“Cured me!” I commented to my colleague, after a visit to a prospect. He had wondered why I didn’t do a corporate overview presentation and why I didn’t at least show a “logo slide.” I told him the following true story…
Some years ago, I was leading and doing sales for a Silicon Valley startup. At that time, we had an extensive corporate overview deck that described our technology, our founders, our mission, our investors, our product history, our corporate milestones, and our logo slide. We were very proud of what we had accomplished so far!
Our standard practice was to begin prospect meetings with this presentation to establish our credentials and set the stage for our product pitches. It was a very typical sales approach for the time.
I was meeting with a large prospect organization located on the U.S. East Coast. The meeting got underway, and I began to present our corporate overview.
When our logo slide appeared, I noticed one prospect player sitting towards the front of the table lean over and whisper a few words to his colleague in the next seat. As he spoke, he pointed to the slide and shook his head negatively.
Intrigued and a bit concerned I said, “I noted you reacting to the slide – are you willing to share what you said?”
He responded, “Certainly. See those guys [the logo] at the bottom-left corner of your slide? We think they’re idiots and we’d never purchase something that they would!”
Ouch! Cured me!
Just because you, the vendor, may be proud of your logo slide doesn’t mean that it resonates (positively) with your prospect. Even if you think you’ve selected logos that align with this prospect’s market, vertical, size and other factors, there’s no guarantee that it will connect as you might desire!
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