According to Andy Raskin, the greatest sales deck has five elements. In this post, I'll present an adapted version. In line with the rest of this blog, I'll give an example of selling a programming language which is not Blub to a company, the newer language is called Y. Assume that the company is fine with language Blub because, well, everything is written in Blub and all the employees know Blub.
Name a big and relevant change in the world
Not moving saves energy and is what you and I like to do. To get the listener moving, show that the world around them is changing. For example:
Big data analysis is embedded in more and more companies and even nations.
Show that there will be losers and winners
Next, show that this change in the world is affecting their world:
Companies which do not use big data are not as efficient as companies who do. Customers switch to competitors because the competitors can help them better and faster.
Amazon has switched from selling books to being the biggest cloud provider in the world.
Tease the promised land
Transition from the big picture to the thing you're selling. Don't move to fast, or you lose the audience.
Customers see the results of automated analyses this helps them in their daily life.
Introduce features as "magic gifts" for overcoming obstacles to the promised land
The big solution has been presented, but now the listener wants to know how to do that difficult thing. Luckily, you are there with the solution already:
With language Y, software developers are more productive than ever and language Y is very suitable for doing analyses.
Present evidence that you can make the story come true
Listeners are now likely to be skeptical about whether you can actually solve that big problem that was introduced before. Therefore, show evidence that you can really solve the problem.
Together with company Foo, we have put three big data systems into production in as little as one year.