Crafting Insights-Based Selling Stories is a Team Effort

By Sue Nicholls, CMKG

The role of the sales professional has been evolving in response to various market dynamics, changing retailer demands, and the need to create insights-driven, shopper-focused solutions for their customers. A key output of the sales professional – the sales presentation – is typically a PowerPoint deck of many slides initially created by internal resources (like brand and marketing), created by people who don’t necessarily understand the market and retail environment, or may not have consideration for customer’s strategies and pain points. These presentations tend to talk about their company and brands (instead of the category/retailer/shopper) and show a lot of data; but in many cases, the data does not provide the right insights to sell the idea or isn’t relevant for the story. The internal sales presentation is then handed down to the sales team, who further tinkers with the it, customizing it to specific retail customer needs (usually with the help of their category management team if they have one).

How effective is the presentation? All over the map!

Focus on the audience and their needs? Not usually. Highlight only the key insights relevant to sell the idea? Nope – many tend to drone on with irrelevant data. Present the idea with logic and flow that make it easy for the audience to say “yes”? Some presentations forget to iterate what they are asking for.

The struggle is real! But there is a way to move to the next level of presentations in your organization.

The opportunity? Develop effective selling stories for your business. This requires internal alignment, and in fact, it may be your internal approach and lack of internal alignment across the broader “team” that is the biggest barrier to moving to insights-based selling stories. Creating these insights-based selling stories includes:

1. Crafting narratives that resonate with the customer
2. Talking about the customer and their categories/shoppers, and promoting how your brand can help
3. Building an emotional connection using vivid and powerful slides with compelling insights to paint a picture of the opportunities; and
4. Ultimately, getting your customers to say “yes” to your idea.

There are three requirements necessary to move to aligned storytelling:

1. Market, Category and Customer Understanding:

Brand and marketing teams need to understand and consider the total market, channels, retailers, and category and how a brand or marketing idea is going to grow total category (and in which channels and key retailers) or benefit the shopper within the total market.

Sales teams need to know their customers and focus presentations specifically on their audience. The customers’ overall strategies, pain points, rules & guidelines, KPI’s and shoppers need to be apparent in the story.

1. Insight-Driven Decision Making:

Teams adept at analyzing and using data are equipped to create insights (using key data sources like scanned sales, POS syndicated, panel and shipment data). I’m using the term “teams” loosely, as it should include brand and marketing (that create the “base” selling story), and external teams like sales and category management (that receive the presentation and customize based on their retail customer). It’s not just about being able to read data or rehash information, it’s about being able to create insights – which are focused explanations of business opportunities, based on a combination of data perspectives, with both business context and action applied to them.

By understanding the changing dynamics of the market, their channels and retail customer(s), their category(s) and their shoppers, brand/marketing/sales professionals are better armed to create insights that help them to:

1. Identify Growth Opportunities: Look at brands and products as part of broader categories, and understand the overall market dynamics, competition, trends and shifts in shopper behavior.
2. Make Fact-Based Assortment and Tactical Decisions and Recommendations: Many organizations still have 100 per cent distribution targets for their brands (this is not realistic or strategic). By understanding strategy and different shopper needs based on channels and specific retailers, teams can identify the right products to build category sales and ensure the right products are available to meet customer needs at the right place and time. They can also use data to make informed decisions on other tactics, such as adjusting pricing strategies, launching targeted promotions, and optimizing product placement.
3. Contribute to Revenue Growth: By optimizing product assortments, pricing, and promotions within a category, teams can contribute to revenue growth. This is especially important in competitive markets where businesses need to continuously adapt to changing customer preferences and market dynamics.
4. Focus on Cost Efficiency: Analysis can identify cost-saving opportunities by streamlining product assortments and improving operational efficiency, which can result in better inventory management, reduced carrying costs, and improved overall profitability.
5. Respond to Changing Market Trends: Staying on top of the latest industry trends, market dynamics and emerging opportunities, enables teams to adjust and refine their selling stories with evolving market conditions.
6. Building the Presentation:

Despite the tendency to jump into PowerPoint to create a “deck”, start by creating an outline (or a storyboard) first. And have your “team” involved in creating the storyboard to make sure everyone is on the same page, including:

1. Purpose of the presentation: What’s the end goal for you? Who is your customer?
2. Audience: What’s most important to the customer as it relates to the purpose of the presentation? Are there any anticipated objections that need to be addressed?
3. The hook: What’s the value of the opportunity (what’s in it for me)?
4. Top insights: What are the 2 or 3 relevant insights (not data points – but insights) that will sell in the idea?
5. Summary
6. Action Plan

Once you create your outline, use PowerPoint to get the logic and flow right, and then visually improve through data visualization to help the insights “sing” in your story. Make sure your teams are adept in using PowerPoint – it can be a sore point if you have a team working on presentations that don’t know the basics!

Crafting insights-based selling stories requires many different skills and a teamwork-type approach, usually using multi-functional resources). Organizations who can master these skills will break down internal silos, become more of an insights-based organization, create an aligned approach, and have their customers say “yes” to many more of their ideas. This ultimately drives profitable sales for the company. It’s a challenging but highly rewarding experience that will transform your organization’s approach to developing presentations.

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