If I got one euro for every bad product/service sales presentation I saw, I could probably buy a three-year supply of books and a dishwasher. In my experience, the more technical the founder, the worse they are in describing what they really offer to their clients. There are usually two problems: the founder suffers from the curse of knowledge, and simply, cannot speak to the point, or focuses on irrelevant techies in the audience.

This post will help you get out of both of these traps with a simple metaphor: a hammer, driven nail, and the desired effect.

First, ask yourself a simple question that every founder knows the answer to:

What do you sell?

● someone employed in the tool shop would answer: hammers,

● someone selling CRM would answer: CRM,

● someone selling cold mailing would answer: sales leads,

● someone from the software house would answer: programmers,

● someone from the performance marketing agency would answer: support for Google Ads campaigns,

● someone from Casbeg would answer: Marketing and sales consulting for B2B companies.

Product features

Until this moment, everything is clear. Over time, however, argumentation evolves towards arguments based on product features:

● someone employed in the tool shop would answer: Red, two-kilogram hammers,

● someone selling CRM would answer: CRM in SaaS,

● someone selling cold mailing would answer: quality sales leads,

● someone from the software house would answer: experienced programmers,

● someone from the performance marketing agency would answer: support for Google Ads campaigns by Google certified specialists,

● someone from Casbeg would answer: Marketing and sales consulting for B2B companies (we don’t use arguments based on product features).

There are two problems with describing what you sell in this manner.

First of all: the client must guess how they benefit thanks to your product features. This is stupid because the salesperson is an interface through which the customer has to buy – and there’s a good reason why the best book about the usability of web interfaces is called Don’t Make Me Think.

The second problem is that the client stops listening in the middle of the sentence because the product features are all very (I mean very) similar. Each software house brags about the quality of their software and who experienced their people are. Each performance agency brags about Google certificates and prizes. Hardly anyone cares.

Value for the client

It’s much better to base the argument on customer values than on product features. So, developing our metaphor – instead of a hammer or a red, two-kilogram hammer, we sell a driven nail. Again, a few examples:

● someone employed in the tool shop would answer: hammers that effectively hammer nails,

● someone selling CRM would answer: CRM, which saves the time of salespeople and their managers.

● someone selling cold mailing would answer: sales leads only for decision makers,

● someone from the software house would answer: programmers who deliver software in the scope and time,

● someone from the performance marketing agency would answer: support for Google Ads campaigns, which generates a minimum of 500% ROAS,

● someone from Casbeg would answer: Marketing and sales consulting for B2B companies, thanks to which your business will grow profitably.

Business effect

This is a much better way to build sales arguments because the client doesn’t have to guess the benefits. Usually, building arguments this way, we will get the client to understand the value better which will translate into a higher level of engagement, eg. in the form of the questions they ask (in my experience, customers who ask more questions, convert better).

However, there is the second part of this argument which almost everyone forgets, the business effect that results from this benefit. It’s good to visualize it. Let’s go back to our examples:

● someone employed in the tool shop would answer: hammers that effectively hammer nails so that you can finally put a picture in your room, which your wife has been asking you to hang for months,

● someone selling CRM would answer: CRM, which saves salespeople’s time, so you can recover 15% of it, and direct it towards acquiring new customers,

● someone selling cold mailing would answer: sales leads only for decision makers, so that your traders will finally stop bouncing off from the secretaries,

● someone from the software house would answer: programmers who deliver software in the right scope and time so that you can collect the next funding pool based on the new product version,

● someone from the performance marketing agency would answer: support for Google Ads campaigns which generates a minimum of 500% ROI, so that you can finally increase the scale and profits of your business,

● someone from Casbeg would answer: marketing and sales consulting for B2B companies, thanks to which your business will grow profitably so that you will finally start to have weekends off.

This is an algorithm that allows you to explain most products, services, and startups. And what about the solutions for which the hammer-nail-consequences pattern doesn’t work? For these, we’re left with steroids, a pitch based on a metaphor:

“You can think of us as steroids for ____ , thanks to which ____ and ____.”

Sales pitch based on a metaphor

And again, to get the full understanding, we will use several examples:

● Amazon would answer: you can think of us as a steroid for small and medium-sized entrepreneurs in B2C e-commerce, thanks to which they can increase the scale of operations, and start selling on a much larger scale.

● any CRM would answer: you can think of us as a steroid for B2B / B2C traders, thanks to which they can remember everything and become measurable for their managers,

● any payment system would answer: you can think of us as a steroid for e-commerce, thanks to which they can improve their cash flow and business security,

● someone from Casbeg would answer: you can think of us as steroids for small and medium-sized B2B companies, thanks to which they can improve their revenues, profits, and business predictability.

Do you get it? Well, then stop talking nonsense about the product features that no one cares about.