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Sales Presentations: the most overlooked growth superweapon.

For every 1% that you improve your sales presentation close rate, you could be looking at tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue gained.

Very few people understand the true impact that the humble sales presentation has on the bottom line. Read on and join the club!

Most businesses are are concerned with hitting growth targets by getting more leads, or better lead quality.

The sales presentation is lost in no man’s land between marketing and sales, often neglected as tool the sales team inherits and has to work with – or even fix with duct-tape.

But there are three reasons that the sales presentation itself is the single most crucial improvement opportunity for sales growth.

1) Making even the slightest improvement to a sales presentation success rate will have a massive impact on sales revenues.

The prospects that you present to are usually sales-qualified leads. That means they have been down the funnel and they are closer to making a purchase decision.

These are typically the leads you would pay for the most.

Improving your pitch close rate, even slightly, will have a significant impact on sales revenue. This also means that a poor or average sales presentation will also waste significant revenue.

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As a lead progresses through the sales funnel, their individual customer acquisition cost (ICAC) also increases as you throw marketing and sales dollars at them to keep their attention.

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So an average-performing sales presentation not only means fewer sales revenues, but it also means greater losses through a wasted marketing budget. Essentially a poor utilization of the marketing budget with a higher CAC overall.

Let’s take a quick look at an example:

Let’s assume your current close rate with your existing unoptimized presentation is 20%.

It is typical to see an improvement of at least 30% in close rates after a sales presentation is optimized for a higher close rate. So in this case, let’s say that we could take the current close rate from 20% to up to 26%.

If you have a sales team of 3 salespeople making 50 sales presentations per year, that gives us a total of 150 sales pitches per year. And let’s also assume the average lifetime value (LTV) of each new customer is $10.000.

With your current presentation’s close rate you would have a total sales LTV of $300.000 from a year’s work. With the additional 6% close rate gain due to a higher presentation performance, the potential total sales LTV would shoot up to $390.000.

That’s $90.000 in additional LTV gained from a single year’s sales pitches. Over two years, which is a reasonable lifespan for the optimized deck, that would be $180.000 (or $30.000 for every 1% gain in the close rate!).

In ROI terms, that could range between 5.950% (59.5x) and 11.900% (119x), depending on the cost of the presentation. Not bad for a week or two’s work.

2) A higher sales presentation success rate has a compounding effect over time

If you improve your presentation’s success rate, it will become the gift that keeps on giving.

The results will accumulate and compound over time. It is essentially a one-off project (perhaps worth repeating every two years to keep everything running smoothly) but the gains keep stacking up over time.

You can also scale the gains infinitely across a growing sales team. The more use you get out of a professional sales presentation deck, the greater LTV you will accumulate.

3) Improving your sales presentation’s close rate is easy and economical

The opportunity cost of investing in an optimized sales presentation design is extremely low, while the ROI of adopting a performance-optimized pitch deck is very high.

The cost of getting an performance-optimized sales presentation put together is extremely low compared to the long-term value it will provide.

So what are you waiting for? Use our sales presentation optimization calculator to calculate your own ROI and get a quote to find out more.

Nicolas Virtsonis
Nicolas Virtsonis

Nick is 25-year marketing veteran experienced in presentations for sales pitches, partnership development, board meetings and professional events. He's also the founder of Pitchsmart. Nick shares insights on building effective presentations that compel, excite and drive action to get results.

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