Board Meeting Deck Template for a VP of Sales

As the VP of Sales at a $12 million ARR B2B SaaS company, I used to dread board meetings. It took 2 weeks, with the help of my team, to prepare our sales department slides for the board meeting presentation.

That’s 16% of our time in a 12 week quarter spent preparing our board meeting deck rather than time spent executing our plan. Which in my eyes, actually put hitting our plan at risk every quarter because we had limited resources and had to make every day count.     

Every quarter, we had to compile data, write the story and design the slides. It took too long. I also got really nervous before every board meeting. We have smart people on our board from Tier 1 Venture Capital firms (think Google Ventures, etc).

The board members ask good questions. Questions that help us see potential risks, opportunities or misalignments in our business. I was always afraid of looking stupid in front of them. Afraid I would either say something stupid or not be able to answer their questions. And then be fired.  

Well, it turns out, I did look stupid on a few occasions and sometimes I can’t answer their questions, but I haven’t been fired yet (fortunately). 

And I think a main driver of that is my ability to now tell a compelling story with data in an easy to understand way. This shows our CEO and our board that I understand how our department is performing today and what my plan is for how to continue to grow our revenue. 

I have designed this board meeting deck template, so you can do the same.  

When you add this template to your cart and checkout, you will instantly receive a link to a powerpoint presentation and an excel spreadsheet. The files include the following content:

• Board Meeting Deck PPT Template: an 11 slide powerpoint presentation you can use as inspiration for your board slides as a VP of Sales. Once you customize the template to align with your business, you can radically reduce the amount of time spent preparing board slides each quarter. We can now produce our slides in a matter of days rather than weeks. 
• Board Meeting Deck XLS Template: an excel file of dummy data with all of the charts created that are included in the powerpoint template. You can simply update the charts with your actual data and forecasted revenue to quickly update all the slides in the deck.  

Creating board decks is not just for your board members, it’s an opportunity for you to step back every quarter to ask “how are we doing?” and “what’s the plan going forward?”

Planning is a high leverage activity for management. VPs of Sales who neglect to plan often get stuck in the weeds of day to day operations rather than empowering their team to execute a well thought out plan.  

Here's how you can adapt this framework to tell a great story for your CEO and board members: 

1. Familiarize yourself with the powerpoint template and excel spreadsheet first. It's always good to understand the content before you really dig in. 
2. Once you are familiar with a potential outline, talk with your CEO about the story he wants to tell at the next board meeting.  
3. Based on that discussion, write an outline of your board meeting deck slides. I like to start with the headlines of the slides first, with short bullets of what the content will be for each slide.  
4. Review the outline with your CEO to ensure it aligns with their story. 
5. Collect the data and create the slides. Try to standardize this process as much as possible, so that you can rinse and repeat each quarter.   
6. Get feedback from your CEO and board on any information that’s missing or data they would like to see consistently  going forward. Remember, the board invested in the business. They want to see you succeed. It’s ok to ask for their help and get feedback. 

Immediately download this template and customize it for your department.

Click “Add to Cart” on the right. Then checkout. You will receive a link to the Google Slides and the Google Sheets to copy for your own business.

If you run a go-to-market team at a B2B SaaS company, explore these other templates:

• Sales Forecast Template
• Go-to-Market Checklist Template
• Demand Generation Strategy Template
• View Template Bundles