Marketing maven Seth Godin writes on his
blog that if you make something people want to buy, then presentation matters less.
He tells the following story from the year 2000, after he sold his company to Yahoo (and long before Google and Facebook dominated in online advertising):
“… when I first got to Yahoo, I was excited. All my life I’d been selling media… sometimes I failed slowly, other times I barely succeeded. I was pretty good at it, if you compared me to everyone else in the field, but it was by no means easy.
The Yahoo guys were different, though. Where it took my staff and me months or even years to make a million dollar sale, Yahoo’s salesforce was doing five or ten million deals every week or so. They knew the secret. They were supertalented, highly trained and very, very motivated.
So, now I was at Yahoo, playing for the winning team, and I was invited to go along on a sales call. I was vibrating in my shoes in anticipation.
You’ve probably already guessed the punchline. It was one of the single most inept sales presentations I’d ever seen. A lousy powerpoint. A non-charismatic, non-empathetic salesperson who faced the wall and read the fine print on the slides aloud. At the end of the presentation, he mumbled something about being able to take a check.
A few minutes later, the prospect handed over four million dollars.”
For Godin, the lesson is that sometimes presentation and salesmanship are overrated.
Sometimes what matters most is making the right product, not hyping it.