How to Create a Sales Deck Without Losing Your Mind in the Process

Whether it's your first or your 101st time creating a sales deck, the pressure to get it right is on. You want the client to see your product or service as the ideal solution and, ultimately, close the deal.

If you're selling B2B, you also know the sales cycle can take months and involve several decision makers. Chances are, you won't have the opportunity to present your pitch to all of them. Instead, you'll send over your sales deck after the initial meeting in hopes that everyone gets on board.

But even if the pitch goes well and your sales deck wins everyone over, your job isn't done. There's still the small matter of getting the paperwork signed.

How do you create sales decks now?

Is someone from marketing creating your sales decks with instructions provided by sales? Is every individual sales rep responsible for creating their own sales deck?

Is someone from marketing creating your sales decks with instructions provided by sales? Is every individual sales rep responsible for creating their own sales deck?

Do you use PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides, Canva? How much of this process do you have templatized?

Does every sales rep get to decide what goes into their sales deck? Did marketing create a huge master deck with every scenario and case study possible so your reps can pick out what they need? Or do you have an instructional master template that contains slides that should always be included, complete with different sections and how to make changes?

If any of this sounds like what's happening in your business, we've got some hard-to-hear news.

You're wasting everyone's time

At the end of the day, your sales deck isn't what's going to make or break a sales presentation. It's your sales rep's skills that make the difference between a sale and a 'no, thank you'.

This isn't to say that you should ditch the sales deck altogether. Instead, it's to point out how inefficient and time-consuming each one of these processes is. So, let's start from the top.

Time-waster 1: Marketing creates sales decks

Marketing is all about creating awareness and interest in a company's products or services. As such, they're targeting a much broader audience than sales. Their main goal is to bring in leads, at which point sales takes charge.

Since sales engages directly with potential customers, they have much more information on individual pain points. It's this insight that makes sales more effective in converting leads into paying customers.

Sales having a conversation with a prospect and then needing to go to marketing for a sales deck is a roundabout way of doing things. This process requires constant back-and-forth between the two departments to make sure the sales deck aligns with the sales team's needs. Besides creating delays and wasting valuable time, this can also lead to frustration on both sides.

Time-waster 2: Reps create their own sales decks

Time spent creating a sales deck from scratch is time away from what reps do best: selling. It's hours of meeting prospects, following up, or warming up leads wasted. To top it off, each sales rep doing their own deck is both inefficient and redundant since the same work is being done over and over again.

In addition to that, you can't reasonably expect each rep to be equally good at everything. While some will have no problem whipping up a sales deck with the right colors and tone, others might not. In the end, what you get are inconsistencies in quality, branding, and messaging. This not only results in confused clients, but also hurts your brand image.

Time-waster 3: Using tools you can't automate

Since PowerPoint is most people's go-to for creating a presentation, let's say your reps use it for sales decks. What this means is that they're working with a local copy nobody else can access, so real-time feedback is out the window.

And even when you get that PowerPoint as an email attachment, compatibility issues can make it look completely different. Maintaining a consistent format and style across all decks becomes a nightmare real fast.

But that's not the only problem. With traditional presentation tools, your pitch deck creation process is completely manual. A bit of copying, pasting, switching between your CRM and the presentation tool later and you've got typos, inconsistent fonts, and potential mistakes.

The last thing you want happening is a client noticing a glaring typo during the presentation. Besides being embarrassing, it also makes you look unprofessional. Think about it from the client's perspective. If you don't go to the trouble of spelling things correctly, why should they trust you to solve their problem?

That's why you have the review process in place, right? Sure. But that process is also manual, time-consuming, and prone to errors.

Time-waster 4: No sales pitch deck template

Without any kind of template, it's every person for themselves. Besides the obvious time-wasting aspect of everyone dumping hours into creating decks from scratch, there's also the issue of quality.

Not all reps will create high-quality, visually appealing sales decks, and you shouldn't expect them to. If they wanted to be designers, they would have been designers.

In addition to that, having no template means each rep decides what information to include. This can result in important details being completely left out or less relevant content being included. As a result, you have no baseline to measure sales effectiveness.

If each sales rep includes different content, you also lose out on a unified, focused narrative. The way you communicate your value proposition then varies from one rep to another, making it difficult to measure performance.

Time-waster 5: Marketing creates a master sales deck

A massive, pre-designed and pre-written master deck is nobody's idea of fun. Marketing won't like creating it, sales won't like having to navigate it and select from it.

Just imagine the amount of irrelevant content your reps have to sift through in a 100-slide deck to find what they need. Whether they're copying the slides over or duplicating the deck and deleting unneccessary ones, it's a huge waste of time.

Not to mention, keeping all the slides inside such a large master deck up to date is a challenge. If someone drops the ball at any point, your reps end up using outdated information, essentially ruining the credibility of the presentation.

Time-waster 6: Sales has an instructional master template

While an instructional master template gives reps more flexibility than a pre-made one, it's still not the most efficient thing in the world. First, you need a sales manager to figure out common elements between all sales presentations. Then, the manager has to either talk to reps or go through previous decks to see which use cases and case studies are most commonly included.

After all the data is collected, the manager then creates a master template with different sections. The last thing left to do is to write out instructions for the reps and send it over.

All these hours spent creating an instructional template could have been invested into training. Mentoring. Developing new sales strategies according to current market trends. The list goes on.

And on the reps' side? More copying, pasting, going through irrelevant information to find what they're looking for. And if they want to add some personalization into the deck, it's off to the manager again for approval.

So, what's the solution?

The solution is easy - streamline your sales deck creation process and automate as much of it as you can. If you think that's easier said than done, guess again - cause it can all be done with Better Proposals.

On top of that, when your clients are ready to move forward, you can use the same platform to get those signatures. No copying, no pasting, no jumping from one app to another, no PDF conversions involved. Just one smooth, easy, painless process that gets your sales decks and your sales docs out faster, without having to compromise on quality. Here's how.

1. Automation

Better Proposals brings sales and marketing together. You don't have to worry whether or not your sales pitch decks or documents will stay on brand. Just add your logo, brand colors, fonts, and pairings into the system once - it automatically applies to everything your team creates.

You can also integrate Better Proposals with your CRM to pull in data automatically. Just set up merge tags across your sales materials and watch the magic happen.

2. Consistency

We've already told you that sales decks you create with Better Proposals are automatically on brand. What we didn't tell you is that you can decide how strict your brand guidelines are.

If you never want to risk a sales rep accidentally using the wrong color, all you have to do is limit it inside the global settings. What's more, you can add all your products and services, their descriptions, and the pricing directly into the system. That way, your reps are always operating with updated information.

When you create a template, you can lock sections you don't want anyone to change. You can add teams, give people different permissions, and set up manager approvals.

3. Collaboration

If your sales deck needs an extra pair of eyes, you can simply mention a teammate in a comment. There are no email attachments or compatibility issues to worry about.

Better yet, you don't have to wait for feedback until you're done with the entire deck. A teammate or a manager can jump into the same sales deck at the same time.

4. Centralized Content Library

With Better Proposals, you can create a centralized library with pre-approved content. Your slides, case studies, testimonials, and product information can then be added in two clicks.

Thanks to this, your templates become modular instead of rigid. Sales reps can easily swap out and add sections based on the client's industry and pain points.

5. Analytics

Would you like to know if a client took another look at your sales deck? How about who they forwarded it to? Maybe how much time they spent looking at which section?

With Better Proposals, you can. You get detailed activity tracking, plus analytics for existing sales materials and team performance. This means you'll know which content resonates best with your prospect, so you can adjust accordingly. It also means you'll know how each team and individual is performing so you can provide training when necessary.

6. Real-time objection handling

That's right, you've read that correctly. Better Proposals integrates with live chat software, meaning you can talk to your prospects as they're going through your pitch deck.

Paired with the activity tracking, this means you don't have to wait for them to make the next move. Instead, you can reach out proactively and handle objections right then and there.

7. Screen size? All of them

Unlike traditional presentation software, Better Proposals is web-based. This means your sales collateral always looks exactly like you wanted it to. Everything created inside Better Proposals adapts to all screen sizes - sales decks, proposals, contracts, all of it. Whichever device you can open a link on, Better Proposals makes it look great.

Creating a sales deck doesn't have to be a headache

It also doesn't have to take hours of editing and three rounds of approval. Better Proposals can help you make your sales deck creation process efficient, consistent, and effective. That way, your reps can focus on what really matters – building relationships with prospects and closing deals. All you have to do is sign up.