The Most Critical Content in Any Pitch Deck

These days the tech marketplace is not lacking for ideas on how to structure your sales pitch. The sequence of themes shown in the image at the top of this article provides a good enough example, and I've cited one or two other models in prior columns, including the Storyline Arc popularized by Firebrick Consulting.

But somehow, many founders, CEOs, marketers and sales teams still manage to miss the mark in their sales pitches, with the result that they can lose their audience within the first few minutes, after which it is difficult to build credibility.

The place that I find most crucial for grabbing your prospect's attention is within the first five or at most ten minutes - in other words, within the first few slides of your "story". Following Simon Sinek's notion of "Start with Why", you need to explain in clear terms why you do what do, and particularly how you help customers to solve painful, sometimes intractable problems that have frustrated them for years.

Using the sequence described above, you have to get them to sit up and take notice by the time you move from the big change (step 2) to why they should care (step 3).

Executives no longer give much credence to the stats you might cite about a multi-billion dollar TAM that your favorite market research firm claims is just around the corner. What you must do is dramatize the problem you are helping customers to fix, in a visceral manner, but without hyping it.

• Tell them a war story about a company you are engaged with that is struggling to cope with the current problem; they don't need to have solved it yet, it's sufficient that you can paint a picture that you know they will be able to relate to because of the similarity of the problem facing your prospect's organization. This means that you need to have done a bit of prior homework beforehand. What you are doing thus far is establishing your credibility as one who understands the problem and why it needs to be addressed. If you tell this war story effectively, you also establish empathy - "we understand the problem" - and make it safe for your prospect to own up to their own predicament.
• If you're fortunate enough to already have a customer that is solving the intractable problem, or has solved it, then you can describe the situation in detail, taking care not to do any indiscreet shaming. If necessary, you should anonymize the critical information - for example, conceal the name of the company, and/or of the individuals you are working with in it.

But what's important is that by the time you decide to show them the better way (step 4) you have grabbed their full attention and got them nodding, or even giving each other embarrassed looks. One sign that you have really registered with your audience is when they actually own up to the problem and ask what you can do to help them.

At this point, it's imperative to resist jumping into 'product demo' mode - much better to let them vent, or go into more detail about how they are experiencing their pain, what they've tried to do to solve it, why earlier attempts haven't (quite) succeeded, and so on. Among other advantages, this part of the session allows you to begin building the business case for your prospect to take action, so it is critical to resist jumping into "closing" mode too quickly.

On the other hand, if you don't pay sufficient to engaging them at a visceral level, you might find yourself dealing with one or more in your audience who are fidgeting, interrupting with impatient-sounding questions, or simply checking out.