https://medium.com/firm-narrative/want-a-better-pitch-watch-...
Year earlier, same author, same story, different source claimed. It’s like this guy is plagiarizing himself?
The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
161–170 of 171 posts
Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Oh come now. Subscription software is simply a system by which software developers can ensure a continuous revenue stream, independent of the value of any ongoing development they do.
On the other hand, traditional licensing provides an incentive for companies to hold back feature enhancements and bug fixes to encourage users to pay for an upgrade to the next version.
And yet the user still has the chance to make an informed choice as to whether to splash the cash for that feature or not.
Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
With all due respect, I disagree. No business in the world needs another product or solution. No business needs a subscription-based business to thrive. Nor does every business need to do inbound marketing to survive as well. Plenty of businesses thrive without it. What Zuora and Hubspot (and many others have done) is use the same principles as religion to sell an ideology to their potential customers - an ideology t…
You guys are on the same page. Heck, the article even uses the term "Promised Land", that evokes thoughts of heaven/hell in most, I would say.
There are similarities in the language - yes we could say that Raskin's promised land is my model's heaven.
But there is a major and important difference.
Raskin's model postulates that the promised land (heaven) should be the point of the whole story. For him, the whole story should be geared towards selling the promised land. (look at his other articles, he states that the promised land aka heaven is the most important part of any story).
But this is wrong.
Heaven (Raskin's promised land) is the same for most businesses operating in the space. For example, if you sell B2B the heaven you'll be selling is the same as every other business in B2B - "more money".
What these businesses are actually selling is a new doctrine. That is the point of the story - to sell a new way of thinking.
Hubspot sold the doctrine of "inbound marketing". Their heaven (promised land) is more clients and more money.
Zuora sells the doctrine of "subscription economy". Their heaven is the same as Hubspot's.
Drift is selling the doctrine of "conversational marketing". Their heaven is the same as the other two.
David Allen is selling the doctrine of "getting things done". His heaven (promised land) is "more productivity" and this is the same as every other productivity coach in the world.
What enables these businesses to distinguish themselves from each other and their competitors is not the promised land (because it's the same as virtually everyone else's) but their doctrines.
My model is a more accurate explanation of what is happening. That's important because we use models to recreate them for our own situations - you need an accurate model in order to do it right.
As Dharmesh Shah himself put - their success came from creating a quasi-religion of "inbound marketing".
This is how this model views it - through the lens of religious and other ideological story-telling, and it more accurately fits what these companies have done.
Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#164They just reinvented Monroe's Motivated Sequence.
Thanks for this - the writeups on Monroe's Motivated Sequence help me understand why this deck works, and this deck helps me understand Monroe's sequence (without this deck, it I came across most of the writeups on the the sequence, I would have ignored them because they illustrate it so poorly)
Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#165>Zuora came up with the phrase “subscription economy” to name the trend in which buyers increasingly choose recurring service payments over outright purchases. It's not a trend where buyers choose recurring payments, but where companies only offer services through recurring payments.
In the enterprise world, many companies prefer recurring payments (opex). Reasons include...It's risky to invest large sums early on in a project without knowing the outcome. Also easier to get approvals for a smaller recurring payment than a single, large sum
Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#166>Zuora came up with the phrase “subscription economy” to name the trend in which buyers increasingly choose recurring service payments over outright purchases. It's not a trend where buyers choose recurring payments, but where companies only offer services through recurring payments.
A trend rarely happens on only one side of the demand-supply axis. There is definitely a trend towards subscriptions, especially for SMBs, but enterprise and individuals as well. It's so much easier to pay a monthly or yearly fee then up front, especially for companies - both in terms of cashflow , accounting practices and stability. Some companies has gone that route that have customers on both sides of the aisle -…
Heck - even HPE are selling HW for a monthly bill based on actual consumption.
Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
He is just grumpy and doesn't like the term, for whatever reason.
No one knows what the hell you are talking about with the word "deck."
It comes from "slide decks", because not too far long ago, presentations were made with actual 35mm transparencies which were slid into a projector, and were carried in decks.
Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#168Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#169Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it's an interesting question if Adobe is going to hurt their channel of new users with this.
When my kid wanted to do animated vector graphics, I looked at the options. There was a $22/mo subscription option with Adobe, and there was a competitor whose product I could buy outright for $30. I went with the competitor. Two months and 10 projects later, my kid has moved on to other interests. I ended up saving $14 over those 2 months. In fact what would have happened is I would have paid for 4 or 5 months of su…
What was the competing product?
Re: The greatest sales deck I've ever seen (2016)
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Most sales people I know pull from existing corporate collateral then tweak for particular opportunities. The reason is that good pitch decks can be excruciatingly hard to write. Writing includes the storyline (obviously) but also details like PowerPoint formatting. Relatively few sales people have the time or experience to do this from scratch.
I'd love links to some resources on how to make a great sales deck if you could share some
Actually the OP is an excellent reference. Story-telling is a powerful rhetorical device. That said, you can't apply it blindly. You need to think about things like who is your audience and what punches their buttons. Here are two examples:
* If you are selling to techies it helps to show though-provoking technology (demo or striking concepts) very early to catch their attention. Business value may or may not have much impact.
* If you are selling an internal project to corporate execs it's common to have enough on the first two slides so that you can make the pitch successfully even if the conversation diverges from your agenda in the first few minutes. I would also ensure that they can read out how it will enhance their careers/position in the company pretty easily.
Figuring out what to say in a pitch is an old problem that many people have worked on. The ancients had a surprisingly good grasp on solutions. It's worth glancing at what they had to say [0] along with modern views.
[0] https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/classical-rhetoric-1...