This article is based on a presentation given by Mikey Mioduski at #GTM23. Catch up on this presentation, and others, with GTM OnDemand. For more exclusive content, visit your GTM Blueprint dashboard.
Whether we’re in customer success, sales, marketing, or the C-suite, we have to communicate constantly. We're busy people juggling multiple priorities. But in this whirlwind of communications, there’s one thing that unites us all:
PowerPoint.
(Bet you thought I was going to say “revenue”, didn’t you?)
We’re all using slides to convey key information and strategy throughout an organization.
If you’re in a product-led organization, you probably don’t make a lot of sales decks or enablement slides. After all, your products speak for themselves – but your most important business strategies are likely still getting boiled down into slideshows.
The scary thing is that anyone can create a deck these days. That means we end up with countless PowerPoints or Google Slides floating around our company drives. You have to wonder – what do some of those slides say? What do they look like? Are they aligned with our company’s core message and vision?
Alignment is a huge challenge as organizations scale. By some estimates, a lack of alignment can cost a company up to 10% of its revenue. That means if you’re in a billion-dollar company and your teams are all pulling in different directions, you could be leaving $100 million on the table.
In short, you could be in trouble if you’ve got dozens of decks telling conflicting stories.
Now, I’m not here to tell you to stop everything, cull those conflicting decks, and make sure everything’s aligned – you don’t have time for that.
Instead, I’m going to talk about two or three key slides we see in most good presentations. If you can perfect these slides, they can serve as “narrative anchors” to ensure alignment across your organization. Scaling a consistent story is hard when different departments have to contribute to the same GTM strategy. Still, by nailing your narrative fence posts in slide decks, you can enable better alignment.
Anchor slides 1.0: The solution
Let’s start at the end and work backwards. We all love a good solution slide. It’s where we get to show off what we do – whether we’re in the SaaS, carbon removal, med tech, or even underwear industry. We get hyped up to reveal what we’re working on – but that’s also where we can trip up.
When we jump right into product features and claims, it can feel off-putting to the audience. Remember the pen sales scene in The Wolf of Wall Street? Jordan Belfort challenges his team to sell him a pen, and they all launch right into claims about how brilliant the pen is without addressing the customer’s needs. Old-school car ads were the same, touting brilliant features and velvety interiors.
Thank goodness the smart marketers of today know better.
As Christopher Lochhead, co-author of Play Bigger says, there are “too many solutions without problems.” After decades of having these solution slides crammed down our throats, we see them coming a mile off. What worked back in the day now falls flat because it doesn’t speak to our real problems and needs – and we all have unique ones.
That’s where the tried and true problem-solution combo punch comes in…
Anchor slides 2.0: Problem-solution
If you focus on only two slides, make them the problem and solution slides. They just belong together. We all love a good problem slide because it makes our solution look even better. It’s the yin to our yang, the before to our after, the peas to our carrots.
As storytelling experts have shown time and time again, engaging an audience with ups and downs makes them feel the story more viscerally. Our brains release chemicals that aid memory when exposed to moments of tension and release.
And, as Nancy Duarte says,
“If two products have the same features, the one that appeals to an emotional need will be chosen.”
Yet, most problem and solution slides out there look like this:
Tell me – at a glance, which one is the problem and which is the solution? We have to do better.
The power of visual storytelling
In this age of ever-shrinking attention spans, slides need to immediately convey their key message – and for that, you need powerful visuals. If you don’t take advantage of visual storytelling, you’re missing out. Our brains process images and the feelings they elicit much faster than text.
Look back at history’s most epic print ads. The best ones had no text at all. What’s the power of this Maxell cassette? See for yourself.
Clever, right?
When we arrive at our own conclusions from images alone, we’re more easily persuaded because we weren’t told what to think.
And it’s not just about icons and illustrations. Think about color, tone, and the feeling you want your slides to convey. Use every tool in the box to bring that feeling to life.
To give you an example, Mindtickle’s CMO, Chris Lynch, likes to push things to the edge with dramatic framing. If there’s an enterprise readiness crisis, he wants to make it look truly catastrophic. Even if you take the text away from the image below, you get an overwhelming sense this person is about to be crushed.
Framing problems so dramatically makes the solution feel so much more powerful by contrast.
If your current problem slides are littered with bullet points and don’t convey at a glance the problems that your customers are coming up against, it’s time for a new approach. Instead of relying on bullet points, break things up and make sure you show rather than tell the problem.
The book Pixar Storytelling analyzes what makes Pixar films so moving and memorable. As Dean Movshovitz writes, “The most moving endings show the results of the journey… preferably in a visual way.” For instance, at the start of Inside Out, core memories can only be happy, sad, angry, etc. But by the end, as the main character grows up, her memories take on more nuanced colors. We see her inner world transform visually – and that’s powerful.
So, as you create problem-solution slides, think about how you can visually illustrate the transformation from problem to solution.
Problem-solution is a powerful one-two punch that should be in every deck. If you had to cut every other slide, you’d likely keep these two because they introduce empathy along with solutions. We feel your pain – and here’s how we can help.
Anchor slides 3.0: Vision-problem-solution
So, having a strong problem and solution is a great start, but you need one more element to round out the narrative: the object of desire.
“The action of a story begins when we discover what someone wants.”
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin agrees. He says drama boils down to intention and obstacle. Someone has to desperately want something in order to overcome the problems standing in their way – that’s where the meat of the story lies.
This is an age-old formula for great storytelling. Way back in antiquity, Aristotle outlined the ideal dramatic structure: a setup, a series of trials, and a satisfying resolution.
So, let’s define our three key anchor slides:
- Vision
- Problem
- Solution
Rather than attempting a clumsy one-two-three punch combo, let’s liken this to volleyball’s famous bump-set-spike.
- The bump, or the vision, changes the ball’s direction, flipping it up to give you greater control. That initial point of contact lets you lift the vision or narrative up for examination.
- The set, or the problem, further controls the ball’s placement so you can strategically aim your message at your target audience.
- The spike, or the solution, is the part where you strategically deliver your message with the best possible framing, to your audience.
Let’s dive a little deeper.
The vision
There are many ways to conceptualize that opening vision slide to tee up your narrative. It could be a goal, mission, purpose, a “job to be done”, the promised land, or an ideal future state. But let’s keep it simple.
As one smart marketer told me, there are two kinds of visions:
- Daydreams: The ideal – think streets paved with gold and not a threat in sight.
- Nightmares: What you desperately want to avoid – like getting eaten by a shark.
If you’re selling to marketers, you might want to paint a dream scenario of seamless marketing success. Meanwhile, if you’re selling to procurement or finance teams, you might be better off illustrating a nightmare to avoid, like hackers, loss of revenue, or straight-up redundancy.
RingCentral set the vision perfectly in a campaign aimed at CIOs. First, they highlighted the pressure to see ROI on digital investments and transformation. That set up the problem of siloed communication preventing those coveted “digital dividends.” And then, they spiked their solution: intelligent connected experiences. Ta-da!
When you align on these three slides, it helps the whole team play together towards one scalable story.
Let’s check out another example. You wouldn’t expect exciting slides from a wastewater treatment company like Hach, right? Wrong!
First, they lay out a vision of better data on wastewater flows. Next, they showed what stands in the way of that vision: the many steps involved in the long and complex wastewater treatment process. Finally, they present their unique solution to that problem.
See how framing the desired end state and then showing what’s blocking it sets up the solution spike? It’s a powerful combo.
Somewhere in there, you also need your unique POV. In Play Bigger, the authors recommend owning the problem if you’re charting new territory, or owning the solution approach if you’re in an established space.
Scaling your story
To recap, to make sure your message lands, you want to bump your vision, set up the problems, and spike your solution.
Of course, just three slides won’t always cut it. For instance, in a first call deck, you’ll certainly need safe harbor statements, specifics on how you deliver, customer proof points, etc. However, these three narrative pillars – vision, problem, and solution – form the three main branches that everything else sprouts from.
Bump the vision, set the problem, spike the solution. Then it gets easy to go deeper – what are the three key benefits of this vision? Great! But three big obstacles stand in the way. No worries – we’ve got these features to help you overcome them. This is how it scales company-wide.
If you’re communicating the big-picture strategy, stick to the main plot first. And then, for the various internal and external characters involved in this story, hone in on the specific subplots they care about most, whether that’s a certain feature or a particular benefit.
When you nail these three slides, you can align all your go-to-market teams around them and make sure everyone’s telling the same core story. Just start small with a bump-set-spike and see where it takes you!
