The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen | Hacker News Reader

The Greatest Sales Deck I’ve Ever Seen

medium.com

I found it entertaining, if not a bit off-puting, how the blog article follows a similar sales tactics as the slide deck itself.

The mythical mentorship lunch imparts knowledge over sauce-stained notes leading to the biggest deal ever. Oooh... ahhh...

It’s sad that our primate brains respond so well to it. As an engineer I even hate it a little bit. But if you’re customer facing you have to embrace storytelling, and that requires finding the thesis statement about why the world needs your product. And you won’t find that in your Feature list.

Actually the thing that really amazes me is that you can only basically tell people ONE thing. Try to communicate two things and they hear neither. I don’t care how many slides, or how many salespeople, or how many people work in your marketing department. The difficulty level of successfully communicating one single idea to your prospective customers is just way higher than you would ever think is reasonably possible.

I think that’s why pitches that just constantly reinforce a single simple concept: “THIS is how you need to do business now” are more likely to reach the target audience and make an impression.

I even hate it a little bit

In fact the article makes me want to puke. The deck doesn't impress me, as it's filled with the same kind of fluff sales guys drive me crazy with when they try and pitch to me. It doesn't help that I dislike subscription billing, preferring to buy things and own them. I'm not convinced Zoura's promised land is the way of the future - I think it's just a stop along the way.

That ranted, I do have to admit there are some good general tips here and the high-level approach outlined by the author makes sense.

A relative of mine who was rather famous European politician said this to me when I asked him what makes a campaign successful. To succeed in politics you should have ONE central point, otherwise nobody will remember what you stand for.

had he said there were multiple important things for a successful political campaign, I would not have remembered that conversation.

John Alsop, who supposedly popularized the word "egghead", also formulated "Alsop's Law of Politics": In politics it is important to say "most oranges are round, and sound as if you mean it. Alsop managed one of Eisenhower's campaigns in Connecticut: Eisenhower, of course, had the advantage of running against Adlai Stevenson, who was unable to keep from going on to say that actually oranges are not really spherical, that though generally round they are elongated in one direction, then there's the thickened area around the stem etc.

(Alsop also said "The eggheads are all for Stevenson, but how many eggheads are there?")

(2016)

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