What are your thoughts on how to put together a good sales meeting / presentation?

Coming in as a technical person who has had some sales experience I need to find resources to help educate my sales managers on best practices and how to practice “lean startup” practices (getting feedback, understanding customers needs, and shifting sales strategies). Here is the best post I’ve found so far on sales presentations, yet it doesn’t present a full story nor best practices keeping the customers “actively participating” customer development style.

http://www.bnet.com/article/how-to-create-an-effective-sales-presentation/313856

(I’m sure there has to be research on how to make sales presentations and meetings more effective)

Jeff

A friend told me about your website, and I’ve just read several of your posts – I absolutely like your site – great info here.

Not paying enough attention on Customer Discovery is one of the main problems affecting businesses today. Sadly, when facing a problem with customer delivery, most companies’ circumstances continue to worsen and losses continue. Here’s why: having invested so much money and effort, and with a full complement of staff on the ground, most companies refuse to go back to basics and start from scratch – or address the fundamental problem, namely, testing the product / service in front of customers.

If only businesses would follow the proper steps of a standard business model, many company flops, losses as well as customer and risks would be minimized or avoided.

It is simply really – your product or service must solve the customers’ problems or give them some benefits in a particular way. Now, if what your company offers is not aligned with what the customers want – your company is doomed to fail or lose a lot of money. It’s as simple as that.

Thanks again Steve for this post and captivating discussion here.

http://www.marsdd.com/buzz/video-detail.html?viddlerUrl=http://www.viddler.com/explore/marsdd/videos/74/

Especially never hire sales guys/head if CEO by himself was not able to crack a single deal in the open market – not from his circle of friends n well wishers.

Get a sales guys/head – make sure he understands the problem, product, market and the customer – have him do atleast a few sales before he is approved for hiring more into his teal. Else, the sales head focus will just be on hiring and missing all the targets with lame excuses – which can’t be tolerated/sustained after some time.

Sales team typically comes up with stupid silly excuses – either the marketing is not proper, well worst is the excuses on the product itself that its not ready etc etc stuff.

I think your recommendation on fire the sales team and understand the customer before hire anyone – is the appropriate action – to protect the startup from dying soon.

Thanks for the wonderful post!!

Dash

I saw this exact scenario happened at the last company I worked for. It was a start up company and we had a fully loaded executive staff and VPs and Chiefs of anything you can think of. The company was based in Southern California and our sales office was in Chicago . They were out marketing and selling when engineering wasn’t even close to having a functional product. Not only that, the first wave of alpha users were people connected to the CEO. Needless to say, they burned through millions of dollars and went out of business.

Such executive would come from sales background and align outbound marketing functions around the needs of sales and be held fully accountable. Things like product marketing might possibly go under product organization, though it might be hard to separate from its role in lead gen.

In all this means there will be two key executives in the company – one who will own making a product and the other in charge of marketing and selling the product. CEO needs to be hands on enough to manage and hold accountable each one, personally owning the Customer Discovery process.

Steve, what is your take on this setup?

The VP of Sales must (in the immortal words of Ronald Regan)

“Tear down that wall”.

The Berlin wall between Sales and Marketing creates the organization’s most easily accessible scape goat.

In the movie Glenngarry Glen Ross, Alec Baldwin summarized it this way, “The leads are weak??? You’re weak!!!”

Marketing often works most comfortably in the eco-chamber of their own world…. where all things said sound good and feel great. These messages get packaged and sent to sales who must repackage in the way the customer thinks and talks. I’ve done this countless times.

Its the Sales VP’s responsibility to get marketing in front of real customers and prospects and experience first hand how the message reasonates. Get them out of their eco-chamber and in the field. The message must be co-built, co-owned and customer driven.

Sales & Marketing need one goal and a service agreement. Marketing will deliver “X” leads based on “Y” criteria. From that Sales will deliver “A” meetings, “B” closings and “C” in sales.

A little basic accountability can go a long way.