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The Case For and Against Sales Decks Today
Decks are not the enemy. Unclear standards, missing talk tracks and unusable slideware are.
Clay Griffith
Recently we were working with a team that had just hired a new chief revenue officer. On day one he called out his displeasure for sales decks, and it drew resounding agreement from both the sales team and the marketing team. Two functions that rarely move in unison were nodding along in unison about a format they all apparently disliked, which is usually a sign that the real complaint is hiding somewhere underneath.
Here is what we already knew about that team. Their real problem was collateral usage. There was a steady complaint about not having a clear narrative, not having compelling storytelling and not having a shared way to articulate a common approach or point of view on how to solve client challenges. Deal cycles ran slow too, including the very first steps and the early meeting cadence. The distaste for decks had little to do with the format and everything to do with the absence of a standardized talk track. The discussion that followed exposed an alternative worth taking seriously, even where it turns out to be wrong.
The case against decks
What that CRO actually wanted, in his words, was for "all presentations to ideally be fully and sufficiently handled from the website itself." It is an idea we had not really grappled with before, and it may or may not be right, but there is merit to it. It is perfectly fine to open a website mid-conversation and walk through your baseline value propositions, features and offerings. If your site is good, it might be the better format.
When web pages are strong, the image support is high quality and someone has clearly thought about brevity, that content scales better than a deck does. Supporting elements like icons, quotes and pricing are easy to reach, and the seller can browse freely as the conversation moves rather than clicking forward through a fixed order of slides. We see that as the starting point for the case against decks.
The website is only one alternative. There are many ways to present the core value proposition and point of view of a service or product without slides. You can do it conversationally and verbally. You can open a one-pager and walk through it. You can do it through case studies, or through structured discovery, asking the right questions and using tools that support those questions and their answers. We have even seen quick-play videos used, with a caveat. Video often draws a cringe, and we agree it is usually not ideal, since sitting in silence while a prospect watches a screen tends to fall flat, though we have seen it land in specific cases.
Underneath all of this is the real argument against decks, which is the pull toward conversational selling. That is the heart of solution selling and what most teams want today. Ideally you are talking about their problems and their needs rather than about yourself, aligning to those needs in conversation, then getting the right people in the room later for the more nuanced discussion a deck could never solve in one shot.
The case for decks
Here is the funny part. That same CRO who walked in with a distaste for decks wanted a deck. It was the first thing he asked for.
That is worth remembering if your own teams are anti-deck. The purpose of a deck was never to be the end-all answer for every conversation. Having a standard talk track for your core offerings and services, a baseline starting point, is still critical. As that CRO recognized, the absence of one meant there was no consistency in storytelling. If your people cannot consistently tell the basic story of what the offering or service is, there is no real path to successful selling or growth.
So you start with the deck. You build something clean, compelling and well-designed enough that its contents are easy to understand, explaining the core talk track of the business both graphically and verbally and establishing standard language everyone can follow and memorize. That is a critical first step for training. It also gives you a format for those early calls where you do need to open a few slides to introduce a client to your positioning, before getting back into the equally structured but far more flexible work of discovery and challenge questions, the verbal conversation that does not involve talking at the client.
So what is a deck actually for?
We think a deck serves two purposes. The first is the first-call format, typically five to twelve slides, where the more brevity the better. It carries a clean narrative everyone can learn, and you can deliver it without offending the client, because you are simply saying, "Let me tell you a few things, and then we'll get into a conversation about you."
The second purpose lives in the appendix, an Arsenal of content a trained seller can pull from with agility throughout the conversation. This is the gold standard we pursue with deckware. We aim to produce all the slideware a standard conversation might need, high quality, highly usable, deep enough without getting verbose, so sellers know they have it in their pocket and can reach for the right slide whenever a conversation turns.
What about Gamma and AI-generated decks?
We think it is great. Using a tool like Gamma, when it is done right with proper design systems, standards and templates prebuilt for your organization, is a powerful way to make client-specific slideware. We have seen it done well and helped make it work, and it is a natural part of the maturity path toward better collateral.
Used without the right standards and baseline construction, it is a dangerous path. It produces slop that nobody uses and signals lower quality and less attention to detail for your brand. The same is true of tools like Claude, Claude Cowork and Claude Code. We have seen really strong slideware come out of them when brand language, storytelling elements, style guides and design standards are part of the approach. Done sloppily, the output is sloppy, and it can read as careless to a customer, a signal that you are not treating them with enough care, which can actively harm the deal.
So start with the standards for your offerings, services or product fundamentals. Then use these tools to extend that content, making it more nuanced for a specific personality or client and evolving your storytelling as new features and service elements come into play. That is where they shine.
The teams that get this right stop relitigating decks and build the one baseline story everyone can tell, then back it with the Arsenal a seller reaches into when the conversation opens up. That is the balance we help teams strike. Bring us your core offering, and we'll build the version worth keeping.