overwhelm prospects with every single feature and speed through important items to make sure they show everything. You don’t need to show everything, only what matters to this prospect.

101 Skill: Create a story around their problems or priorities and how it is addressed with your product/service.

• Pick one of the important items.

• Use simple visuals or your product to demonstrate 1-3 areas where you help solve that specific problem. (By the way, check out this new AI that is incredible at making visuals from text. It’s called Napkin AI).

• Wrap that specific problem up and move to the next one.

There needs to be a beginning, middle and end. Only show what you need to show and move on.

Step 3. Make It Interactive

What Founders Often Miss: They talk at the prospect instead of with them.

101 Skill: This is a conversation, not a monologue.

• Ask questions to gain clarity on their problems so you can articulate the value when relating to your solution.

• Confirm they are understanding what you are showing and why.

• Continue to make sure they are tracking along.

If they aren’t talking, you are losing out on valuable insights. The presentation is for them, not you. When they are engaged it means they see value in what you can provide and are visualizing how this could fit into their world.

Step 4. Always End How You Started

What Founders Often Miss: They wrap up saying things like “Okay, so that’s our product, any questions?” and then don’t know where to go when the prospect says, “Nope.”

101 Skill: Recap what you discussed and get a response

• Go back over the main points of the call

• Confirm nothing was missed

• Ask an emotionally-driven question

We miss out on the opportunity to “gauge the temperature in the room” by not regrouping and not asking more meaningful questions. Try to get a reaction and figure out if you are well-aligned.

TL;DR: A Few Main Points

1. Surface the priorities: Lead with why they’re here and the important items that need to be addressed.

2. Tie their problem(s) to your solution: This isn’t a training session, make it engaging.

3. Make it a dance: There should be back and forth dialogue throughout.

4. Find out how they feel: Ask better questions to pry into what they are thinking.

5. Have Fun: There is value in your product. You can help them. Let them see your personality shine through in your presentation instead of trying to be overly scripted.

Action Item:

Pick one upcoming sales presentation and prepare by visually outlining the flow using the steps above.

Every skill takes times to learn and become natural. There will be adaptions along the way as you start to feel it out. Don’t overthink this. It’s a flowing and evolving process and will change slightly based on every conversation.

Be prepared with a foundation and it’ll give you confidence to create a collaborative experience for your prospects.

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