You're right about a significant proportion of sales presentations, but not everybody in a company being presented to is necessarily fully in agreement about the scale and imminence of that need.
The "insight sale" format - where you attempt to show something very big is happening to their industry which you just happen to have part of the solution for - works in some situations better than others. It's a much more interesting presentation at an industry event than simply talking about your product. It's good at persuading a sceptical senior management that the underlings who want to implement your solution are focused on the right priorities. It can be a snappy introduction to the "??? -> Profit" part of the presentation with the more relevant benefits and technical details when your presentation is targeted at more motivated customers (but it's not a substitute for nailing that bit and if you're still waffling on a high level about subscription economies when their tech team wants to understand why integrating your service is better than rolling their own, you probably screwed up)
Sure, on the many occasions where the potential client is going to have a far more specific reason why they want a subscription model and why a third party SaaS solution might be the most efficient way for them to implement it you can do a lot better than the generic example material in the article. A presentation/discussion which opens by understanding the client's specific Big Relevant Changes will be further ahead than one with a cool buzzword and examples as generic as Dollar Shave Club and IBM. But the killer bit isn't the buzzword or trend line, but emphasising that there are potential losers and winners (in that order) from business decisions related to buying your product, and not taking for granted that the client has already figured that bit out.
Bonus points for being able to amaze them with a stat when you switch from talking about losers to talking about winners (I bet Zuora's full client presentations have some compelling and market-specific figures showing client's sales revenue growth after switching billing model)
The "insight sale" format - where you attempt to show something very big is happening to their industry which you just happen to have part of the solution for - works in some situations better than others. It's a much more interesting presentation at an industry event than simply talking about your product. It's good at persuading a sceptical senior management that the underlings who want to implement your solution are focused on the right priorities. It can be a snappy introduction to the "??? -> Profit" part of the presentation with the more relevant benefits and technical details when your presentation is targeted at more motivated customers (but it's not a substitute for nailing that bit and if you're still waffling on a high level about subscription economies when their tech team wants to understand why integrating your service is better than rolling their own, you probably screwed up)
Sure, on the many occasions where the potential client is going to have a far more specific reason why they want a subscription model and why a third party SaaS solution might be the most efficient way for them to implement it you can do a lot better than the generic example material in the article. A presentation/discussion which opens by understanding the client's specific Big Relevant Changes will be further ahead than one with a cool buzzword and examples as generic as Dollar Shave Club and IBM. But the killer bit isn't the buzzword or trend line, but emphasising that there are potential losers and winners (in that order) from business decisions related to buying your product, and not taking for granted that the client has already figured that bit out.
Bonus points for being able to amaze them with a stat when you switch from talking about losers to talking about winners (I bet Zuora's full client presentations have some compelling and market-specific figures showing client's sales revenue growth after switching billing model)