People digest large amounts of information every day – both on a business and private ground. Your offer competes for the client’s attention not only with the offers of your competition, but with Facebook, a crying child, Netflix, and sleep as well. It’s possible that in addition to you, potential clients are still talking to your competitors, who have also sent them their offers. That’s why, the sales deck should clearly indicate why it is that the potential client should cooperate exactly with you.
Sending offers that don’t clearly communicate that reduce the chance of winning a client, and wastes the work of a seller and marketers who helped create this sales opportunity.
After reading the offer, the potential client should be able to answer 4 questions:
What’s in it for me?
Why is the X company better than the competition? (or its realisation as an internal project?)
Why is this project important to me now?
How much is it?
What value is in it for client?
The reader’s interest is greatest at the beginning of reading an offer. In addition, what the potential client reads at the beginning can influence the interest with which they will analyze other pages. That’s why the beginning of your sales presentation is a place for the most important information stemming from it – that is, what the reality will look like once the client starts working with you. Remember that the offer is not a presentation about your product, but an explanation of how the customer’s problem will be solved by it. The information contained in this part should be specific and described in so-called selling values.
The customer is our priority! – we respond to 80% of customer queries within an hour.
Our advantage is customer orientation – we have completed 90% of projects within the established period.
The principle of a driven nail comes helpful in creating your offer. Remember that the client doesn’t want to buy a hammer – he wants to have a nail driven, and he will be happiest once he finally gets to hang a picture on it, which for half a year has been causing arguments with his wife. So in practice, although you sold a hammer, but communicate a driven nail, the customer in fact buys no arguments with his wife. Such description of a solved problem should be at the beginning of an offer, along with a summary of your greatest assets from the customer’s point of view (for example, the fact that your company has unique experience in the customer’s industry, or the fact that you have already solved a similar problem three times with other companies) to ensure the customer that buying your solution is connected to a lower risk.
In addition to describing the benefits, it’s worth mentioning the risks and problems that the customer will avoid because of you.
Why should customer buy from you now?
Your goal is to be the top 3 priorities for this quarter, so you need to explain very precisely why this issue is important to the client. Presenting the status quo cost, namely losses and problems that the client will have to deal with if you don’t start solving the problem now, will help you illustrate it.
At the end of the day, everyone in B2B sells an increase in revenues, a drop in costs or something that indirectly contributes to one of these values – it is worth answering the question about what you sell, and show specifically what impact it has on the 2 main parameters of your client’s business.
For instance, if you are trying to convince a potential client to change their website right now:
Each month with a homepage that has an X% bounce rate means that each month Y potential customers do not make purchases in the amount of Z, because only the most determined users reach the product page.
One month of unstable application is the cost of about X needed to cover additional customer service costs.
Why is your company better than the competition?
Information about where you have solved similar problems, how you did it and what beneficiaries of your solutions think about it will help convince the client that he should trust exactly you. That is: your clients’ logos, testimonials and case studies. It’s worth strengthening this message with specific numbers and facts, e.g.
Over 10 projects completed in the e-commerce industry.
X% increase in conversion for Y customer.
When presenting the team, it’s worth mentioning the number of projects that your company has already completed and gained experience – their hobbies and completed universities are unlikely to interest your client.
When creating slides describing your company, remember:
– the more important they are to a particular customer, the better,
– the less competitors could use your description, the more unique it is, and more clearly presents your Unique Value Proposition – it seems obvious, but most of the companies I have analyzed forgot about it.
How much does it cost?
The price list should clearly communicate how the solution to the customer’s problem is evaluated. It’s worthwhile that the price list page clearly informs about adequate costs and (if you are applying a discount policy) how much you can save by paying “in advance” or by deciding to cooperate with a longer contract.
Discount policy is a partner set of rules explaining when and for what you can expect a lower price. Therefore, avoid customers who expect special treatment and don’t leave money, margins, or other benefits with you. You have to remember that “I would like to use the product, but for half the price” is an “entitled” attitude. It will probably be better if you don’t obtain this client, because they usually require special care that destroys the profitability in the long term.
If you want to provide the customer with several variants of solutions, try to prepare several packages instead of creating each of them from scratch, for example: small, medium and large, which you will suggest to clients or alternatively, on their basis, create more tailored proposals.
Remember that the price list and possible discount policy should result from well-thought-out calculations, namely well-calculated project margins. Basing prices on the intuition or the general assumption “costs + 20%” may affect the profitability of individual projects, and thus the entire company.
How to limit the time necessary to create a sales deck?
Preparing an offer tailored to a specific customer often takes a lot of time. It doesn’t have to be so if you consciously approach the process of creating it. The offer consists of two parts:
- business, which in most cases may be based on previously worked out parts of the text (eg. company description, case studies),
- describing how to solve a specific problem – this part can also consist of fixed and variable elements.
So, for example, we can assume that when you have prepared 50 ready slides, based on which you create an offer, you can:
- add 7 of them as they are,
- change the individual sentences in 5 of them,
- 3 of them will be created from the beginning, especially for a particular client.
This way, the customer will get an offer tailored to his needs, which consists of 13 slides.
Of course, the numbers will vary depending on the specific industry, but in the vast majority of sectors you will be able to find large parts of the offer, which you don’t have to write manually. You can read about how to speed up creating parts of the variable elements of the sales deck in an article on how to estimate projects faster .
The sales presentation based on 4 questions important for the client will make it consist of information that is legible for its recipient. It’s worth checking if the created offer really is legible. If you show it to a person outside the customer’s industry who has no expertise, and this person will be able to answer 4 questions from the beginning of the article, there is a very good chance that the most important information will be readable also for an overworked and busy client. You can also schedule a meeting with me – together, we will consider what is worth improving in your proposal for the client.
