This is a guest post from Steve Gershik, Chief Marketer at 28Marketing. Steve has been a VP of Marketing & demand generation leader for over 16 years. He's a very funny guy to boot.
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A drinking game, if you can remember back to college, is where you watch a movie or television show and you take a drink every time some key term is mentioned.  Usually it's the utterance of some cliche, character tag line (imagine Seinfeld saying "Newman") or a ridiculous, abstract, content-free term.

The Marketing Automation space is rife with the latter, which prompted me, during a Focus teleconference with Craig Rosenberg, Carlos Hidalgo, Justin Grey and Adam Needles, to propose whether there ought to be a demand generation drinking game.

So here are a proposed few rules for the game.  Feel free to add your suggestions and modifications in the comments:

I've been a bit obsessed with sales presentations lately. Not so much on construction of attractive slides, but on the requirement to tell a compelling story via the world's most torturous medium: PowerPoint.

In the Inside Sales world, Reps work incredibly hard to earn 10, 20 or 30 minute discovery/needs analysis calls. At presentation time, we’ve got (at least in theory) guaranteed prospect attention.

But far too often, we squander all that preceding effort by confusing, boring or annoying prospects while generally failing to move the sales process forward.

I just came across this eBook from the folks over at SalesCrunch called "Designing Presentations That Sell." And let me tell you, it rocks. (Note: I wouldn't normally link to registration required content - but it is that good.)

In the eBook, presentation designer Jan Schultink goes through 3 acts: Images, Stories & Content. I thought I’d share the bits that most impacted me.

 
I have a confession to share – I have gone through the full 5-stage Kübler-Ross coping model with the buzz around Social Selling.

Here’s how it went: