Chapter 2

The Role of Slides in Today's Sales Training

I felt like I was in a war zone. The slides were bombs and the presenters were firing in every direction, but nobody was getting hit. It was just a bunch of loud bangs.

—Business Development Manager, Eastern Region, large networking firm

The Battle of the Slide Bulge

Have you been to one of these sessions? It's typical product training. All the salespeople are in a room for a full day. Eight hours later they walk out, bleary-eyed and shell-shocked after a long line of presenters has bombarded them with slide presentation after presentation on the latest and greatest products and features. Somewhere in the barrage of slides there should be something that connects those features and functions to value for the customer but, sad to say, this is not the standard.

Slides have negative impacts that reach far beyond the sales meetings with buyers that we described in Chapter 1. Unfortunately, slides are also the cornerstone of how marketing and sales enablement teams equip salespeople with critical knowledge. Salespeople learn the skills they need to do their jobs effectively through slides. And slides are the way the organization communicates to salespeople about the latest and greatest products and solutions. The key phrase here is “communicates to them” instead of “communicates with them.”

Studies show that people retain less than 20 percent of what is presented to them using slides. The “first three slides and last three slides” retention rule—which is scientifically proven—is in full effect. Later in this book you'll learn about the science that shows how passive forms of slide-based selling and slide-based training result in poor retention, poor motivation, and therefore poor results.

Another reason slide presentations are badly suited for sales training, as well as selling, is that they are limitless. By this we mean there are no generally accepted, hard and fast rules on how many slides are consumable by an audience within a specific amount of time, or on how much content is permissible on each slide. If there were, whiteboard selling probably wouldn't be such an attractive alternative.

One of the most frustrating things about slide-based training is that the information is transferred to sales reps in such a way that it can't actually be used to facilitate customer conversations. Most of the time, slide-based training becomes a pure transfer of knowledge process rather than equipping sales reps with the critical skills and knowledge they need to hold effective, value-driven conversations with both their company and their customers.

The Slide Agenda from Hell

Does the following sales training agenda look familiar?

It's no wonder salespeople need a stiff drink after a day like this (and this is just the morning agenda!). It's hard enough to retain information from just one of these presentations, let alone five or six or more.

Because these types of training sessions are for the most part noninteractive (with the exception of a five-minute Q&A session at the end), attendees are easily distracted by IMs and e-mails that arrive on their personal devices. If there are no repercussions from management for dozing off or replying to e-mail (after all, it's too dark in the room to see who's not paying attention), it's just too tempting to get distracted.

Not only is this type of training noninteractive, it is nonactionable. What are the expectations? What is a salesperson supposed to do with the information he or she has acquired after training like this?

It's the Norm

Each year, sales organizations large and small congregate at conference centers or headquarters in order to, among other things, get briefed on new products. Slide-based training is the norm for how to do this. For large events, the expense to bring everyone together can be astronomical—in some cases $10,000 or more per attendee (when factoring in travel, accommodation, and other event costs such as conference space, catering, and entertainment). If you accept the premise that only a small fraction of the information contained in a PowerPoint presentation is retained long-term, aside from the benefits of team building and awards dinners, your sales effectiveness dollars are not being put to good use at these meetings.

The Typical Annual Kickoff

We recently worked with a large software company that was planning its global annual kickoff, with more than 2,000 sales personnel flying in from more than 20 countries. The cost represented a significant percentage of the annual sales operations budget. Year after year, the agenda of the kickoff didn't change much. It always had the following key elements:

• Opening session
• Product sessions (slide presentations)
• Sales methodology training (some hands-on role playing)
• Awards dinners
• Motivational speaker
• Team building activity (treasure hunt, etc.)
• Closing session

Sales methodology training can be money well spent, assuming it is broadly adoptable, repeatable, and has the right level of accountability and measurement. To their credit, broad-spectrum methodologies that include elements such as organizational mapping, account management best practices, negotiation skills, and so on, usually involve hands-on role plays and scenarios, which help facilitate learning and retention. The weak link in an agenda like the one above, however, is the product presentation component of the sales meeting.

Later we will discuss how we helped this very same organization free itself from slide training jail and move to interactive, memorable, and effective sales training and enablement for important sales meetings and kickoffs. We worked closely with the marketing organization to change the way it created and delivered content during the training sessions.

Where Did That Slide Come From?

Even if slide handouts, binders, or laminated sales tools are handed out at the end of day-long presentations, these materials are most likely “round-filed,” lost, or put on a shelf to gather dust.

Sometimes presenters will hand out memory sticks at the end of their presentations, or post them to intranets. You may think your sales and marketing messages are locked down when you deliver the slide deck to your sales force and partners. But then the presentation mysteriously morphs and transforms itself as it makes its way around the organization, changed in a way that violates corporate guidelines. Some slides simply disappear, while others, often home grown, are inserted. Before you know it, a completely different message is being communicated to your potential buyers, one that could actually harm your brand and identity in the marketplace.

Slide-Fry Your Brain Online

Slides also play heavily in the way online training is conducted for a sales force regardless of size and industry. Internal webinars and other web meetings typically involve a remote version of in-person training—marketing or training personnel presenting slides. There is even more risk of poor retention with these types of training since there is no way to prevent attendees from “alt-tabbing” away from the presentation to do e-mail and other tasks. Online curriculums are also jam-packed with slides stored in learning management systems.

Maintaining online, slide-based learning also becomes a challenge for every training organization. The time and cost required to develop, redevelop, and even just tweak content can very quickly become a drain on resources. Version control can get out of hand, and with the multiple systems, intranets, and individual hard drives where online materials are stored, accessed, and distributed, it can become impossible to ensure that sales reps are using the most up-to-date content.

We hope we've convinced you that slides have the potential to be as damaging to sales training programs as they are to sales calls.