Strategy Slideshow Trouble

"When you have to rely on a slide show to explain your strategy then you are in real trouble as leaders of a sᴀʟᴇs team."

I've duly altered the above opening from an English broadsheet column by a former Ashes winning captain. Swapping in the label sales, where he talked cricket.

In his environment, you share the view that a "very corporate ... slide presenter" would bring problems. How similar though is our space? Well, we too are unlikely to warm to "a PowerPoint presentation packed full of buzzwords and management speak".

The fashion for lengthy decks to explain where we're headed stubbornly endures.

I like to break free from that.

I am not alone.

Judging by conversations I have long held in the field, those in Sales feel released at last when I talk instead of their singular encompassing mantra, process thread or solution framework.

If this is the case for your team, then imagine how a prospect best responds.

A visual needn't be ignored. Consider the angle for a switch on an old adage as our friend. Such as when, a word paints a thousand pictures.

In the current England Test cycle, there was much early promise. A side with just one win in seventeen did experience a turnaround. From 2022 the mantra arose, 'run towards the danger'. Yet that phase may well have run its course. Time feels ripe for at the very least a tweak.

In whatever direction they go, success won't come from a slide show. But from the quest distilled into repeatable form.

Our Sales push is no different.