Written by Sean McPheat | 
An effective Sales Strategy Presentation is a valuable tool for showcasing how you’re planning to align your sales strategy (and team) with your company’s vision and goals.
But when it comes to ‘how to write a sales strategy’ and ‘how to present a strategy’, where do you even begin?
We’ve got 13 useful steps to help you create an effective Sales Strategy Presentation that your stakeholders will love! From start to finish, we’ll cover everything you need to make it a huge success. Including a sales presentation structure to follow, and a strategy slide template to use. Let’s get started!
Contents
A Sales Strategy is a plan which aims to maximise sales whilst coordinating the plan across your whole sales team and aligning it with the corporate strategy.
Research giant Gartner defines Sales Strategy as “an organisation’s detailed plan to drive sales performance, innovation and growth by better penetrating existing markets and growing share of current customer wallet.”
This definition downplays the corporate alignment aspect and focuses on sales performance. However, a Sales Strategy does not merely consist only of delineating your sales approach.
In brief, a well-written Sales Strategy can be said to have three main aims:
The above list is not ordered in terms of priority—all three aims contribute vitally to your Sales Strategy.
When we’re talking about a presentation, it’s important to distinguish this from the pitch you’ll give to your clients. A Sales Strategy Presentation is where you obtain corporate buy-in for your sales approach, making sure that messaging, pricing, product specs, sales media and other details of your campaigns are clarified and agreed across the board.
In this presentation you’ll describe your target market, competitors, sales techniques, and the composition of your sales team, amongst other information. The aim is to secure support for your strategy, which may include budget approval. It’s important to include enough detail to convey the main information, without overburdening your audience.
Below, we’ll look at how best to go about preparing your presentation, alongside some tips for maximising audience attention and approval. If you can nail this presentation, you’ll be off to a flying start with your strategy, so it’s worth putting the hours in to get it right.
The most important thing to get right is your structure. This should be logical and narrative-driven, leading the audience from big picture to fine detail. It should be compelling and as brief as possible, without short-changing your audience. Remember that you’ll be asked plenty of questions when your presentation is complete!
Begin by outlining the current state of play within the company. If you are an agency selling your strategy to a company, here’s your opportunity to demonstrate a rounded understanding of the company and its priorities, as well as giving a summary of your agency, and what it does.
If you are heading up an in-house sales team, you have the chance to maximise corporate buy-in, and ensure your strategy is fully supported with the necessary resources.
Don’t go into exhaustive detail – offer the sort of brief “executive summary” you find at the front of annual reports. Do use bullet points and figures where these are impressive enough to support your case. Highlight the opportunity your Sales Strategy will address, whether it’s a gap in the market, the chance to cross/up-sell a new product, or some other benefit you’ll bring.
Here’s where you identify who your ideal customers or clients will be, and really hit home that you understand your customer.
You can use buyer personas, which may include graphics depicting “typical” customers, to help your audience visualise who you’ll be selling to. In terms of aggregate markets, you can include Venn diagrams or other graphic means to delineate core customers and subsidiary consumers.
For instance, if you’re selling an app for video editing, your core customers may be corporate content producers, but your subsidiary audience may be far wider, touching upon anyone who regularly uploads content to YouTube or other social media platforms.
You’ll need to describe how you’ll approach all your significant markets elsewhere in your presentation (see step 5).
USP or Value Proposition (VP) is a concise statement of what makes your product stand out in your chosen marketplace. It’s a vital concept for sales reps to grasp because it’s the main reason why a consumer would choose your product over a rival’s. It’s important that all stakeholders buy into the value proposition because it’s a key factor in building brand identity.
For instance, some footwear brands stress comfort as their USP, while others highlight value, durability, style, or exclusivity.
Your VP could also be a combination of factors, i.e. going back to the app for video editing example, “we offer the most accessible, best value for money and most fully featured video editing app on the market”.
Key to your VP is describing the “problem” a customer might have and how your product is the perfect solution to that problem. How will your customers uniquely benefit from the product you’ll be selling?
You can use comparisons with rival products, and data taken from market research, showing what consumers want, and how your product addresses those needs. Literal quotes taken from review sites can be helpful, revealing how real customers feel about their purchases.
The main takeaway is that your sales team are enthusiastic about the value they are offering customers, and that they understand how to characterise the benefits and features of the product.
It’s essential at this stage to factor in your competitors. Unless you are first to market or are offering a very niche product, the chances are you have a host of rivals eager to bite off chunks of your customer base. Here you need to emphasise that your sales team have the answers to the question “why us?”
Differentiation is key! What solutions does your product offer that rivals cannot? It’s important not to underestimate the competition and respect the successes that other players in the sector have scored. Much can be learned by studying the achievements of legacy brands, while offering something that builds upon previous offerings.
It can be a good idea to tabulate your top three or five competitors and show how their success provides an opportunity, rather than a threat. Remember that competitors should be understood in the broader context and can help you turn your weaknesses into strengths.
For instance, Netflix hasn’t only got to worry about Amazon Prime TV, Disney Plus and other streaming services. It must compete with cinema, social media and podcasts too. These are all popular draws upon customers’ leisure time.
Now you can summarise how your product will be marketed. Will conventional advertising be used? Will social media play a significant role? Is this a B2B campaign or will the product appeal to individual customers? Will buyers be targeted at work, or at home?
Perhaps you have partners working on marketing campaigns. If so, introduce them, and their best work to date. Provide examples of finished campaign materials if you have them or works in progress if that’s all you have at this stage. This is a good opportunity to use dramatic visuals or video, rather than text or graphs, which can become boring if overused.
Your marketing strategy should include the following five elements:
You can finish by briefly describing how marketing and sales departments will cooperate and coordinate their efforts.
Here you can drill down into the specifics of the sales process. What does your sales funnel look like? Where are you getting your leads and how are you qualifying them? Will cold calling or email drip campaigns be a major part of the process? Will you have a presence at any trade shows or events?
Do you have scripts that you can share to offer an example of a typical sales contact? Provide concrete examples to help your presentation feel solid. If you have incentives planned for your sales team, or KPIs you expect them to achieve, then outline them here too.
You can break down your sales activities into:
Once you have outlined what you’ll do to make sales, it’s time to explore who will do what.
Begin with an organisational diagram of your sales team, so that your audience will get a clear picture of command structure. Outline the responsibilities of each role, lines of reporting and (if relevant) base salaries.
If you are creating a sub-team for this project, then show the diagram for that sub-team. There’s no need to reinvent the wheel with an organisational chart since everyone understands the traditional flowchart model. Use that, to save valuable time.
Explain any unfamiliar roles or unexpected team members. Perhaps you have an in-house social media researcher, or a CRM specialist. Make sure you highlight and explain anything unexpected. You can also identify roles that are not filled yet, which will help when it comes to steps 10 and 11.
If you have leaflets, landing pages, product listings, demonstration videos or anything else that will be key to the sales process, then here is a suitable time to hand out samples or give demonstrations. If you’re offering a free demo version of a piece of software, you can quickly run through its features and how you plan to convert free users to paid subscribers.
Remember that if you provide handouts, your audience will lose eye contact with you while they pore over them, so use this option sparingly. You can always provide supplementary handouts or follow-up emails, after your presentation is over.
All goals and objectives expressed should conform to the SMART principle, being specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, and time-based.
Try to be specific with sales targets, without promising more than you can reasonably deliver!
You can have nested targets—fair, good, and excellent anticipated results—while stressing that you’ll always be aiming for the latter. You can also express goals in terms of short, medium, and long-term. This is especially relevant when you’re launching a brand-new product, or entering a new market, where it would be unrealistic to achieve full market penetration immediately.
It’s very important to obtain buy-in on your goals and targets, so that there’s transparency across the organisation, and you can be held accountable if you fail to deliver. That’s the downside of getting specific with KPIs, but it’s also a great motivator for sales teams.
On the plus side, you can also mention any incentive or bonus structure you’ll be offering your sales team for achieving ambitious goals.
If you know you’ll need to train up staff to understand a new product, software system, or working process, then it’s valuable to admit this upfront. Training needs affect the bottom line, as well as your process timeline. You have the opportunity here to demonstrate that you’ve thought through all human resource requirements and researched training opportunities. You may already have Sales Training Providers you’ll partner with (mention them now) or if you’re still looking why not check out our Essential Selling Skills Training or Telesales Training Course.
Spending time on this aspect of your Sales Strategy will also build stakeholder confidence. They’ll know you aren’t throwing your reps in at the deep end. Instead you are preparing them properly for success.
With resources in mind (IT, human resources, content creation, research costs and other expenses) outline what you expect your operating sales budget to be. There is no point in understating your anticipated costs, since overruns may occur, and senior management will often try to make cost savings. It pays to build in a little wriggle room for negotiation.
Don’t blind or bore your audience with spreadsheets; just give the headline figures. Highlight any areas of expenditure that are loosely estimated, or unclear. Remember to allow for hiring costs for any unfilled sales team roles you described in step 7 (see above), and for staff training.
Remember also to include cash flow, as well as overall expenditure. How much money will you need and at what milestones? Sometimes success can be more expensive than failure; for instance, when it necessitates a sudden recruitment drive to expand your sales team. It’s vital for stakeholders to appreciate key dates when funding must be made available.
If you’ve prepared a simplified GANTT chart, you can show where in the project timeline you currently sit. Explain what your next actions will be, and what the future holds. Here you can build further confidence by demonstrating that you’ve thought everything through.
Remember to build in a little more time than you think you’ll need for more flexible stages like research, training, and lead prospecting. Make sure you highlight any immovable deadlines, like sales events or product launches, and how you’ll ensure you’re prepared for them.
You should also be building excitement and enthusiasm here, so don’t make it too dry. This is a thrilling time—you’re about to hit the go button on a brand-new sales campaign. Get your audience to feel your enthusiasm and you’re halfway to achieving buy-in.
The cliché is true – a picture is worth a thousand words. Sometimes a short video or meme can make a more dramatic point than yet another set of bullet points, facts, or figures.
There’s a popular rule of thumb with PowerPoint slides, called the 7 x 7 principle. This states that no single slide should contain more than seven lines of text, and each line should contain no more than seven words. How many presentations have you witnessed that fail to pass that test? Too many, most likely!
Avoid this issue by preferring visual content over words. After all, you are there to deliver the verbal component of the presentation. You can do this so much more effectively with your communication and interpersonal skills. You already know this — you’re a salesperson!
Finally, make sure you leave time for questions (and prepare some answers to likely ones in advance). Thank your audience for their time… and relax!
Now you know how to create your presentation, it’s time to have a go at making it! Here’s a PowerPoint template you can download to kick you off.
The deck includes 13 slides covering all the sections we’ve touched on. Just customise the template by adding your own branding font and colours – and don’t forget to add some of those engaging visuals we’ve spoken about!
Perhaps it’s worth leaving you with a simple thought – you can enjoy this moment! After all, it’s the culmination of a complex sales planning process, and now you get to share your vision with everyone who matters. That opportunity doesn’t come around very often. So, take a moment to congratulate yourself on your hard work, and have fun!
Finally, here are some parting thoughts on presentations, from writers and speakers who’ve been there:
“They may forget what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.”
–Carl W. Buechner, politician and church leader.
“The first 30 seconds and the last 30 seconds have the most impact in a presentation.”
–Patricia Fripp, Sales presentation expert and speech coach.
“You are not being judged, the value of what you are bringing to the audience is being judged.”
–Seth Godin, dotcom executive and bestselling author.
Hopefully, this article has reminded you of some principles you already understand and has given you the inspiration to really smash your Sales Strategy Presentation!
If you need any extra sales support for you or your team, please contact us for further information on our Sales Management Training and Account Management Training solutions, also take a look at our popular portfolio of Sales Training Courses.
Happy Selling!
Sean
Sean McPheat
Managing Director
MTD Sales Training
Updated on: 13 June, 2023
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