Let's talk about Templates

I’ve sat through hundreds of sales decks. Most of them lost me by slide 3. Here’s the pattern: company logo, mission statement, “we serve 500+ customers”, a product screenshot that’s too small to read, and a pricing slide that shows up way too early. By the time you get to anything that matters, the prospect is checking their email. The best decks do something different. They start with the prospect’s world, not your product.

Let me tell you the real reason most B2B teams have fewer case studies than they need. It’s not because they can’t write. It’s not because they don’t have successful customers. It’s because the production process is broken. Here’s how it usually goes: Marketing identifies a great customer story. They ask the account manager to make an introduction. The AM says “sure, let me find the right time.” Three weeks pass.

Here’s an uncomfortable truth about battlecards: most of them don’t get used. Product marketing spends weeks building beautiful competitive decks. They’re thorough, well-researched, and 15 slides long. They get presented once in a team meeting. Then they sit in a Google Drive folder that nobody opens during an actual sales call. The problem isn’t the intel. It’s the format. A rep on a live call doesn’t need 15 slides. They need one screen they can scan in 10 seconds that tells them exactly what to say when the prospect mentions a competitor.

Here’s what happened to sales email templates: they worked so well that everyone started using them. And now that every prospect gets 15 emails a week that start with “Hi {FirstName}, I noticed {Company} is…” — they don’t work anymore. Templates became anti-patterns. The prospect doesn’t read your email and think “what a relevant, personalized message.” They read it and think “I’ve seen this pattern before. This is a sequence. Delete.

Every piece of sales collateral exists to answer one question: “What does the prospect need to move to the next stage?" If you can’t answer that for every stage of your buyer’s journey, you have a content gap. And content gaps turn into lost deals – prospects stall because they don’t have the information they need to build internal consensus, justify the budget, or feel confident in the decision. Here’s the complete checklist, organized by funnel stage.