Marketing that's sweeter than a chocolate Easter egg
Intermission: A bonus issue!
📬In this issue:
An excerpt from The Mehdeeka Method
Tips for working with sales teams
Tips for building sales decks
Hi Mehketeer,
I’m not going to lie. I didn’t prep an issue for this week. So here’s an excerpt from my book, The Mehdeeka Method, which I won’t count towards the season — I’m not cheating you out of reading my ramblings!
Despite the section I’ve selected for today’s excerpt being part of a list of suggested possible areas to focus on after the actual main piece of work (a product marketing playbook) is developed, I get asked about this section a lot! I’m actually working on wrangling this into a larger workshop offering, so if reading this piques your interest and you want to pilot the workshop while I’m refining it, definitely reach out to me.
Also available on the Kobo and Kindle stores, physical copies of the book are limited (but available to worldwide shipping!)
P.S. if you have already read the book I would love to hear what you think about it in the comments!!!!!!
Designing the sales pitch
You’ll likely have already identified the sales assets you’re going to produce as part of your initial outputs. The pitch itself is something that can be difficult to get your hands into.
Sales leaders can be very protective of it. I’ve heard, “You can’t possibly understand it unless you’ve had a sales target to hit”, which is a load of crap. Designing a pitch is a different skill to building rapport and talking during a sales meeting.
There are a lot of formats for a pitch, but there’s just as much that should go into the pre-pitch as there is the pitch. You’ll need to really get to know the sales structure in place at your organisation, why it is the way it is, and all of the maths and theory that goes into making that model work.
A sales-led team might have sales development reps (SDRs) and account executives (AEs), or business development reps (BDs). A product-led team might only have AEs. Your org might be heavily leaning towards outbound motions rather than inbound. Whatever it is, get to know it inside and out.
Once you’ve done that, take a look at their processes. Find the exact templates they’re using for outreach, email responses, and follow ups if they get to someone’s voicemail. Look at everything they’re using.
Find all the things they’re doing inefficiently. This could be:
Stereotyping and over simplifying customers as “all the same”,
Not doing a complete discovery process (where they uncover what problems the prospect is experiencing),
Not doing qualification,
Not actively listening to what the customer is saying,
Not asking enough questions during the pitch as an engagement strategy,
Not following up on things they said they would, or
Many, many, many more things!
You want to get the sales leader on your side for this, and the best way to position yourself is as an extra pair of hands to perform quality control. You’ll listen to call recordings, report back on what was good, and where things were a bit off the rails, make slight suggestions (e.g. why don’t we introduce this one question to qualification?) and give it all to the sales leader to implement and let them be the hero.
Your suggestions will not just be well-intentioned and helpful for sales, they’ll also represent your other stakeholders. What data points could sales capture that could feed back to marketing? Feed forward to customer success? Give product insight into market needs? Plant seeds for all of these.
Where changing a sales process usually falls apart is in asking sales people to just remember to do something. You need to bring the marketing side in (or sales ops or revenue ops – whoever is in charge of the CRM) to build out workflows, prevent sales people from converting a lead into an opportunity unless they’ve filled in all the fields, or whatever else you can do to get them to change their behaviour. Having sales leadership buy in will help push this as well and take the heat off you when they want to complain it’s more work for them.
So that’s the prep for before a pitch is done. What about during the pitch?
One thing I don’t see often enough is opening the pitch with a personalised summary of everything you’ve learned about the prospect during qualification, discovery, and any independent research, such as, “Based on our discussions and what you’ve told me, these are the [three] goals we’ll work towards.”
What you want to do is list specific goals they’ve told you about, limit your pitch to areas of the product that will contribute to those goals, and start tying your product to direct ROI outcomes that you can call back to throughout the pitch.
It doesn’t have to be three goals, it can be more or less, just keep it punchy.
To bring back our hypothetical product, let’s say during our discovery process we discovered the following about a prospect:
We’re talking to a great economical buyer, an operations leader.
They want to roll out to one team first and test adoption before rolling out to the whole company because they’re cost-sensitive.
The team they want to test on is well known to blow budgets because they bring in last-minute contractors to finish work on time, and they never account for contractors when they scope project budgets.
Currently, lots of teams have picked out their own solutions, but it’s a headache for accounting, and they want to get a lower per-user price by getting everyone on one platform.
They have a number of feature requirements, mostly based around security and user management, since they have 500 employees with steady growth.
The goals we can bring this back to are:
Run a time-bound pilot to validate the solution as quickly as possible.
Reduce their costs through
a) scoping projects more accurately and reducing need for contractors OR at least budgeting for them, and
b) getting them a more efficient per-user cost through one platform.
Notice there are a bunch of requirements and goals not mentioned. That’s because the more there are, the more watered down it becomes. You can address those other requirements later in the sales funnel.
Let’s also break down that first goal, run a time-bound pilot to validate the solution as quickly as possible. What we’re demonstrating with this is that we listened to them. We know they want to run a test, and they need an outcome. We’re going to design a pilot program for them, keep it to a clear time boundary, and not lock them into a 12-month contract. I know a lot of software companies don’t offer trials. This could be an exception you make for enterprise level clients, and only do it in exchange for a multiyear contract if they do decide to sign, make it worth it for both of you!
The pilot program could include extra training sessions, extraditing customer support requests, and a dedicated effort to identify and develop a power-user within the test team.
Show intention in what you put forward.
After goal setting, and starting with a big here’s why you’re here and why this presentation is worth your attention, we get into the more regular aspects of a pitch or demo.
The order I like* to pitch in is:
Goal setting (and getting confirmation on those goals),
About your company - if you can fit it all on one page, include your “as seen in” PR coverage, big customer logos, and any other riff raff like “headquartered in”. You might want to keep the customer logos out, and instead have templated slides that are customised to industries or other segments,
Your big, overarching value proposition,
A product breakdown, which could be one slide = one product or feature (of course, leading with value),
Any additional value propositions, like customisation of the overall platform or “universal” features, and “permission to play” stuff like data security,
What level of customer support or account management they’ll get,
How you’re going to drive user adoption or ongoing engagement,
ROI and hard numbers,
The price, and a reminder of everything that is included,
Implementation, including process, how much effort it’s going to be from their end, and timelines,
A launch plan (if you treat launch and implementation separately), and
A final reminder of the goals in slide one, and contact details of any relevant staff members.
*The way I like to do it is not the only way to do it and there are many pitching experts out there with different methods. You may need to try a few before you find the one that works for you.
Now, all of these should be made into a pitch deck, but not every slide should be presented. Creating this library of slides means your sales team can pick and choose what they want to present, and then they can send an extended version via email after the meeting that includes additional information that wasn’t important enough to present in the call.
This also ensures if the sales person did go a little off script or forgot to say something, that the followup materials have all of your key points in them.
Re-reading my own writing is weird
I will say this reads a bit differently taken out of the context of the 75% of the book that comes before it. While designing a pitch absolutely is possible without being a salesperson, the person building the pitch must actually immerse themselves in the lives of the sales people.
The top reason why decks aren’t used by sales people is because it was built by someone who didn’t bother to sit in pitches and understand the context it’s presented in. You have to do the leg work first. It’s not optional.
Want to read more excerpts? Here’s one on how to figure out what work you should be doing:
And for anyone who’s interested in how the book came about and the “build in public” side of making it, there’s the announcement post:
If I’ve convinced you to buy it, here’s the link again!
Technically available on Amazon worldwide but you have to buy it from your country’s local Amazon URL, just search The Mehdeeka Method (which annoyingly corrects to the Mehendi Method and you have to correct it.) Jeff Bezos why!! 😤
That’s it!
Goodbye
Kayla