Death by Powerpoint - or not?

Was Steve Jobs right?

We all miss the charisma that Mr. Jobs exuded during his product launch love-ins such as the famous iPhone announcements.When Steve did present he only used a few slides. During the lead up he would talk and "story tell" and work the audience into a frenzy. Each slide was simple, clean, and elegant -much like Apple's overall branding message. I don't recall seeing any bullet points - if there was text - it was a short impactful message that he expanded on and punctuated it in a very confident and unique manner.

Let's face it, sales people are not CEO's and all don't work for cool companies like Apple. We are the front line to the customer (and prospective customer) and we constantly make our "pitches" using our PPT Decks. (Powerpoint Presentations for those not up on the PP lingo) because that's what we have done in the past. We present what our marketing departments deliver to us (with some augmentation). In many cases we are the marketing department as well as sales - so we essentially build our own decks.

We recently presented to a new client and prior to the meeting decided to distill our 48 slide PP Prez. down to 8 slides. This was extremely tough - as you can imagine as we agonized over which slides would stay, produced new slides that summarized 10 others, and so on. The presentation went extremely well - but what was particularly interesting was - as we kicked the meeting off we informed our clients that our usual PPT Deck was 48 slides but we had reduced it to 8 slides just for them - to which they both sighed and said "Thank You - we appreciate that" and we all shared a laugh.

The most interesting comment after the presentation was the client asking - "would you mind emailing us the 48 slide deck for reference?" - which I agreed to do along with an electronic version of the 8 slides.

Perhaps this is a method we can use for future presentations - present the concepts and benefits in 10 slides or less - but have the complete Deck as a backup. We do our own version of "Steve" with a creative front end - and follow it up with the complete Deck so the client has something to read on the next flight.

Death by Powerpoint is a great moniker as in many cases - it is true - 60 slides are the norm these days. If we can reduce the deck down to 20% of the original. This gives us more time with the client - discussing issues, answering questions etc, versus powering through the entire deck without time for qualification.

What a concept - spend more time with the customer understanding their needs.

Great read: http://www.amazon.com/Death-Powerpoint-Michael-Flocker/dp/B000WCTNF4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1348779463&sr=1-1&keywords=death+by+powerpoint

Never Cold Call

I recently read Frank Rumbauskas's book - you guessed it (Never Cold Call) and I must admit it is an interesting read for sure. For reference:  https://www.nevercoldcall.com/

Sales people are always looking for methods to avoid cold calling and Frank does a good job in supporting his methodology that only old fashioned sales guys (or their dinosaur sales managers) are still cold calling. He has plenty of supporting evidence that cold calling is a total waste of time. At best it yields an 8% success factor and is a practice that continues to live on - almost as a business tradition. "It's what we've always done" most sales managers will say.

I have signed up to Frank's newsletters and I receive an email once a week on "horror" stories on how some sales people have been fired because they didn't make their monthly quota of cold calls. In one case a sales  person was always over plan at his company but because he didn't adhere to the sales manager's policy of excessive cold calling he was let go - "no exceptions" the sales manager said. I agree with Frank - in most cases sales people have to tow the line and set up a cold call facade by making the quota of "dials" to ensure they at least stay in their company's Salesforce.com analysis -  that incidentally  breakdown stats on every possible detail you can imagine.

Frank's point is (to paraphrase) "why spend the resources on a relatively useless exercise when you could be spending time more proven methods of networking and business development". Cold calling has been around for ages and I don't think it will evaporate overnight because of the Internet, however, getting found online and having the prospect call you is obviously a more preferred method of sales prospecting.

I have a sales colleague who works for a web agency and has not cold called once in the five years he has been there. His firm invests in creative marketing efforts including: advertising using Google Adwords, sends out direct mail to targeted prospects, frequently blogs, organizes networking events, and is involved in community outreach by sponsoring charitable organizations. Every morning he has at least 2-3 leads from companies that are interested in his company's services. Now granted not every lead is golden, but when my colleague calls them they are definitely interested in his company's services.

My take on this is that our respective marketing departments need (at least) to launch continuous online marketing initiatives that are designed to make the phone ring - at our end. If you are in a B2B scenario where marketing resources are extremely thin - then explore the agency route as there are several alternatives available to promote your brand online - including: Google, Linked in, Facebook, and Twitter to name a few.

I do like Frank's motto - Never Cold Call - whether or not we will see cold calling eliminated in our sales lifetime is anyone's guess. However, I kind of like the idea of calling a prospect (back) and confirming an appointment time rather than wasting time calling cold prospects and having to follow an introductory phone script.