How to build your first sales materials
What you actually need, what to skip and templates to get you started
While there are dozens of sales materials you could create, the first four you actually need for an early-stage B2B startup are:
A discovery deck for initial discovery or disco/demo calls
A proposal deck for packaging, pricing and implementation
An internal FAQ for answering customer questions and objections
A blurb for warm intros
Why only four? As an early-stage startup your product, positioning and messaging changes rapidly, so the more sales materials you create, the more sales materials you’ll need to maintain. Keeping the surface area of your sales materials small keeps your maintenance overhead low.
Why not one-pagers and case studies? Your website is your one-pager. You don’t need case studies to persuade early adopters to buy your product. Case studies are social proof for later adopters.
This post covers what to include in each of these 4 materials, what to skip and templates for each to get you started.
What to include in your discovery deck
The goal of a discovery deck is to provide structure and visual aids for an initial discovery call or disco/demo call. The key slides are: