Differentiate or Die: The World’s Best B2B Tech Presentation

Bob McDonald: Hi, this is Bob McDonald, and welcome to Differentiate or Die, the Firebrick Consulting podcast series that focuses on the keys to great positioning. On this edition, Firebrick founder Bob Wright and I are going to be talking about the best sales presentation in the world. Bob, at Firebrick you have now positioned over 400 companies, and every year we’re adding to that list. You have seen sales presentations of all types, all sizes, and all levels of effectiveness. What does the best presentation look like?

Bob Wright: Bob, that’s a great question, and I see this all the time. When somebody wants to talk to me about positioning, I say, “Send me over your corporate or sales presentation.” Real quickly, I can tell whether you have a positioning problem or not. The best sales presentation in the world is a fundamental shift from the typical sales presentation, which is all about the company. You’ve seen these before: all about the features, all about the product, all about the company. The best sales presentation in the world shifts that model from a product-centric conversation about how the product works to a buyer-centric conversation about why the product matters.

Bob McDonald: So where does that best presentation start? What’s the material at the beginning, in contrast to information about the products and the company?

Bob Wright: The best presentation in the world starts with the buyer and the problem, and introduces the company at the back end. But let me walk you through the typical B2B tech presentation that I see all the time. Slide one: here’s our great product for the cloud and mobile world. Slide two: here’s our great platform. Slide three: here’s our great monitoring feature. And don’t forget, we have some really cool analytics, because we’re now a data company. Slide five: here’s some stats to back up why we’re so great. Then the cool screenshots slide, the requisite logo splash slide, and always a slide with the executives and their cool company, because they’ve got a company dog. And slide ten is the call to action: you’d be crazy not to buy our great product from our great people.

Bob McDonald: We’ve seen a lot of presentations like that. And it’s interesting that when a company has hit a rough patch, it doubles down on that model — the amount of product information in the first-call deck is off the charts, isn’t it?

Bob Wright: And buyers aren’t drinking the Kool-Aid anymore. A glazed look has set in with buyers seeing these types of presentations. Think about a typical chief information security officer, a CIO or even a CFO. How many tech vendors are trying to reach them every single day with boring presentations and blah-blah-blah language, all about their features and how great their company and product are? It’s just not working anymore.

The flow of the best sales presentation

Bob McDonald: Okay, you’ve taken us through the bad example. Take us through the sequence of the best sales presentation, so we can get a sense of the flow.

Bob Wright: The best sales presentation begins with the buyer: naming the big change or market dynamics that are causing that buyer a multimillion-dollar problem. Slide three says: you’re going to lose your job, because this problem is going to get worse. Next, you build an argument that the traditional approaches to solving this problem — including doing nothing, or going with your competitors — will no longer work. Then there’s a shift to the buying criteria. Slide five: where do you have to move to? I’ve got to move to the promised land, from this state to that state, and the only way to do it is by setting up the buying criteria. Slide six: what do you have to do to fix the problem? Here are the five or six buying criteria — the characteristics or elements that need to be in place — to solve that multimillion-dollar problem.

Bob McDonald: And we still haven’t gotten to product features.

Bob Wright: That’s correct. The first part of the deck builds a case that there’s a multimillion-dollar problem: naming the problem, showing the promised land — what it will look like if you move from this state to that state — and setting up the buying criteria in the company’s favor.

Bob McDonald: What’s next in the flow?

Bob Wright: Then you introduce the company. Slide eight is: here are three or four reasons customers exactly like you choose us. That’s what we call the pillars — typically three value statements or headlines. Slides nine, ten and eleven are the evidence: we map the features and functions to each pillar, showing why you can deliver on that unique value proposition. And then comes the call to action.

The market texture

Bob McDonald: Sometimes we also help the company develop what we call the market texture. Can you talk about the role of that in the best sales presentation, versus what we’d typically see — a very complex product architecture slide?

Bob Wright: One of the most powerful slides in the back of the world’s best sales presentation is what we call the market texture. If you set it up correctly, you’ve built a case that there’s a big change in the world causing a multimillion-dollar problem, that if you don’t solve it you’re going to lose your job, and here’s what you have to do to fix it. Then you introduce the company and say, here are the three or four reasons we can uniquely solve this problem. The buyer’s next question is inevitably: show me what it is. That’s where the market texture comes in. It’s a visual representation of your product, but it’s designed specifically to reinforce the positioning. Many of our clients can tell the whole positioning story from that one slide.

Bob McDonald: An important part of the process when we work with clients is getting them to shift to this model from their old approach — but also encouraging them not to make the presentation too big or too complex, and to know there will be follow-on meetings after introducing the concept.

Bob Wright: That’s correct. Typically we deliver a long version of the story, which is 18 to 20 slides, and a short version, which is nine to ten. But if you get really good at the story setup, you can tell the whole story in three slides.

Bob McDonald: Which sets up a framework for understanding a lot of other information about the company and its products — but that comes in follow-on presentations.

Bob Wright: I think that’s the cardinal sin I see a lot of B2B tech companies commit. They just start spouting off features, hoping one of them will catch the buyer’s eye. And if the buyer glazes over, they throw more features at them, until at some point the buyer says, “Oh, that’s the feature I’m really looking for.” That model just does not work anymore. What’s more effective is providing the context for all the complexity of the features and functions that sit underneath.

Bob McDonald: You’ve been listening to Bob Wright, founder of Firebrick Consulting, talking about the best sales presentation in the world. Thank you for joining us for this edition of Differentiate or Die. We invite you to listen to all our podcasts on the Firebrick Consulting website, firebk.com. For Firebrick, this is Bob McDonald signing off.