♖ The Situation Slide

Hi Friends,

Our pipeline at Pricing I/O has nearly 2x’d in the last six months.

Great news, right? Except win rates need to keep improving. More at-bats means nothing if we're not converting.

So last month, I asked a mentor, Peter Cohan, to review a few of our sales calls.

Peter wrote Great Demo!, Doing Discovery, and his most recent book Suspending Belief. He's trained hundreds of sales teams. And back in 2015, he spent a week with our team at Mercatus in San Jose, California. I think he flew there himself in his own plane, which I remember being badass.

One tool Peter taught us that week changed everything: the Situation Slide.

We adopted it company-wide. Looking back, it’s one of the few rare things that was widely adopted across our company. Product, Marketing, Customer Success and Sales finally aligned around the same customer language. The team still uses it today, over a decade later.

So when Peter reviewed our Pricing I/O calls, I found his feedback was so obvious, I am embarrassed to write this:

"Why aren't you starting every sales meeting with a Situation Slide?"

I didn't have a good answer.

So I'm bringing back. And why I am confident it will work.

The Situation Slide

It’s one slide. Six fields. The foundation for any compelling sales conversation:

1. Job Title: Who are you selling to?

2. Critical Business Issue: What goal or objective is at risk for this person?

3. Problems/Evidence: What's making it hard to achieve?

4. Specific Capabilities: What do they need to solve it?

5. Delta: What's the quantified value of the gap?

6. Critical Date: When do they need it, and why? What’s at stake?

The rule: If you can't complete the slide, you can't present a compelling B2B solution.

Why It Works

Most B2B sales teams collect surface-level pain and rush to pitch (e.g. we have a discount and net retention problem).

But B2B sales is getting more brutal:

• 86% of B2B purchases stall during the buying process (Forrester, 2024)

• Average win rate is just 21%, meaning 4 out of 5 opportunities lost (HubSpot, 2024)

• Sales cycles are 38% longer than they were in 2021 (Ebsta, 2024)

Missing a Critical Business Issue, Delta, or Critical Date? That deal is statistically headed nowhere. The Situation Slide tells you before you waste months chasing it.

The Snowball Effect at Mercatus

Here's what I didn't expect when we first adopted this: the Situation Slide didn't just improve sales. It became our storytelling framework for the entire company.

Every completed slide captured the voice of the customer in a consistent format. We collected them and segmented them by sector and personas. That created a snowball effect:

• Sales used it to qualify pipeline.
  

• Product used it to prioritize the roadmap with real customer language. It was the first slide in any new feature or product release (who and why vs features)
  

• Customer Success referenced it during new customer onboarding to remind customers why they bought and what the north star is for the customer.
  

• Marketing pulled messaging directly from a centralized Situation Slide bank across each of the three teams above. We weren’t scrambling to create new case studies or messaging for our website. We already had everything teed up to copy/paste.

The Situation Slide became the connective tissue across every team.

What a Real Situation Slide Looks Like

Here's a real example for a Pricing I/O prospect (obfuscated a few metrics). Note, you want to use prospect’s real language and keep it simple during sales discovery.

Company: Sales Enablement Tech Platform; $75M ARR, 1,200 customers, $62K ACV

Job Title: Chief Operating Officer (COO)

Critical Business Issue (CBI): "Achieve $100M revenue by end of 2026 for Series D. At current growth rates, we'll miss by $10M+."

Problems/Evidence:

• "Win rates dropped from 25% to 18% over the last year. We're losing deals on price to point solutions that undercut us by 40%."

• "Our four pricing tiers don't match how customers use the product. Average discount rate crept up to 32%, killing margins."

• "Net Dollar Retention stuck at 102%. Customers don't have a clear upgrade path, so expansion conversations go nowhere."

Specific Capabilities:

• "Packaging that justifies our premium against cheaper alternatives, so price becomes a non-issue."

• "Simplified tier structure aligned to usage, so discounting is the exception, not the default."

• "Built-in expansion model customers can see from day one, so NDR moves toward 115%+."

Delta: "Win rates back to 24% and NDR at 115% adds ~$10M ARR over 12 months. That closes our gap to $100M."

Critical Date: "Q3 2026 board meeting. Need a clear path to $100M before Series D conversations. Miss it, and we're raising at a down valuation."

Note, here it is an editable PPT format below.

What We Started This Week at Pricing I/O

We are starting to incorporate the Situation Slide into every sales conversation this week. Here's what it will solve for us:

• Discovery roadmap. The goal of a great discovery call will be to get to a great Situation Slide. If we can’t, we don’t have a real deal or shouldn’t rush to solution selling.
  

• Qualify urgency faster. Distinguish "just exploring pricing" from "board wants answers by Q2."
  

• Quantify the cost of inaction. Get prospects to articulate how much revenue they're leaving on the table, before we tell them.
  

• Identify the real deadline. Funding round? New product launch? Fiscal year? No Critical Date = no urgency.
  

• Delivery team handoff improvement. This should be the first slide our Client Advisory Team presents to our Delivery Team to get clarity on the next client we closed.
  

• Build conviction on which deals to prioritize. Incomplete slides = incomplete qualification.

Will report back how we do.

'Til next time,

Ali

P.S. I know I have several Patriot readers on this list. Just know the Texans are going to destroy your team tomorrow. Can’t tell you how excited I am about the football games this weekend.

About Me: I'm Ali, VP of Growth at Pricing I/O. I write about growth, GTM execution, and sharing real stuff I am doing to hit our numbers this year.

My 12 year old daughter just taught my 73 year old dad how to use the word “Baddie” in conversations. Hearing my dad now use the term consistently (FYI - he pronounces it “Betty”) has been the highlight of my year so far.

Go be a Betty this week.