The Bad Sales Deck That Worked

My fellow Lion Karl loves to tell the story from his sales days about The Bad Deck That Worked. The person brought in before him to lead sales, let’s call him Ron without meaning any offense to any actual Rons, had a strong set of industry contacts and was willing to go out on the road to get meetings with those good prospects. As a result, he sold things. He was successful.

When it came time to scale their sales, the company hired a team of Karls and said “do what that guy does.” Ron showed them the slide deck that “performed” so well, and then sat back to “manage” the team. The deck took about an hour to present and was so text heavy that you’d have to shrink the font to fit it in the freight elevator. 

Then, the team shadowed Ron on actual sales meetings; events Ron referred to as presentations rather than meetings because few other than Ron got a word in edgewise. The plan was for the whippersnappers to “replicate Ron’s success.” Karl reports watching people fall asleep multiple times during Ron’s presentations. Nevertheless, Ron had sold in the past using this process so it would surely scale easily and yield results in perpetuity. 

Sleeping dogs are sweet, but not what you want your prospects to resemble in the midst of your pitch.

Karl did NOT present that deck (using some careful language to assure his boss and Ron that he was “replicating just what Ron did.”) but quickly generated a huge book of business without it. 

The sales deck was not the key to Ron’s success, and replicating it was not how that company can scale. 

Sales is an intimate process. When humans are speaking directly to each other we pick up on authenticity. We know when someone is just reading from a script. The salesperson needs to find their own authentic way of speaking and responding. 

So why create sales enablement tools like decks? What should they be?

Yes, you should create sales decks. The deck is a tool to bring up past success and to guide the new sales person. They should not recreate the wheel. Here are three “shoulds” for deck-making.

Number one: They should be short. You need to leave the sales person and their audience time to interact. There needs to be questions and answers and “I’ll get back to you on that.”

Number two: They should spur conversation. Structure content to make space for questions that reveal the particular needs of the audience. 

Number three (and top of mind for the business): They should protect the brand and messaging strategy. Sales people, bless them, when left on their own will create very questionable-looking content for themselves. It hurts the company overall if the customer is looking at material that does not reflect the hard work and deep consideration of the marketing team. 

Decks are not the be-all. These sales folks need tools for ongoing engagement. Lion’s Way clients are selling big ticket business tools; they don’t sell in one meeting. They need to talk to multiple people in the prospect organization. We need to equip them for security, business, compliance, and other specialized concerns.

These principles underpin how Lion’s Way thinks about sales enablement (as does Karl’s experience selling B2B tech). But we want to support your initiatives and insights. What do you need to scale your sales?