How To Run A Tabletop Roleplaying Game Like A Sales Engineer: Reusing Assets.

In presentations, Powerpoint is pretty much the go-to. It’s not a matter of it being good or bad, it’s just the tool that everyone uses when they want to present non-interactive data. The thing is, when you do multiple presentations every week, do you sit there, day after day, handcrafting the same slides?

Hopefully not! Hopefully, once you have your Master Slides, you reuse the same core assets. You swap out names where needed, and if there’s useful data like “how well your last purchase from us helped you,” you put that in. Customers appreciate a validation of their previous investment, because they’re paying you to solve their problems. If you can prove that you’re still doing that, they’re more receptive to carrying on the conversation.

In my experience, that meant that my own decks started from a core template, and then those turned into the individual client templates. Then those decks got a new dated version for every presentation. Simple, basic stuff, but it means that every customer has their own, unique presentation, while saving you a lot of work in reinventing the wheel.

What that also means is that I knew my decks so well that I could skip an entire section when someone asked a question. I could go off-script, and if they were completely out of the sequence? Well, I tended to keep a few additional “deep information” slides after the last one I meant to present. Those were the “eye-charts.” The dense, barely-presentable information that I would happily dig into, but weren’t meant to be flashy. They were there as storytelling support, something I could openly share with a customer, but not something that was meant to be shown in a ten-minute deck.

Likewise, when you’re running a game, you come up with maps. You’ll prepare art of things that the characters might see. In a physical game, this is where miniatures and handouts come in. In digital games, you’ll use tokens and offer PDFs. Players will ask for details about background characters that you never thought about, like “what’s the name of the person serving our meals?” or “how long has this city been around?”

You’re going to have to come up with answers that you didn’t prepare. Some of those are easy: “Oh, this city’s been around for generations!” It’s a great line to buy you time to figure out what matters in those questions and how to answer them in-depth later on. Names? I keep a list of candidate names on-hand and when I use one, it gets added to my notes.

What gets even better with some of this is that you’ll prepare entire story ideas that the players will somehow manage to avoid. You’ll expect them to break into some bad guy’s fortress, and they’ll get themselves lost at sea for months instead. This could be a waste of your time… unless you reuse your assets.

Now, that fortress is a pirate enclave on an island. The maps are still good, and the guards? Well, trade out uniforms for more casual clothes and throw in some eyepatches!

In a lot of cases, people like to claim that the Technical Sales types are the smartest ones in the room. Now, that’s definitely up for debate. I’ve worked with plenty of smart customers who know more about specific things than I do, and ones who can think circles around me. Worse, I’d be the one Expert up against half a dozen experienced Domain Experts. They’re going to outsmart me. It’s just a numbers game.

Running a game is no different. I might be smart, but the goal isn’t to beat your players. It’s to entertain them and keep them coming back. I don’t win by defeating their characters, I win by making sure we all have a good time. And good thing, too, because think about it: Who wants to watch you present to them that they’re losing all the time?

Don’t be smart through knowledge. Don’t be smart by being right.

Be smart by adapting, entertaining, and sharing your what you know… when your audience wants to know it, too.

How To Run A Tabletop Roleplaying Game Like A Sales Engineer: Underpromise and (Ideally) Overdeliver

Once I had the routine lined up, I had to answer the next question: What’s on the truck? What’s my product?

In my case, right now, it’s a bit of a loving mashup of homages to various bits of pop culture. At first, just a couple of franchises that I realized could exist in a shared world… and then I kept going. It’s ambitious. It’s messy. It’s incredibly self-indulgent. But there’s the thing, isn’t it? I knew what it was, and I knew that it wasn’t going to be to everyone’s taste.

Now, imagine my surprise when the door got kicked in by my players. I actually ended up with a great problem: I have more demand than supply. At one campaign, one party of players, there’s an upper limit to just how many people I can accommodate, and I have players who want in, but just can’t spare the time. There’s really two reasons for that. The obvious is that I just might be offering something uniquely interesting. The other one is that when I talk about it, I speak with confidence. I know what I’m offering. I’m passionate about it. And more? I know what I’m not offering.

It’s challenging to bring a customer away from a particular pattern of doing things. You can bring in numbers, you can talk speeds and feeds, and you can run the slickest demo they’ve ever seen, but at the end of the day, you need to compete with institutional inertia. Customers don’t switch to a competing solution overnight, and when they do, there are inevitably questions. If you told them that you can do all the same things that their current solution can do, and you can’t, you’re going to erode trust. You’ll eventually lose that audience, because your credibility comes into question.

Now, if you know what you can’t, won’t, or just plain-out shouldn’t do, the best thing to do is to direct your customer away from that. Maybe they had a workflow that ignores Best Practices for that area of technology. Maybe Best Practices changed. Instead of ignoring that? Face it head on. Tell your customers what you don’t think your product should do. Find out what results they want, and see if you can deliver on those same results. Focus on outcomes, not on features, and you’ll build up credibility when you prove it in the delivery.

That’s how I introduced my players to their story. I was asked a few questions, and some of them made me think: “Can I fit this into the story?” There were a lot of cases where I said yes, but likewise, I explained when I said no. The concept didn’t hit the flavor, typically. I was going for contemporary heroism, and some ideas fell more into post-apocalyptic horror. It’s not a bad genre, it’s not even a bad idea to see what you will or won’t blend together! But if you’re telling a story, and your heart isn’t in it… then what are you delivering? Can you really put your all into something that you don’t believe in? Do you have a vision in which that chapter can fit?

In the end, if you acknowledge the advantages and the constraints of what you’re offering, your confidence will show. You’ll know precisely what it is you’re trying to do, and when you mix confidence and credibility, you build a connection. In one case, with your customer, and in the other, with your players. In the end, that’s still an audience that’s invested in the story you’re telling, and one much more likely to ask for more.

How To Run A Tabletop Roleplaying Game Like A Sales Engineer: On Deadlines

One thing that’s always been straightforward for any professional: Deadlines.

If you have one, you stick to it, because it’s rare that a customer is going to move a meeting because you’re “not ready.” That means that when you show up, it doesn’t matter if you finished your deck last week, or if you wanted to get some finishing touches on it before the meeting started, it’s showtime, and you get up there and present with the resources you have.

Does that mean that you’re adequately prepared? Not necessarily. Your audience might have a question you’ve never heard before. They might have one that none of your peers have heard before. Either way, you carry on. You can pivot, you can take notes, you can tackle the harder questions afterwards, but the show starts when it starts.

When it comes to games, the same thing applies: I run my sessions once a week, with few breaks. We’ll take a session off here or there for vacations, or due to illness, but I’m approaching 40 sessions since we started late last year, and what does that mean? Each and every week, I come in with a story. I have a deadline, an audience, and expectations, and with those come responsibilities.

Now, I don’t think that everyone needs to run their games like this. Some people are more casual, and even my own players may not mind if I showed up a little less prepared. This is simply my style, and what I’ve found is that when you do it this way, you force yourself to write. The creative juices flow a bit here and there, sometimes with a little coaxing, but they’ll flow, and for me? They’re enough to tell a good story every week.

As a friend once told me, “I think it’s time.” It turns out that not only was he right, but in so doing, I actually forced myself to get better, week after week.

Hello? Is this thing on?

Wow, it’s been a while! Between professional concerns and the like, I decided to let this blog cool off for a bit. So, what’s changed?

Mostly, I found something I wanted to talk about: Storytelling. When I started this blog, it was a place for me to post my thoughts on technology, on where things were going, all of that. Some of that might still come up, but at the end of the day? I like to tell stories, and with a switch to Presales Engineering (also known in some circles as Technical Sales,) I’ve found that there’s a lot of things in common between the creative process and the sales process.

What does that mean for this blog? Well, I’m going to focus on the intersection. Where my hobbies and my work overlap, and how each side makes me better at the other.

In the coming weeks, I’ll go over something a little eccentric, but that’s been near and dear to me for quite some time: How to run a Tabletop Roleplaying Game Like A Sales Engineer.

Stay tuned!

-Chris