How to Personalize Your Sales Deck To Boost Sales

1) Research your audience

Start by diving deep into your audience’s world:

• Use analytics to understand their behavior
• Conduct interviews to gain insights into their needs and pain points
• Review customer service conversations to identify common issues
• Listen to sales call recordings to understand the questions and objections that arise during the sales process (or use tools like Gong)

This research will give you a well-rounded understanding of your audience.

2) Define your value proposition

Once you have a deep understanding of your audience, define your value proposition.

This is a clear statement that explains how your product solves customers’ problems, delivers specific benefits, and why it’s better than the alternatives.

Your value proposition should be compelling and directly address the needs of your audience.

Here’s a video explaining how to write value propositions for sales presentations:

3) Outline your narrative (make it about your prospect, not you)

Your sales deck should follow a story – a narrative that portrays your client as a hero embarking on a journey to overcome a major challenge and reach the safety of a better future.

The narrative should position your solution as the trusted guide leading your client through uncharted waters and empowering them to fulfill their full potential.

The “challenge” should be an acute pain felt by your prospect that you can solve, and the “better future” should be the outcome they seek.

This approach makes your sales deck more memorable and adds a layer of emotion prospects can relate to.

It structures the sales deck around your prospect and helps you avoid the common pitfall of talking too much about you and your solution.

Here’s our recommended storyline:

4) Gather relevant social proof

Social proof in a sales deck has 2 goals: (1) to create peer envy and (2) to prove you can do the job.

To create peer envy, your social proof should be as close as possible to the prospect’s own circumstances.

It should answer the question “Is this solution good for people like me?”

Take into consideration that ”People like me” is a perceived label, not a factual label. So put yourself in your prospect’s shoes and ask yourself “Who am I (aspiring to be)”.

For example, I could be an executive manager aiming to become a CEO. In this case, a testimonial by a CEO would serve better than a VP.

To show you can do the job, make sure to add quotes and case studies that show you’ve already brought the outcomes they want to a company like theirs or (preferably) bigger.

5) Segment your sales deck for different decision-makers, industries, or use cases

It’s a commonplace challenge to build a sales deck that addresses all the critical decision-makers for landing the deal. But you aim for one and you miss the others, that’s just life, right? No… it’s not.

You can segment your sales decks for multiple decision-makers without giving up anything. This is how –

Use tabs – For example, you could have a tab for each industry you serve, each decision-maker role, or each use case of your product. This way, decision-makers will be exposed only to the information they want.

Use dynamic variables – For example, you could use a dynamic variable to address known decision-makers by name within your content, where their specific attention is needed.

Link to resources for specific decision-makers – For example, information the CFO, Legal, or CIO might need to access before they make their decision.

They get their info while you get to avoid the anticlimax of including financial spreadsheets, legal documents, or cyber security specifications in your sales deck.

Here’s how you can do this using Storydoc:

6) Prepare original visuals

Use visuals that exemplify the prospect’s world. Show people like them doing what people like them do.

But also avoid generic stock images and videos. Show your own people in action if possible, or better yet, find images or videos that show real people from real clients.

It may take more work but it will make your content instantly more credible and relatable.