A new era of B2B sales: What does it mean for my pitch deck?

There is an alarming and growing trend within B2B sales at the moment. Buyers would increasingly prefer to make a purchase without speaking to a sales rep. In 2020 the number reported was 43%, just a year later that number climbed to 75%. But add to the mix the dizzying contradiction that 77% of buyers report feeling overwhelmed by the buying process – and consider that between 40-60% of deals are lost to no decision at all – that is teams decide to do, well, nothing – and you have yourself a big mess.

If buyers don’t want to talk to sellers, and don’t have a way to confidently navigate the buying process, it’s no wonder teams give up and choose to keep things the way they are.

We’ve been reading The Framemaking Sale by Brent Adamson and Karl Schmidt. You may know Brent Adamson from his work on The Challenger Sale, which has become foundational for considering how to kick off a sales presentation in a compelling and engaging way.

In this latest book Adamson and Schmidt unpack some new trends they’ve noticed in buyer behaviour when it comes to B2B sales, and it may have quite an impact on the way you approach your own sales collateral, and so over the course of this article we’re going to look at some of their key findings and then apply that learning to your pitch deck, slide library, and anything else you have lurking in that folder called ‘Sales’.

• What went wrong in B2B sales?
• A new era of B2B sales: The framemaking approach
• What new sales materials do I need to make?
• What do I do with my existing sales materials?
• How do I present in a way that resonates with the new B2B buyer?
• So what does this mean for me and my pitch deck?

What went wrong in B2B sales?

So how did we get here? There was a time that selling a unique product was the best way to differentiate yourself in a B2B market. But then everyone started having unique products. And so the landscape changed into more solutions-based selling – I’ll sell you a package of products to solve a wider problem for you. But then everyone started doing that too, and so differentiation came from providing unique content and insights – thought leadership, white papers, podcasts – you name it. And that’s how many B2B sellers still try to distinguish themselves in the marketplace.

But there’s a problem. A 2021 survey found that 55% of B2B buyers found the amount of information they came across as part of a recent purchase to be trustworthy – well done everyone!

But simultaneously overwhelming – oh bother…

And more alarmingly, 44% of buyers said that the information they came across was trustworthy – woo!

But also contradictory – womp womp.

And I think there’s one thing we can all agree on in this current era of business communication. There has never been more information. On average, we are exposed to the information equivalent of 280 newspapers every day. The last thing we need is more information. And yet, that’s what insight selling drives us towards.

So just as product and solution selling had their time, it’s time for insight selling to be replaced by something else. And Adamson and Schmidt believe that is an era of ‘guided buying’: a kind of selling focused on boosting customer confidence in the decisions they’re making. The salesperson essentially becomes the guide or coach to walk a B2B buying team through a successful purchase.

To quote Adamson and Schmidt: “We’ve shifted from what we sell, to how we sell, to how we help.” (The Framemaking Sale, 259)

A new era of B2B sales: The framemaking approach

So what do you do now? Let’s paint the picture together. If over ¾ of B2B buyers find the buying process overwhelming, rather than focusing on a particular solution, what if sellers walked through the purchase process with the team, and made something incredibly complex seem really doable.

It’s a shift from sellers not just being the teachers, where they give a wealth of insight and information with pitch decks, brochures, white papers etc., to helping to guide the buyer to see what’s important, what their team needs to make a decision on, and then making sure they get to the finish line.

Instead of a sales toolkit full of persuasion and objection handling, you load up your pack with empathy, guidance and trust building.

Adamson and Schmidt have this useful comparison: “sellers will have to stop focusing on their ability to deliver value, and instead build customers’ belief in their own ability to extract value.” (The Framemaking Sale, 161)

Essentially, have I thrown it over the fence like an Amazon package, or have I gone in there and shown them how it works, plugged it in, and got them going?

It all sounds great. Inspiring – aspirational for sure.

But I imagine you have a pitch book, a bunch of white papers, some brochures, a ream of thought leadership articles on your website, and an extended slide library to boot.

Let’s take a look at what it means for your sales collateral.

What new sales materials do I need to make?

Adamson and Schmidt are very clear on one thing. Don’t just make more stuff for the sake of it. There will definitely be new pieces of content you need to create, but it’s to meet the very specific needs of your buyers. They suggest running several analyses on your current buying process to troubleshoot where customers get lost or off track. They suggest talking to existing customers to hear their experience with a view to establishing where future buyers need guidance.

This enables you to create a number of frameworks. A framework could be a simple checklist, matrices, process diagrams – that kind of thing – that allow you to distil complex information into a manageable, actionable format. So you give your buyers a checklist on key deliverables they need to have in place, you provide a matrix diagram for them to simulate risk, or you might provide a process diagram to talk about implementation and deployment.

Things to try

A simple tool that gives your buyer agency to feel like they’re in control of the process feels like it might be a unicorn. Trying to condense these assets into one or two pages may feel like you’re trying to collapse the nuance of One Hundred Years of Solitude onto the back of a beer mat…

But it is possible. Try creating an interactive tool for your more complex processes or simulations. You can walk your buyers through different scenarios, or let them self-guide. And you don’t have to cram all of that detail onto a single slide.

And the best news is you can do all of that natively in PowerPoint.

• Read more tips on creating effective branching scenarios here.
• Watch this resource on creating interactive presentations in PowerPoint here.

What do I do with my existing sales materials?

Think of a product. Such as a great add-in that enables you to access all of your content libraries natively in PowerPoint or Word. The buyer books a demo.

Now when they turn up to the demo, it would be bizarre if the product team said ‘well instead of doing a product demo today, I’m going to talk to you about all the people you’re going to need to help you get this add-in deployed across your organisation.’ The team hasn’t yet made a decision, they probably don’t know enough details about what you’re selling anyway.

Let’s start over. The buyer books a demo call, and the team does a product demo, with a few pitch book slides about why managing content in this way can save teams tremendous amounts of time in terms of content creation, and give everyone peace of mind that brand integrity won’t be compromised. The buyer team respond with lots of nods and are already thinking about how much impact this will have.

But then, after the demo, the sales rep might say, ‘but one of the biggest problems we see companies like yours face is actually in the deployment process, and we’ve seen a number of companies put this product on ice while they reconcile internal issues about who manages what.  So in light of that we’ve put together a list of the key stakeholders you need to reach out to sooner rather than later, and we’ve got a list of questions you can answer with those stakeholders to ascertain what the best way for you to deploy the product would be.’

Regardless of the supplier they choose, this will be useful information and it helps set you apart as buying guide, rather than seller.

Things to try

Use a scorecard framework to help a buyer figure out their key problems – we use a similar process for working out a client value proposition – your buyer may not know what their key problems are and so walking them through a discussion to narrow down their top 3-5 will enable all future conversations to be more focused.

When you know their key problems, you can pull relevant slides from a larger library and use those as the starting point for your next discussion. Make sure you can tailor them to the buyer so they don’t feel like they’re getting cookie-cutter content.

How do I present in a way that resonates with the new B2B buyer?

Adamson and Schmidt say that every piece content in your pitch deck has two dimensions: a teaching point and an emotional point. And so for every piece of content you need to consider what you want your audience to know, and what you want your them to feel.

This means using emotional language – talking explicitly about how a customer should feel: disheartened, encouraged, frustrated.

As a buying guide you want to create a visceral feeling of decision confidence and so your cold hard facts need emotional context, and that comes from humans talking to other humans.

Things to try

Run the exercise from chapter seven of the book with your team. Have each person present your pitch deck and give feedback. Have your audience members specifically listen out for ways that the presenter is making an emotional connection with the audience, and evaluate if they are explicitly identifying emotions they should be feeling. As a team workshop ways to make sure the presenter is tying all the facts and figures to how the buyer should be feeling.

So what does this mean for me and my pitch deck?

Before you open up the trash can ready to dump out all your hard work over the last several years to make a really robust pitch book, hold up. Taking a framemaking approach to sales isn’t a fresh start, it’s looking at your existing content through a new lens with a view to help this new era of B2B buyer. In all likelihood you’ll end up keeping big chunks of your content, but it might not be served up in the same way you do things currently.

One helpful next step for all your sales materials – including your pitch deck – is to audit them. Note down what you have, and what topic everything is linked to. When you complete the other analyses as mentioned in the book (e.g. buying process, implementation and deployment), see how your current sales collateral can support these different points on the buying journey so you can keep things simple, without overwhelming your buyer with too much at once.

Need help crafting a truly stellar pitch deck to suit this new era of selling? Book a call with BrightCarbon’s experts.