B2B sales reps face an impossible task: making the same one-size-fits-all corporate sales deck work for every prospect.
The average sales cycle often includes as many as 11 to 20 different stakeholders, each with their own needs and priorities. So, why are they all presented with the same sales content? It’s easy to see that one generic sales deck is woefully inadequate for addressing the nuances of each deal.
Yet, that’s what most sales reps are armed with…A giant PowerPoint deck filled with company-approved slides.
‍These presentations—developed by well-meaning Marketing Departments to enable Sales—keep growing in an attempt to satisfy every need, and to include every potentially relevant nugget of information.
‍The problem?
When the monster deck doesn’t meet the needs of a particular deal … it starts getting modified.
When a rep wants to tell a different story … they create their own version.
When everybody starts doing it … the sales process descends into chaos.
It’s not a new problem. It’s just one that new presentation tools, sales enablement platforms, and other approaches continuously fail to solve.
‍Sales is frustrated.
Marketing leaders are pulling their hair out.
Leadership wants results.
And prospects deserve better.
‍It’s time to rethink sales enablement. Introducing: The Modular Sales System.
Ready to discover how a simple mindset shift is transforming the way modern B2B teams sell?
Ready to make a compelling sales story your competitive advantage?
Ready to put an end to disorganized decks, content chaos, and rogue reps?
Then this is the guide for you.
In theory, a well-designed sales presentation is a sales rep’s secret weapon for converting prospects into buyers. In reality, every deal is different, and one-size-fits-all sales decks simply aren't up to the task.
The sales enablement process typically involves a company-approved presentation deck produced by Marketing and handed off to Sales–often without Sales’ input.
It's packed with statistics, diagrams, bullet points, case studies ... anything and everything a rep might need.
There’s just one problem:
‍It overwhelms prospects. Sales reps recognize this. That’s why they take matters into their own hands and modify presentations as they see fit (after all, they’ve got a quota to meet).
We all know where this leads…
“The Frankenstein” A rambling hodgepodge of slides, cobbled together without a cohesive story or brand consistency
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‍“The Rogue” An off-brand, off-message copy of the approved sales deck that has been modified by a single rep to suit his tastes
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"The Snowball” A long-winded deck with an overwhelming amount of information, that just keeps getting bigger
Companies have tried to solve this issue for years. They experiment with numerous presentation software solutions, thinking one must hold the secret to reining in their sales teams and streamlining their sales process.
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But, presentation software alone won't address the core problem: a broken system, built on a disconnect between Sales’ ever-evolving needs, what Marketing can reasonably provide, and what prospects actually want.
Companies have tried to solve this issue for years. They experiment with numerous presentation software solutions, thinking one must hold the secret to reining in their sales teams and streamlining their sales process.
It’s easy to blame sales reps for going rogue and presenting unapproved decks. After all, it’s every rep for themselves as they try to top the leaderboard and generate new business.
But sales reps are just one victim of the broken sales system.
Sure, Reps waste hours every week hunting for content assets and taking presentation design into their own hands…
But Marketing is putting tons of time into branded sales content that ends up being modified, misused, and mismanaged.
Meanwhile, the Brand is in the throes of an identity crisis. Efforts to outposition competitors and establish a market-leading presence are undermined by weak, inconsistent messaging.
And the end result is impacting those who matter most: Prospects. They’re looking for an efficient solution to their business challenges, but getting a disorganized pitch that lacks a cohesive story doesn’t inspire confidence.
Your organization may be worried about the cost of adopting a new sales enablement platform or undergoing a major sales content overhaul—but the greatest expense of all may be the cost of inaction.
Consider the time your reps spend engaged in activities other than selling:
Ultimately, the cost of a mismanaged sales process with all these additional tasks can be astronomical. And it only gets worse as teams grow. Scaling a business is nearly impossible with dozens or hundreds of reps trying to navigate a chaotic system.
Here’s a look at how much sales presentations could cost a company with a 100-person team:
Most organizations believe they’re just one new tool away from dispelling their presentation disorganization problem. Some think that redesigning their sales content … again … is enough to eliminate inconsistencies and restore order. Others think more Sales oversight is the answer.
But, until the company adopts a fundamentally different approach to conveying their sales story, it's only a matter of time until it all unravels again.
Transforming how sales content is created and presented starts with a brand new perspective.
It's time to adopt the Modular Mindset.
If your organization suffers from presentation chaos, you’re not alone. It's a problem that has been firmly in place for over 3 decades, since the early days of presentation design software.
Legacy presentation tools offer a way for anyone to share information visually. But, they also give every employee the freedom to be a designer, a copywriter, and a branding expert … whether or not they have the skills.
Presentation tools like PowerPoint have been used to tweak, edit, and rearrange slide decks for 30+ years. And yet, the same problems remain; companies still struggle to keep their sales presentations organized, consistent, and controlled.
Change is long overdue.
Even as tools become more user-friendly, with beautiful templates and fancy design features, modern presentation solutions continue to miss the core problem. They don’t strike the right balance between control and flexibility.
Fancy presentation design tools
Pretty slide decks are a great lure, but they can’t mask an inconsistent sales story. Even the nicest templates don’t prevent sales reps from wasting time hunting down content, designing slides, or modifying presentations.Big sales enablement platforms
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Powerful sales tools come with great promise.
But, they also come with a huge investment in onboarding, training, and money. Even after all that investment, reps will still be building presentations the same old way.
If tools alone aren’t the solution, then what is? How can a high-growth organization arm a rapidly expanding sales team with the resources it needs to maximize productivity and deliver sales presentations that are both customized and consistent?
‍It comes down to a simple mindset shift.
A shift from: The practice of modifying old presentations in order to create new ones.
‍A shift to: Assembling new presentations from pre-approved modular content “building blocks.”
Much like Lego building blocks, modular content is designed to fit together easily, in numerous ways, with consistent results.
It provides the control necessary for unified brand messaging.
And the flexibility reps need to tailor presentations.
But how is modular content created? What does it look like? How does it work?
Answer: The Modular Sales System.
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With a modular mindset, your organization’s approach to developing and distributing sales content fundamentally changes.
Gone are the days of the massive, long-winded sales deck. Gone is the need for reps to create their own iterations of it.
With the Modular Sales System, everyone can build custom presentations from the same approved, modular content elements.
Think of them as chapters in a book.Each rep can choose the chapters they need, and assemble the right story for each touchpoint.It’s fast.
It’s easy. And it’s scalable.
The Modular Sales System consists of 3 core pillars that make it all possible. You’ll learn more about them in the sections that follow, but here’s a sneak peak.
1. Story Development
Prospects need different information at different stages of the buyer journey. With the right story architecture, you’ll have the right messaging and visuals for every prospect and every touch point—in the form of modular content “building blocks.”
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2. Presentation Delivery
Enabling exceptional presentations means giving sales reps the right tools for the job. With a well-organized content library, a user-friendly toolset, and a modern way to share, anyone can build custom presentations from modular building blocks to tell consistent sales stories and deliver them effortlessly.
3. Selling at Scale
A sales process must be optimized to work at scale. Harnessing the right data insights allows organizations to continuously iterate and evolve, fueling sales productivity and performance. Modular presentations make it easy to monitor, measure, and improve where it matters most.
At its core, sales enablement is about helping your sales team engage with prospects more effectively. That means every member of your team can consistently articulate your brand’s promise and the value your solution delivers.
It’s not enough to show prospects the various features of your product or service; they have to understand the problems you can help them solve, how you solve them, and, ultimately, the outcome your solution will produce.
These elements—and the order they’re presented in—are vital components of your sales story.
B2B sales are often characterized by large purchases and long sales cycles. But why the prolonged sales process?
Often, prospects are making a significant investment that involves input and approval from multiple stakeholders. Each stakeholder has their own anxieties, fears, objections, and other considerations weighing on them throughout the buyer journey—and the sales rep is responsible for addressing every one to make the sale.
For sales teams, delivering the right message at each stage of that journey is the key to meeting prospects where they are, mitigating their concerns, and moving them forward.
‍A sales story is the narrative that does just that.
‍While many sales teams have a loose collection of presentation assets to draw from—like one-pagers, customer testimonials, product specs, and price sheets—they are rarely used in a strategic way (and that’s putting it nicely).
A well-planned sales story is delivered through well-timed presentations. Content organized into a cohesive message, with a logical sequence mapped to the steps in your sales process, enables your team to share targeted presentations, combat objections, and persuade prospects with ease.
Once you’ve developed a narrative that speaks to prospects at every stage of the sales process, how will you use it?
Here’s where the modular mindset comes in.
Instead of delivering a presentation with the entire story at once, consider how the story can be broken down into modular components—or building blocks.
Ask yourself: which parts of our story are most relevant to prospects at each stage of the buyer’s journey?
Should your first sales presentation contain market research that supports the need for your services? When is the right time to introduce detailed product features? When will case studies and testimonials have the most impact?
Think of these different messaging elements as chapters in your sales story. Consider where each chapter best fits into your sales process and who the information in that chapter is intended for.
With a modular approach to sales content, your reps can employ the right chapters at the right time to move any given prospect forward in the sales process.
The result? Sales teams with dozens or even hundreds of reps can deliver highly customized presentations by selecting the content they need … instead of attempting to create it themselves.
Once you’ve developed a narrative that speaks to prospects at every stage of the sales process, how will you use it?
Here’s where the modular mindset comes in.
Instead of delivering a presentation with the entire story at once, consider how the story can be broken down into modular components—or building blocks.
Ask yourself: which parts of our story are most relevant to prospects at each stage of the buyer’s journey?
Should your first sales presentation contain market research that supports the need for your services? When is the right time to introduce detailed product features? When will case studies and testimonials have the most impact?
Think of these different messaging elements as chapters in your sales story. Consider where each chapter best fits into your sales process and who the information in that chapter is intended for.
With a modular approach to sales content, your reps can employ the right chapters at the right time to move any given prospect forward in the sales process.
The result? Sales teams with dozens or even hundreds of reps can deliver highly customized presentations by selecting the content they need … instead of attempting to create it themselves.
1. Presentation Architecture
‍The goal of this step is to map out a sequence of presentations that each play a specific role in your sales process. Be sure to include both Sales and Marketing here, as a common understanding of the complete buyer’s journey is essential.
Begin by identifying the stages in your brand's sales cycle. What content is mostly likely to engage prospects and move them forward at each stage? Do you have that content already? Does it need to be improved or will it need to be created from scratch? (Tip: Don’t overthink it! This exercise should be simple enough to sketch out on a napkin.)
Using this “presentation flow” as a guide, begin outlining each presentation. Don’t worry about visuals yet. Simply describe the information page by page, using as few words as possible.
This step is complete when you’ve developed individual presentations for prospects at the beginning, middle, and final stages of your sales process. These will become the modular “chapters” that make up your brand’s sales story.
2. Presentation Visualization
As you develop the chapters of your modular sales story, you’ll want to consider the clearest, most compelling way to present them. Here’s where the right visuals will make all the difference, helping prospects easily understand—and remember—your presentations.
Take stock of your existing visuals. Could a simple animation take the place of that confusing diagram? Could a well-executed product visualization make a stronger impact than several text-heavy slides? Could a short explainer video help prospects quickly understand how your solution works?
Here, you’ll also want to address visual inconsistencies. Ensure brand elements like logos, colors, and fonts are accurate, and look for ways to add continuity to layouts, images, icons, and other graphic elements.
With compelling visuals, consistent branding, and presentations mapped to each stage of the buying process, your modular sales story is ready to deploy. Your reps will be armed with the building blocks they need to create customized sales presentations without straying from company-approved content.
Next, you’ll learn how to put it into practice at scale and transform the way your team sells. This is where choosing the right presentation platform is a game changer.
Your new modular sales story may be designed to effectively engage prospects at every stage of the buying journey … but that alone won’t guarantee a streamlined process.
Ongoing modifications dilute the story, leading to weak, incorrect, or non-compliant presentations. And, if reps are still wasting time reconfiguring content to suit their needs, they’re spending less time selling.
The key to controlling your sales story lies in leveraging a Closed Presentation Platform.
While Open Presentation Platforms like PowerPoint can be a good solution for internal slides or one-off decks, organizations delivering a large number of sales presentations on these platforms constantly struggle with a lack of control.
A Closed Presentation Platform—or CPP—is designed for sales teams that need to organize, create, and deliver presentations with the highest degree of consistency.
With a CPP like Nuvue, sales reps can quickly assemble presentations using approved content assets. Custom edit permissions ensure that changes can only be made to specific elements by certain users.
Powerful features like a drag & drop presentation builder allow sales reps to create tailored presentations with modular building blocks for different prospects, buyer stages, or products in mere seconds.
An effective CPP tackles three critical presentation management challenges: Control, Access, and Time.
‍Control
With a CPP, all sales content is locked down with strict edit permissions. This ensures that information about your organization, products, and services stays consistent and compliant.
Access
A CPP serves as a single source of truth for your sales content, so users can always find the latest and most accurate versions of every asset—no matter how often it evolves.
Time
A CPP puts an end to countless hours wasted on presentation design. Sales reps have presentation-ready content at their fingertips, so they can simply drag, drop, and present.
Key features of a Closed Presentation Platform:
Your organization’s sales story should be a living, breathing, ever-evolving narrative. But the more your team grows, the more often that story will be told … and the more important it will be to implement guardrails to maintain consistency.
Traditional Open Presentation Platforms keep content unlocked, leaving the door open for problems.
A Closed Presentation Platform offers flexibility without compromising consistency.
But the story isn’t over when your sales reps hit SEND. The modular mindset thrives on continuous improvement. That’s where the final step comes in—measuring performance and turning data insights into action that fuels sales growth.
As organizations scale, growing pains are inevitable. With scaling sales teams, there aren’t just more reps; there are more prospects, more products, and more markets … all contributing to a chaotic process with unpredictable outcomes. Sales forecasts that should rely on the ability to spot trends, measure performance, and identify what is and isn’t working are more guesswork than science.
This is where a modular sales story—combined with the right presentation platform—becomes a major advantage.
In the old days, sales leaders would only know if a presentation worked if a prospect bought. They had no insight into when (or if) presentations were viewed, if reps were following up with prospects, what content was converting, and what caused the sales cycle to lag.
This passive, wait-and-see approach is a hallmark of the traditional presentation mindset … and there’s no place for passivity in the Modular Sales System.
With a modular mindset, data can easily connect positive results to specific elements—a high-performing presentation, a single content asset, a particular product, or an individual rep. Once those elements are identified, it’s a lot easier to see the path to an improved sales process.
Dedicated analytics in a Closed Presentation Platform provides granular data on individual content assets and team member performance, empowering teams likes yours to:
Every modern, high-growth sales team should be leveraging data, but not all of them have instant access to it. A platform that provides the right insights and an easy way to implement improvements represents a true competitive advantage.
For far too long, the traditional presentation mindset has made sales reps the bad guys. In an effort to boost their performance, reps have resorted to modifying sales content in an unsustainable way—and scaling organizations pay the price with a chaotic sales process.
Thankfully, there’s a new way. One that helps growing B2B teams sell smarter and faster without sacrificing consistency.
Adopting the modular mindset doesn’t have to be a pipe dream. With Nuvue, B2B sales teams are turning the Modular Sales System into their competitive advantage. Nuvue is a Closed Presentation Platform that helps organizations just like yours deliver customized presentations that engage and inform prospects with unprecedented efficiency.
‍Ready to transform the way your team sells?
‍Rest assured, you won’t get a high-pressure software demo. In just 30 minutes, we’ll show you what your modular sales story looks like, and we’ll even build your first modular presentation with you. It’s that easy.
‍Schedule a Hello Call today to see exactly how The Modular Sales System will scale your sales engine, control your sales story, and save your team thousands of hours each year.
