The product is good and the presentation is full of features, but sales aren’t happening. The value of a good product only becomes clear once the buyer sees what it means for them. One entrepreneur’s sales presentation began to change when customers took priority over the method.
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A remote meeting, a shared screen, and a long slide deck. An entrepreneur is walking me through his sales presentation. He’s been doing this work for a long time and knows his method inside out.
The opening catches my interest. A few slides in, I’ve lost the thread. The presentation quickly dives deep into the details of the method. I’m still trying to grasp the bigger picture.
I stop the presentation and say plainly what I’m thinking:
I understand the method, but I still don’t understand what the customer is actually buying here.
The method itself was good. That’s exactly why the explanation started so deep. He knew it so well that he began with the details. I was hearing about it for the first time.
I recognized the situation, because I had made the same mistake myself. I first wrote about a brilliant product back in spring (Why a Brilliant Product Doesn’t Sell Itself). Below, I explain what we changed in Voitto’s own presentation and what the entrepreneur’s slide order looked like before and after.
Motorola’s Iridium is a familiar story to many. I’ll tell it anyway, because the ending is often left out.
Iridium’s satellite phone network was completed in 1998. It required 66 satellites to operate. Building and launching them cost five billion dollars.
The technology worked, but there were few buyers. The brick-sized phone cost $3,000. The connection required a line of sight to a satellite, so the phone didn’t work in a moving car, inside buildings, or in many parts of cities. A regular mobile phone was far cheaper. According to TIME, there were about 10,000 subscribers, when the company had forecast half a million. By August 1999, the company was bankrupt. The business plan had been locked in 12 years before the system was even operational.
In December 2000, a group of investors bought the system for 25 million dollars. The technology stayed the same, but the customer changed. Behind the deal was the US Department of Defense, which committed to purchasing the service annually. The new company needed 60,000 customers to be profitable, compared to the million the original business would have required.
Sources: TIME, May 14, 2009 and Smithsonian, Air & Space.
Iridium was a pioneer. Being a pioneer means pulling a heavy sled. I used the same comparison with the entrepreneur. If you try to get people to understand something they don’t yet understand, the road is long. A more effective approach is to first sell what the customer already wants. From there, you can lead them forward.
The same pattern shows up, on a smaller scale, in many companies I’ve worked with. The product or service is good. The people behind it know it inside out. Yet sales move more slowly than planned.
When I was younger, I too was certain I knew how things worked. Experience has taught me otherwise: customers determine what’s worth doing. In a sales negotiation, I once told a CEO: you’re not doing this for yourselves, you’re doing it for your customers. It’s a simple point. Yet it’s easily forgotten, precisely because you work with customers every day.
Customer value is what the customer themselves says they received, not what we list as features. When we start developing sales at Voitto, we begin with why the customer buys and why they don’t. The sales process comes only after that. Once we know what the value proposition is and how the customer would phrase it themselves, building the sales model becomes much easier.
I learned this from our own presentation as well. We used to have four or five slides about how we do our work. Yet it felt like the audience didn’t understand. We cut the method down to a single slide and focused on what comes out of the work. The audience started asking about results, not about the method.
I suggested the same to the entrepreneur. Document the customer cases: what was the customer’s challenge, what was done, and what was achieved. Two or three slides are enough for the method.
We’ve found that the name of a service matters a great deal. If the name describes the method rather than what the customer gets, the listener guesses wrong about what it’s actually about. A name that describes, in plain language, what the customer gets is easy to sell.
It’s also worth building the value proposition according to who it’s being told to. A company executive is sold on customer cases and value. A partner who would resell the product is more interested in how broadly it can be used and how profitable it is to sell.
The same applies within a company. The user looks at whether the product makes their work easier. The decision is often made by someone else. For them, price, savings, or another company’s experience matter more. If the presentation only speaks to the user, the decision is easily left unmade.
The value proposition framework: how to define customer value together with sales
An empty line is the first question for your next customer interview.
The sales process describes what the salesperson does. The buyer’s journey describes what the customer thinks and wants at each stage. A sales presentation works when it matches the stage the buyer is at. Once the buyer’s interest has been sparked and they understand what it’s about, they’ll ask themselves whether there’s a ready-made package. Until then, the package can wait.
That’s why we start by listening to three perspectives: what leadership sees, what the team experiences day to day, and what the customer themselves says. In my own projects, I’ve yet to see a case where these three pictures matched. It’s precisely the differences that show where to start.
Toshiba Tec Nordic went through this journey across four countries. Its products were competitive and its market position strong. The company wanted to shift from product sales to solution sales. The change began with mapping the three perspectives, not with the sales process. Sales Director Harri Salokangas described it like this:
Voitto Group was able to identify where our customers’ real needs lay, instead of settling for surface-level answers. They dug deeper and found the genuine development needs we hadn’t noticed before.
Harri Salokangas, Sales Director, Toshiba Tec Nordic
According to the customer story, Toshiba Tec Nordic’s sales grew by 28% following the solution sales development project. Read the full story: From Product Sales to Solution Sales.
Customer cases need the customer’s own words. These come from interviewing current customers as well as those who considered you but chose otherwise. In our experience, 10-20 interviews are enough. If there are only a few target groups, answers start to repeat themselves early in that range. The set of questions gets refined interview by interview.
A salesperson talks with customers every day. A sales conversation rarely leaves room to ask why the customer chose you in the first place. That’s why it’s worth conducting the interview separately.
Questions for a customer interview
I ask for an example in response and record the customer’s words exactly as they said them. From these come the customer cases in the presentation and the first line of the value proposition.
The next time I met the entrepreneur, he told me he had put the suggestions into practice. Here’s what the slide order looked like before and now.
Before
The new order we worked through
By the next time, the first point had already been put into practice. The remaining slides were still a work in progress. He kept refining them bit by bit.
In that same meeting, we also talked about a new service package designed to meet a customer need. I asked, though, what the buyers of the package thought about it. That wasn’t known yet. The next step was to hear from them, so the package could be refined into something that actually sells.
Checklist for your next sales meeting
The entrepreneur’s presentation had already changed simply by putting customers first. The next change will come from his customers.
Get in touch
We’ll look together at how your customers describe their reasons for buying, and where exactly your presentation or buyer’s journey loses the listener. We’ll start with what you’re already doing well. More on sales development
A couple of sentences in your own words is all it takes. We’ll respond within one business day and tell you straight away whether we can help and where we’d start. If it’s something you can handle without us, we’ll tell you that too.
A 45-minute discussion with one of us is also possible directly from the calendar.
45 min · Teams or Google Meet · No sales pitch
Or by email: hello@voittogroup.com
A few sentences in your own words is enough. We will respond within one business day and tell you directly if we can help and where we would start.
