Evan Carmichael critiques Joey's HR consulting pitch deck, which buries its value in text and vague language. The fix: cut the copy, lead with concrete benefits like 50-60% cost savings, use a one-sentence tagline, and add credibility signals like client names and testimonials.
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Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael. Welcome to another edition of Ask Evan. In today's episode, I'm going to answer a question from one of my readers, Joey, who has a company called HRpreneur, and he asked me a question and wanted me to check out his sales template strategy and wanted my advice on it. I thought it would be easier to kind of walk through it together and give you some advice by using my computer instead of going on the whiteboard. So if I look at the document that you sent, it's basically a sales presentation that I guess you're giving to entrepreneurs. He said back in his email that he's looking to target people who are a million dollars or more as entrepreneurs, and the email doesn't exactly say what he does, so attach information on HRpreneur in the article, marketing strategy to target SMEs with a million dollars or 10 employees or more. We provide solutions and services to all industries. However, I'm currently focused on industries that I have support throughout my career. So I'm still a little curious as to what he does, so I'm going to check out this presentation. And I don't know if this is what you're actually sending out to people, but let's go through it quickly. So who we are: HRpreneur is a human capital consulting firm with extensive knowledge that becomes an integral part of your company providing— Okay, so it's really long, right? Right here, this sentence is way too long. Nobody's going to read that, and nobody wants to hear you read that if you're doing a presentation. So you got to cut this down. Right away I'd say, you know, HRpreneur is your outsourced HR department, something like that, like quick, easy, you got to get to the point. These are entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs I'm sure as you can imagine, you're an entrepreneur, you don't have a lot of time to sit and listen to presentations or to read a whole bunch of text. So I would definitely cut that down to one quick line that people can understand quickly what it is you do and the value you have. Going a little bit more, we become you. 3, these 3 simple words guide our partnership. Immerses yourself in the organization's company dedicated to making human capital a strategic differentiator for our clients. You know what, it's great, it's what you do, but it's still kind of fluff. You're not getting to the point yet where I want to do business with you and really fully understand what you do. Mission, small and mid-sized corporations. Okay, vision, inspire. Okay, what or values, okay? People are going to flip through all this stuff because entrepreneurs are thinking, "What's in it for me?" Right? "How am I going to benefit from using your service?" So your mission, vision, all that stuff is great, you know, for you internally, and it may be something that your clients would care about ongoing, you know, once they're at the point where they're thinking, "Do I want to do business with you?" But right now, you got to get somebody interested, you got to tell them why they should do business with you, and you gotta hit them home right away. So we're, you know, we're 6 slides in, 7 slides in here, and you haven't grabbed me yet. Too much text on this page. I don't even want to read it. Flywheel, too much text again. It's great you're pulling concepts from Jim Collins' Hedgehog. Way too much text. Too much text, too much text. Now I'm scrolling, I'm scrolling, I'm looking for Cost is good. So how much is it going to cost me? These are typical costs. You save between 50-60% in cost per year. Okay, it's good. There's a benefit. Your services, okay, try to kind of squeeze that down. It'd be good if you had a process that maybe was clearly explained in diagrams. Industry specialties, you know, you said before you didn't have specialties, so I guess you do have some of them here. Industry questions. So, wow, this was a presentation that you're giving, you're going to lose a lot of people, they're going to be pretty bored. Just honest feedback, I had to go through a ton of presentations as a venture capitalist, and you got to cut down the slides, you have to cut down the number of words and speak to them more, and you got to grab the reader with value for them. So I kind of have a sense of how much your service costs, The benefits of using your service are buried somewhere in all that text that you have up there. I don't know who your clients are, for example, so who are some reference clients, what are some testimonials from them? Have you— are you just a startup? Like when did you start this business? Do you have any media attention recognition? Build some momentum to make me want to see that you're not just some fly-by-night operation that's going to leave me hanging next year when you go out of business. You know, this slide is cut off too, you might want to fix that one up. So less text, more value, straight to the point. Think about yourself as an entrepreneur, if you're getting pitched by another company, you don't have time to sit through huge presentations and nobody is going to read this if you send it to them. So you got to cut that down, make it more succinct. I think there is some value in what you have, you just got to say it more clearly, more quickly and hit home the benefits as soon as you can. So I hope that helps. If you guys like the video, please give it a thumbs up below. I'd love to hear what you have to think. Maybe you guys love this presentation. Love to hear some comments if you want to leave it underneath this video. And stay tuned for next episode.
