Introduction

Okay, good evening, everybody.

It's really good to be back here. I was at that first MindStone event that Josh mentioned.

It's been incredible to be part of this community, seeing how it's grown and all the energy that exists in the room. So thank you for sharing it with me this evening.

So I'm going to talk about a lot of things quite quickly because there's so much fun detail to go through. So don't panic.

What I did last night was create a page here on my site which just has everything I'm going to go through here. And I'll update it in case there's something I forgot.

So don't feel you've got to be scribbling notes. You can sort of pay attention on the big picture.

So great to be here.

Setting the Stage

Before we get going, what I want to do is see a show of hands. So who's used Google Slides in the last seven days, or PowerPoint?

There's some lucky developers in the room. We don't have to do it.

Who thought that was a sort of 7, 8, or 9, or 10 out of 10 experience? Who has been blown away by PowerPoint or Google Slides?

No. Yeah, there you go. Amazing.

We'll show you some new things this evening.

And who's taken part in a sales call in the last 30 days? Hands up, okay.

Now, who's got a personal chief marketing officer or chief revenue officer who's there to coach you through your sales calls and building your sales collateral? Anyone got one?

All right, some lucky people in the room. Probably paying 300, 500, maybe even up to 1,000 pounds an hour for that kind of quality, right?

Keep all of that in mind, I'm gonna show you.

About the Speaker

So very quickly about me. So I started off 20 years ago as a developer building the first version of my product that we funded and scaled as a startup. We spent a long time building big data, and then we called it machine learning.

And then when we sold it, we called it AI. That was quite a few years ago.

I started off in a technical role, writing code, but quickly became the main person doing the selling, and that's what I've spent the last 20 years doing, selling quite complex technical products often to sort of big, unwieldy organizations. That's what I'm a specialist in.

1What I do now is run a hands-on accelerator where we take technically brilliant founders through anything from a three to nine month really bespoke program to help develop the confidence and skills needed to do that kind of high value selling. So a lot of the things I'm talking about today have been drawn from my experience years ago as a founder, but with the tens of founders that I take through this program every year, so quite a lot of exposure.

Challenges in Sales Presentations

1And I think one of the big, big problems that you get out there in any startup is deck chaos, right? We're talking early stage, often pre-product market fit.

The problem is the landscape is changing under your feet so quickly that by the time you figure out a new insight, you know, you work out what it is your customers might want, you then have to update all of your sales materials. And it's just this never-ending game of whack-a-mole that you can never complete and you forget where the slides are and then suddenly you're presenting to a customer and you've got old insights in there.

And this is stressful, and really importantly, it puts founder energy in the wrong place. Up at midnight working on sales presentations when founders should be talking to customers, writing code, build product, talk to customers is what founders should be doing.

AI Tools for Sales Collaboration

So I've been very excited in the last few months because I've seen that various AI tools that I'm going to demo are a way to solve for this one. So there is a solution out there.

Now, what I'm not excited about is this really lame slide, because it's done what AI always does. And the solution is accompanied by a guy here, a bro, who's busy solving all the problems. And I think to make this fair, I'm going to tell it to make this a female tech founder.

So what you're seeing here is Gamma, this tool Josh mentioned. And Gamma is Google Slides with AI built throughout it, an AI-first slide. slide app.

So instead of you needing to go into OpenAI or any image generation, do the image generation. This is all built into here. It understands the context of your presentation.

It understands the design. You can choose different image models if you want. And you can really quickly do things like this.

Cool, I'm going to go with that image. So that alone is a process that would normally take quite a bit more time than that to do. And this is the kind of gains you can get.

Live Demo Section

So I'm going to show you three things that really excite me this evening. I'm going to show you advanced voice mode and how you can speak to your computer or phone to have a CMO in your pocket. I'm going to show you how you can then layer in your real customer insights from live documents to make this your presentation rather than a generic one. and then I'm gonna show you the outcome.

So together, in the next 10 minutes, we're gonna build a sales presentation deck. Ready?

Let's see if the sound works. Hi there, are you there? Now's the time for sound if we need to turn it up.

All set, how's it going? Who's used, I'll turn it off because I don't wanna confuse it. Oh, we're there? Cool.

Who's used advanced voice mode before, this thing I'm using? Okay, who didn't know it was there until now? Who didn't know you could do that? Okay, yeah, a few people.

We ready to go? Cool.

Hi there, are you there? Hey, what's up? I would like you to... Ooh, nice one. Live demo mode.

So I'm going to restart. Unable to load conversation. So if it does any of this weird stuff, just start a new conversation, reload, that kind of thing.

I would like you to be my chief marketing officer. I want you to ask me about five questions one by one to help me develop a sales presentation. Your goal is to produce a high converting presentation in the form of notes that I can use to then get a presentation made. Can you walk me through the questions?

Absolutely. Let's start with the first question. Who is your target audience for this presentation?

So my target audience is sort of founders of early stage tech companies. They would be maybe Seed or Series A. They've probably closed some investment, but they haven't yet got their sales operations going. So they're having some problems with sales or they haven't quite started sales yet. Often in deep tech, but also in high value B2B sales.

Great, next question, what's the primary goal you want this audience to achieve after your presentation? Well, what I want them to be able to achieve is to use a selection of AI tools to be able to accelerate their sales.

Got it, what specific challenges? Nice, are there any key AI tools or techniques you plan to highlight in the presentation? Yeah, so I think there are three things that the founders are going to find pretty interesting here.

The first is the ability to increase the amount of revenue they bring in by using tools to better qualify their pipeline. The second is increasing the value that they as founders bring to their startups by freeing themselves from menial tasks like building sales decks and all this sort of back and forth that they've gotta do. And I think the third is probably around speeding up the speed of revenue delivery, so reducing the sales cycle.

Excellent. Now, what's the main call to action for the audience at the end of your presentation? The call to action is to join a workshop I'm doing, a LinkedIn Live that I'm doing on May 1st at 2 p.m. And I can drop in a link to that in a second.

Great. Let's summarize these points into notes. Ready for a quick run-through? Yeah, summarize that. All right, here are your notes.

Audience, founders of early stage tech companies, seed or series A, facing sales challenges. Goal, equip them to accelerate sales using AI tools. Challenges, qualifying their pipeline better, reducing medial tasks to focus on high value activities, shortening the sales cycle. AI tools, highlight tools that help in pipeline qualification, task automation, and speeding up revenue delivery.

Join the LinkedIn live workshop on May 1st at 2 p.m. Does this capture everything? Yeah, that's good. That's great.

Let's end now. Let's end the conversation now. Ooh, that is exciting.

So... Yeah. Yeah. Let us lose this sound on this, because I think that is the most likely thing that is confusing it.

Navigating Demo Challenges

OK, so what you got from that is you can have this really good chat, and you can do this on your phone. Now, because of demos never work right, that did not work.

So what I am going to show you now is a quick way. I am not going to go through that speech again for you. I am just going to voice dump this in this using a different mode.

So it is going to do it in one shot, and you will see how that works. OK, what I want you to do is be my chief marketing officer. And I want you to turn these ideas that I'm having for presentation into a structured presentation format that I can use to give to founders. So my target audience is founders of early stage tech companies, seed to series A, who are struggling to get sales going, often in deep tech, sometimes in other areas of B2B.

OK, so that worked. then I think there are sort of three, so that's the big struggle is really why aren't my deals closing? Why is my sales cycle taking long? Why isn't my sales team performing?

Those are the kind of things I tend to hear a lot. Then I think there are three key ways that I've seen that AI can help these founders. I think firstly, it can be used to shorten the sales cycle time by better qualifying deals. I think, secondly, it can be used to increase the value of each sale, so actually increase their price by harvesting customer call transcripts to identify pain points and needs from customers. And I think, thirdly, using this assortment of AI tools, these founders will be able to release the time that they spend doing menial kind of back and forth admin tasks and focus their time on the highest value parts of building product, talking to customers.

So this mode is working. And then finally, I want this to be a really clear call to action slide that invites the founders to join a LinkedIn Live I'm doing at 2 p.m. on Thursday the 1st of May. And I want you to deliver all of this in a five slide summary.

Voice Mode and Its Benefits

OK, so whilst it's churning away, the thing I really like about voice mode, and I definitely encourage you to have a go at voice mode, is it's literally a coach. So you can interrupt it. You can ask it to reflect on things.

So I will walk around with my AirPods in having a conversation with it in a way that I would with a coach. And we tend to process things really differently when we're writing compared to when we're talking, which is one of the reasons coaching and talking works. So I really encourage you to have a go at this. It's a great way of getting fresh thoughts.

However, there is a good old backup. So the app that I was using there was called Whisperflow, which is an amazing app for being able to do call transcription. So I just press Fn, and it will record what I say at any time.

OK, so normally I would go through this and check it and edit a bit, OK? But I'm going to show you another feature that I think is incredibly powerful.

Canvas Feature for Document Editing

I want you to put all of that onto a canvas for me. Who's used the canvas feature in ChatGPT?

Okay, so those of you who don't know about the Canvas, Canvas, as I guess you're seeing here, Canvas is like Google Docs, but with AI built all the way through it. So instead of it being a chat window where you sort of ask sequential chat questions, you've now got a Google Doc over on that far side over there, and then you've got your prompt window over there, right?

So I can now edit this. So I can come in and I can say, OK, the pains. I can edit that and say, why aren't my deals closing now? So you can edit this like you would a Google Doc.

But now where things get really cool is that you can basically ask the AI to do the editing for you. So for example, I've got a call to action that I couldn't tell it a URL. So I can just drop this in here, add this URL to the call to action. Okay, so it will then just go through and start to edit that.

I am going to come back to this document in a second to show you some more things you can do with it, but I really want to put this on your radar as a really powerful step in the process of being able to edit documents and get the AI to make changes to it for you. That is pretty cool, AI doing our work for us. That is what we are here for.

You will see it will now edit at the bottom, and it is going to drop in that LinkedIn Live there. So I'm going to copy this. This is a copy button up here.

Building Presentations with Gamma

And I'm going to open Gamma. Now, Gamma is what I started in. I'm going to create a new presentation.

I am going to paste in text, and I am just going to paste in that whole conversation, the whole output of the Canvas window there. That is just all of the things I had in there. I am going to get it to build the presentation.

Now, there are loads of things I can do here. I can get it to do my content in different ways. I can tell it who is it writing for, the tone it can use, the language to use. I am not going to mess around with that that much now.

I am going to say, and then it has got my cards here that I just worked on with ChatGPT. You can then load custom themes. The hardest thing I had to do in Gamma was upload my PowerPoint theme, but it was worth it. It makes it look a lot more custom, premium, nice.

Now it is going to build my presentation for me. We do not need sound anymore, by the way, so we can kill the monitors. So this is pretty amazing, right?

In real time, we're having this presentation built based on a conversation I just had 10 minutes ago with an AI. And I could have gone back and forward on that conversation. So maybe there's a few things I want to do. Maybe I want to come into here and customize things a little bit.

may give it a touch of me to personalize it. So you can see you're going from quite a generic AI presentation to one that's really customized. I can change the layout of things here if I don't like it, and I can obviously edit it. But what I tend to do is edit things in ChatGPT.

So I'm going to show you a really neat part of this process now. I'm exporting a PDF from Gamma.

Handling Objections with AI

Then I'm going to come into ChatGPT, and I am going to start a new conversation with O1, one of the advanced reasoning models. I am using this because I find for the thing I am about to demo you, O1 works better.

This is the PDF that I just downloaded. I am going to drop it in.

Now, what I want you to do here is be a founder of an early stage tech company. I want you to imagine that sales have been going badly, you've been missing your sales forecast, you're under a lot of pressure from your board, things are not working. However, you are really skeptical of consultants and people who claim to have a solution to everything all of the time.

I want you to read this deck with that skeptical head on, and I want you to try and find some flaws in it and tell me what are the blockers, what are the objections that you would raise? I have told, okay, so this is where Whisperflow is really good, because if it goes wrong like that, you can just go to your history, copy it out, put it back in. Nothing is lost. I can change my kind of blabbering a bit at the beginning.

OK. So this is going to take a bit of time to process because 01, the reasoning models, take a little bit longer. But what this is going to do is give us a set of objections.

Anyone who's done sales knows that objection handling is a really key part of it. And the best salespeople and founders, when you're learning how to do founder-led sales, it's about preempting the objections. So you take the anxieties and the frictions and the people that slow things down, you throw them to the beginning of the sales process, and you deal with them upfront. So here's a great way of doing that.

So this is what it's come out with. It's come up with a whole bunch of objections here. So I'm just going to take this straight back into here, and I'm going to tell this Canvas window.

This is some objections I just got whilst presenting this to a founder. Can you add comments to the Canvas window so that we can address this, please? So I just paste that in.

There you go. So what I've asked it to do now is to add comments. So just like you get comments in Google Docs, you can actually have comments here in the Canvas. So rather than it editing my text, it will come in and add comments there.

And I can have a look and think if I think it's a good idea. It's done it quite quickly. It's often quite slow.

I'm just going to say. That is all great. I want you to accept all of those and just use that feedback to make this document as compelling as possible.

It is just going to come through, wipe this, and use that feedback to change this document. This is an iterative process that I tend to do again and again, using 4.0 for text writing, because I find it just better and faster, and 0.1 for doing the objection finding. If you have board meetings with boards, I have found that putting your board deck through this with that same instruction, be my board member, you are slightly grumpy or whatever, you are expecting us to have achieved better things, that will move 80% of the objections that can really derail your meeting, because you just address it all up front, then you can get down to business.

Iterative Process for Presentation Refinement

So what I can do now is just take this back into Gamma, and I just start again. So I do not even bother editing, I just come in, Put it back in.

This is one of the things that is really, we have seen a lot in vibe coding. There is very little need to go back and fix mistakes now, because it is so quick to create something from new. Just recreate the presentation again, and then delete your old ones.

You can loop this process. I mean, this is so fast, right? You can be cycling through things.

This is like stunning. This would be half a day's work in the past.

Now, of course, Gamma is fully editable. I can come in. I can change it. From this point, it is just like a real slide.

It is like using Google Docs or PowerPoint. You can get it to do as you please. It has got my call to action here.

What I would probably want to do with this one is change the layout a bit, switch that to there. Then I am going to drop in something I made earlier. Then you can do this little thing. It just uploads the image. It gives you a little preview, and then it uploads it properly.

Oops.

Conclusion

So thank you.

I hope this has been valuable.

And if you'd like to find out more about using AI for things like sales qualification, for getting customer insights, join me at this LinkedIn Live on May 1st. This is a real thing that's happening as well as being part of the demo.

Thanks a lot.

And I think I've probably got a few minutes for questions as well.