In this day and age, there are no shortage of Powerpoint presentations to explain who you are, what you do, and why the audience should care.  Beyond the societal implications of releasing so much graphical presentation power to the masses, most customer facing presentations lose there way somewhere between “About Us” and “Questions?”

I continue to sing the praises of Blank’s Four Steps to the Epiphany because it nails so much of the reality of building, launching, and selling pretty much any product.  He covers the customer “problem” presentation and suggests the following simple to say but a bit more complicated to create three column approach:

1. List of problems
2. Today’s solution
3. Your company’s solution

Pretty straightforward but gets at the essence of what you are trying to do.  Odds are if something is a big enough pain, something has already been purchased or is being done to alleviate that pain.  You need to understand this and be able to explain how your product or service addresses the pain and is better than the current approach.