Cutting Pitch Development Time in Half | Jason Lapp - 1482

Developing a sales pitch can be time-consuming and challenging, especially when creating an entirely new presentation or document each time. But there’s undoubtedly an easier process, right? That’s exactly what today’s guest did. In today’s episode of The Sales Evangelist, Donald is joined by Jason Lapp, the president and COO of Beautiful.ai, to explain how you can cut your pitch development time in half.

But first, what is a pitch?

• Pitches can look wildly different for each person and company. Some might be an in-person meeting, some just a document, and others somewhere in between.
• In today’s world of remote selling, you have to be highly engaging, have great content, and be precise.  
• The biggest change? You can no longer expect a decision at that moment. You have to focus on the follow-up, sending the right information, in addition to the pitch itself.
• A big challenge with creating a deck is finding a balance between premade content and content for your specific pitch. 
• Branding should always be consistent, but the method you convey aspects of your pitch could vary.
• There are 30 million presentations created per day, and over 1 billion people with presentation software installed on their desktops.

The challenge? Those common presentation platforms were created 30 years ago.

• Platforms like Canva and Beautiful.ai don’t force people to start from scratch; they provide a starting point to get things done faster.
• Beautiful.ai focuses on design automation. You create content based on what you want to say while the platform designs for you. 
• Marketing departments can (and should) build out templates to provide starting points for the salesperson. This way, salespeople have pre-approved content they can then tweak for their specific client.

Creating a pitch:

• Once you know what you want to present, storyboard concepts before production. Storyboarding cuts down time by filling in the dots instead of plotting out where the dots need to go.
• Use some sort of collaborative platform, especially in today’s virtual marketplace.
• Salespeople need to focus on sales. They shouldn’t waste time on marketing elements when they could have pre-approved templates with design elements pre-approved.

Somebody out there is asking, “why not use google slides?”

• Google slides is excellent. Any platform that allows for collaboration is certainly a step in the right direction.
• The challenge with slides, keynote, or PowerPoint is that they are primarily design softwares. You can use old decks, but you then make each design edit yourself, whereas Beautiful.ai makes design decisions for you. 
• We do things as sales professionals that were established over the decades. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s right. We no longer have to be designers. 

Jason’s major takeaway? Don’t reinvent the wheel. If you’re creating a pitch, you should have content and templates to start from. Don’t spend time designing, spend time on selling. To contact Jason, visit his company website Beautiful.ai, and the software is free to trial and use. And, anybody that mentions they came from The Sales Evangelist gets 25% off! (How can you resist that?)

This episode is brought to you in part by Skipio.

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Audio provided by Free SFX and Bensound. Other songs used in the episodes are as follows: The Organ Grinder written by Bradley Jay Hill, performed by Bright Seed, and Produced by Brightseed and Hill.

Mentioned in this episode:

HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS

HubSpot and bluëmago | STUDIOS hubpspot.com/marketers bluemangostudios.com