Maybe you’ve been in this position before. You have killer sales decks, but you lose the sale. In all likelihood you haven’t lost to a competitor, but to something else entirely. Often the victor is the status quo.
Where you advocate for change and something new and fresh, the status quo will sidle up to your prospects, smelling of old mothballs, and tell them that things aren’t really that bad, and – come on now – there’s no need for any rash decisions. Even though we can all see how stale the status quo is, it can be very compelling for a prospect and can stop your sales pitch dead in its tracks. In this post, we’re going to teach you how you can develop sales decks that overcome indecision and beat the status quo. For good.
About ten years ago, we learned that the best salespeople were ‘challengers’; they brought disruptive insights that challenged the status quo and reframed their prospects’ thinking. This approach became best practice for sales decks.
Early-stage sales decks need to answer the question ‘Why change?’. By doing so, they challenge the status quo, and get prospects thinking about how the world has changed, and why they need to change now too. An effective way of selling a new category of product or service is to explain what’s wrong with the status quo and how the old way of doing things won’t cut it anymore. By standing still, prospects might be missing out, facing risks, losing money, or all three. For example, the first cloud accounting software vendors might have gained traction by explaining how doing everything ‘on premise’ means you waste time and money on your own infrastructure and prevent effective collaboration between offices.
An effective challenger sales deck is made up of different building blocks that come together to tell a compelling and persuasive story.
Bring measurable insight: The first thing you need is measurable insight to grab the attention and get the prospect to realise that you can add value in your meeting.
Show the status quo isn’t safe: Next you build on this insight to show that the status quo isn’t safe – ignoring an issue brings risk, or losses, or perhaps being left behind. You need to make it clear that the fact that the status quo is no longer safe isn’t the fault of the prospect – they aren’t stupid for finding themselves where they are. You don’t want them to get defensive. Rather, the world has slowly changed, and now they need to change too.
Introduce an exciting new world: Now it’s time to offer the light at the end of the tunnel. Contrast the unsafe status quo with the shiny and beautiful new world that’s possible. You don’t directly talk about your solution at this point, but rather about the category that your solution sits within.
Make it all believable: And then finally, you try to make your claims believable. You show that changing does deliver what you say it will – less risk, lower costs, greater revenue – and you do that with stories, testimonials, analyst insights, or even customer data.
If you want to learn more about the challenger method and how you can apply it to your own sales decks then our blog post – How to make the ULTIMATE sales presentation – is a great place to start.
This ‘challenger’ model for sales and sales presentations is widespread. Yet, according to Matthew Dixon, the author of The Challenger Sale, and a newer book The Jolt Effect, around 40-60% of deals today end up stalled in no-decision. In other words, everyone learned how to disrupt the status quo, how to be a challenger, but the status quo is still winning.
Why you’re (still) losing to the status quo
Some of the time when we lose to the status quo what’s happening is that the prospect is evaluating their options and actively deciding that their current way of doing things is better than the alternative. Sellers can repeat their arguments to try to show how bad the status quo is but, if the prospect doesn’t agree, eventually they’ll hit a dead-end.
However, the rest of the time we don’t lose to the status quo because the customer prefers it, we lose to the status quo because the prospect finds it too hard to make a decision on what to do instead. They get ‘paralysed’ by indecision. Dixon’s research suggests that over half of losses to the status quo are due to prospects not being able to commit to a decision.
The typical approach to a prospect who seems to be choosing the status quo is to double down with the fear, uncertainty, and doubt (FUD). And sure, you can ramp up the FUD in a bid to scare the prospect into action but what you will most likely end up doing is scaring them into inaction. They may be able to see the problem more clearly, but they’re paralysed over their next step – you’ve actually scared them into indecision, and a victory for indecision is a victory for the status quo.
Why dialling up the FUD doesn’t work
To understand why dialling up the FUD doesn’t work when prospects aren’t making a decision, it’s worth thinking about the organisational dynamics inside a purchasing organisation. The status quo is established. It’s nobody’s fault. It’s hard to pin the blame on any one individual for how things are today. Doing nothing is easy.
On the other hand, choosing what to do is usually someone’s responsibility. Somebody signs the contract. Somebody risks their professional reputation if they choose wrong, if the supplier messes up, if everything ends in tears. We all know someone who has been that person – a hotshot on their way up the corporate ladder, brought low by one bad choice. Nobody wants to be that person. And if your prospect is deeply worried about making a horrible professional misstep, then piling on more FUD isn’t going to help. It just makes them more nervous, and even more reluctant to do anything at all. The status quo might not be great, but at least they won’t lose their job for continuing to ignore the same thing their company has been ignoring for years. Which is why 40-60% of deals still end up in ‘no-decision limbo’.
So what does all of this mean for sales presentations? You’ve got your beautifully crafted ‘challenger’ presentation that answers the question ‘Why change?’ and you have your ‘Why us?’ presentation that you deliver next, either later in the sales cycle or all together in one meeting. But buyers end up stuck, not willing to risk their reputations by making the wrong decision, and your attempt to just repeat your challenger pitch again but louder doesn’t work.
Luckily, the answer is fairly straightforward.
How your sales decks can overcome indecision
At the start of the sales cycle your ‘Why change?’ presentation needs to work as hard as it can to make the prospect fear that staying where they are isn’t tenable. Then, your ‘Why us?’ presentation needs to dial down the FUD, dial down the fear of making a decision, and make it seem like choosing your solution is a simple, straightforward, and low-risk option. By tweaking your approach to FUD in this way, you’re giving the prospect a reason to change but also reassuring them that the change is going to be easy and simple.
What does that look like in practice?
If a ‘why change’ ‘challenger’ sales pitch does its job, the prospect should be convinced that they have a problem that they need to solve. Then, you tell them about the solution that will fix their problem. Then you switch gears to ‘why us’ and show the prospect how the solution they need happens to match your solution very closely. And so by shaping the buying vision, with any luck, you end up with the inside track to making a sale.
But having the inside track doesn’t mean running the race alone – most buyers will still go to look at who else is in the space, whether there are other vendors worth talking to, at which point you might need to gently remind your prospect of what it is you’re offering and why they would choose you over your competitors.
It sounds simple – straightforward even – but of course a lot of B2B sales decks are used to sell fairly complex solutions. Even when the prospect decides that they want to buy from you and not a competitor, there’s still a significant effort to work out exactly what to buy. Do you want the deluxe or the supreme? Should you get the ultra add-on or could you do without it? Is this feature worth paying extra for? It sounds ridiculous that you might lose a sale due to the complexity of your own products and services, but that’s what happens; prospects don’t buy because deciding what to buy is too tricky.
So how do you change your ‘Why us?’ sales deck to overcome indecision, defeat the status quo, and bring home that sale? How do you make buying your solution seem as low-risk as possible so that the prospect can’t help but say yes?
Here are seven ways:
Say less
Sometimes those writing sales decks say too much. Stand in a room in any company and ask them to answer ‘Why us?’. You’ll get dozens of answers. Everyone thinks their thing is important, and a presentation by committee can be an unruly thing. The problem – aside from the obvious one that a lack of conciseness can be boring and hard to remember – is that buyers hate to hear about things they don’t want. Talking about things that are weak or irrelevant just provides prospects with a reason not to buy. Are they paying for features they don’t care about?
Pre-empt objections
Prospects will usually have an idea of what their ideal, or perfect solution will look like, but it’s very rare that you’ll have the absolute perfect solution, ready-made for a prospect. Usually, buying involves some sort of compromise for the prospect, and that compromise will usually come with objections. It makes sense for you to think about the common objections that you hear, anticipate them, and address them in your presentation. So when the prospect comes out with those common objections you’ll be ready. This builds trust, saves time, and allows you to get your messaging right.
Admit to gaps
Not every product does everything. That’s OK. If certain functionality is absolutely essential to a prospect, they’ll notice your gap eventually. If you come clean about the gap that you have, you are more likely to sell to buyers who don’t see the gap as a big deal, but who are struggling to make a decision.
Limit choice
There’s a reason so many SaaS companies offer three options, with neat feature comparisons running down the screen. They’ve tested their checkout processes to the nth degree and understand that less choice means more sales. There are well-known experiments away from software too. For example, in a study supermarkets offering free samples of 24 flavours of jam had 60% of visitors stop for a sample, but only 3% of the 60% actually bought any jam, so only 2% of all shoppers. When they reduced the flavours to six, only 40% of visitors took a sample, but 30% of those sampling bought jam. That’s a much higher 13% of all shoppers.
You might have an infinitely configurable product – but the prospect doesn’t need to know that yet. Reduce what’s available to make it more likely that you sell anything. And if you want to really reduce uncertainty for your prospect, have a default option that ‘most customers choose’.
Use modest claims
The temptation is to go in with your biggest and boldest claims but you’re trying to make this feel like a low risk decision, so tone it down a bit.
Let’s say that a great PowerPoint productivity add-in developed by a great company proved in some studies to save employees 30 minutes a week. You might say something like ‘we’ve done studies that show the average person saves 30 minutes of their time each week, but just to be sure you get a great return on your product, let’s take a look at the business case using just half of those average numbers. Even by saving just 50% of the average time compared to most users, you can still get a great return versus your costs.’
Start small
Start with one machine. One team. One solution. Land and grow – don’t try to grow before you land. Tell the prospect not to over-buy. They might say they want to buy the super-deluxe supreme option, and get you all excited, and then just umm-and-ahh forever because it’s so expensive. Just sell a hesitant buyer your regular option and you’ll already have a customer, and build a lot of trust.
Protect the purchase from downside risk
If you’re faced with a buyer who’s nervous of making the wrong decision, offering a money-back guarantee, or a cancellation window, or allowing a subscription downgrade is a great way to derisk things for them. A nice idea if you’re in charge, but some of these options might depend more on company strategy and not be achievable for a lone salesperson. Other options are available without organisational buy-in – packaging the recommended option with professional services support so that the buyer isn’t worried about implementation, or even just providing a really detailed project timeline to reassure the buyer that you’ve done this before.
So what have we learned? That the status quo is one of the most formidable competitors in B2B sales. But not all losses to the status quo are equal – some of the time the prospect genuinely prefers the status quo, other times they just don’t know what to do instead.
To create an opportunity, you need to dial up the fear, uncertainty, and doubt so that your prospect realises that the status quo is costing them. Your ‘Why change?’ presentations need to drive prospects to do something different. Once prospects believe they should change, when you shift to your ‘Why us?’ content, you need to dial the fear, uncertainty, and doubt right down. Do everything you can to make buying seem obvious, low-risk, and easy.
To talk through your sales deck strategy with one of our experts, get in touch.
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