Storytelling for sales teams: DigitalEx's sales deck

Whether it’s an ad, your website, your sales deck, or a conversation, you need a good story to hook your audience. And we’re storytellers.

When you’re crafting your funding deck, there are tried and true formulas for what to include and how to tell that story. There’s Guy Kawasaki’s “The only 10 slides you need in a deck,” that’s probably the most popular one for startups. There’s the 11 slide “Perfect Pitch Deck.” There’s also Y-Combinator’s “Seed Round Pitch Deck.”

They’re all very similar. Where you put your secret sauce relative to the market opportunity might change from one to the next, but they’re all storytelling frameworks. What will be different and unique is your story.

As Y-Combinator points out—on slide two of their deck template—founders often build bad decks. They’re great at what they do, but not everyone is also great at telling people about what they do. When it’s your company, and when brevity leaves out so much of the rich detail that you know about your company, it can be especially challenging. Having outside eyes (and pens, or keyboards) can help.

And the same holds true for all the stories to all the audiences that you want to tell.

A sales deck might not talk about your market opportunity, but it follows a set of conventions, a storytelling framework of its own, too! It covers pain points, your solution, your secret sauce, and next steps. You might have different versions that hit different points harder or softer based on audience.

If you need help crafting sales decks, or funding decks, or any other deck, we can help, soup-to-nuts, copywriting, design, and graphics.

PS Since this is a snapshot of DigitalEx’s deck and their CEO, Sundeep Goel, graciously gave us permission to share it, we want to tell you a little bit about them, too. DigitalEx helps companies optimize hybrid (public/private) cloud costs across AWS, Azure, Google, VMWare On-Prem, and Oracle Cloud. They have an easy pitch in that they reduce existing costs for their clients but, like everyone else, they have to beat their competition on price, service, or both. We think they are beating their competition, which made our job easier and, honestly, more fun.