Spotify Intro Deck
The modern-day 'intro deck' flowered from the 'corporate overview' of around a couple of decades back. Which in itself was a slideshow borne from old style site sellers flipping over pages in-person and, more hi-tech for its day, the fancy carousel projected marvels in darkened, often smoke-filled meeting rooms.
Where such evolution works, is that the corp-overviews used to be tortuous. Too many slides. Too detailed a content. Parsing this down to just a relevant handful of messages was always a winner.
The above sextet appears produced by 'New York & San Diego Powerpoint designers', Slidegenius. The one of their 4,000 clients highlighted in this case being music streamer, Spotify.
It may (or not) well be the 'intro deck' used for Enterprise ad spend prospects. Spanning at least March 2019 to the end of '21.
I happened across a marketing podcast featuring half-hour with a recently departed five-year vet of Spotify's ad sales team. She began with ads around ten percent of revenue. Upon leaving, they'd grown impressively to half.
She touched on the Enterprise selling approach used. Including something similar, if not the same as, the set of slides above.
Mentioning there may well have been a couple of extra ones added. Dependent on need.
As to the purpose of this intro deck, note her words;
"What's the definition of success? Securing the first meeting".
Well, clearly the outfit was not without success. But I have to say, it feels despite, not because of, this collateral.
I got the same sense when reading the (excellent, by the way) Predictable Revenue. As per one of Jim Collins' statements which has aged well; Best Beats First. And neither Salesforce CRM nor Spotify music streaming were first in their space. Instead, they saw from the original innovators what prevented scale and nailed it themselves.
Still a laudable achievement.
Yet my point is, that this kind of shows the much-vaunted PLG writ large. Product-Led Growth. Where you don't need a salesteam, because the product sells itself. Gaining clients through word-of-mouth, spreading like wildfire.
So anyone working at Spotify back then - and perhaps even now too, given the latest streamer push into podcasting and elsewhere - didn't really have to truly 'work hard' for their money. Genuine, albeit rare case of 'right place, right time'. A bit like the only seaside prom restaurant around. People were inclined to throw cash at it. Advertisers being no different, desperate to say they were there.
Maybe that's what this lady meant when she says she moved because she 'needed a new challenge'. Suspecting times might be getting tougher. Or maybe not, after all five years for a managerial tech industry native is a long time at any organisation.
Still. The themes of this intro deck were to 'set out their stall' and 'to show how different they were from other ad platforms [big ticket] clients deal with'.
Which does not strike me as the right approach at all. Compounded by the actual content of the above graphics.
It's just all too much leaning 'me me me', isn't it.
It is notoriously tricky to truly get on the prospect side of the table.
Yet all salespeople think they can do it with aplomb.
Spoiler; they can't.
Even I struggle with this at times. Yep.
None of the above seems to really inform a potential advertiser why they'd be better off siphoning funds their way.
In an 'are your potential customers like our listeners..?', or 'how many of your target market place listen with us..? type manner.
And that's all before we get to the calibre, appropriateness and slant of the actual imagery itself. It can't be just me - and I am a voracious consumer and creator of music - but the pics feel generic, vanilla and vacuous.
There may be an ever so slight chance of caveat. Given that there could be a pair of slides missing here.
Yet when we learn of the follow-up deck, this might not be the case. Its purpose includes, 'telling their story back to them'. (An aim which does merit a ✓, incidentally.)
What this also introduces, is an intriguing piece of salesforce knowledge management.
Further presentations intended 'to respond to what you've learned from the client'. Salespeople had access to a 'Question Bank'. This 'armed the salesteam to tailor' their pitches. With a 'Grab Bag' of slides to choose ones 'which'll resonate with the client'.
Given my background, this is the element striking me the most.
I've heard of many initiatives along such lines. Yet despite being so important, seldom see one working well. How is yours running?