Sales Are Sleeping On Sales Decks. That’s Not An Accident.

Jennifer Sillars on the assumptions behind bad sales decks, and why fixing them starts before the deck.

Jennifer Sillars is a Product Marketing Leader who has audited sales enablement across more than 100 products. She contributed written and video commentary to The Launch That Almost Worked after reviewing the survey findings.

Jennifer opened her commentary with something most product marketers won’t say out loud: she’s been guilty of the same mistakes she’s spent years diagnosing in others. She also has a view on sales decks that most marketers won’t want to hear. Below are selected insights from that exchange.

75% of sales professionals say they could manage without marketing. How do you read that?

I want to point out that sales often don’t fully appreciate the work marketing — product marketing in particular — does behind the scenes: choosing the segment with the best chance of hitting the next revenue goal, identifying a problem painful enough that prospects will pay to solve it. It’s not just content creation.

But I’m being generous. Excuses don’t get us better results or more respect.

After auditing sales enablement across 100 products, I’ve seen marketing consistently miss key elements that make the difference between sparking interest and helping close a deal. I’ve been guilty myself: offering “differentiation” straight from product, when sales knew it wasn’t a factor in any buyer’s decision-making. Differentiation only matters when it helps a prospect choose between us and our main competitor.

You have a strong view on sales decks. What’s going wrong with them?

People are sleeping on sales decks. We let them be mediocre so they don’t do the heavy lifting upfront that they should.

The first pitch conversation is actually the highest-stakes moment for your positioning strategy. There’s no account-specific context yet, no deep rapport, no reason to go off-script. It should be your clearest, most compelling argument for why a customer should choose you. And right now, for most companies, it isn’t.

If reps are supplementing your deck with their own materials, that’s not a sales problem. It’s a signal that something critical is missing from what marketing built. When marketing builds decks with the assumption that sales won’t use them anyway, the result is generic slides that reps abandon the moment they’re in front of a real prospect.

If we all put a bit more strategic thought into the deck, follow-up sales enablement needs would drop dramatically. The sales deck is exactly where all the things sales want should be articulated in the most comprehensive and compelling way — even competitive comparisons.

You can never guarantee a second meeting, or even that they’ll bother to read your follow-up emails. The first pitch conversation should cover every point. From there you can personalise with assets that reinforce key points, explain elements that didn’t quite land, and support the champion to sell internally to the rest of the buying committee.

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Where does positioning go wrong most consistently?

We’re not having enough conversations at the idea and development stage. Marketing is throwing assets over the wall, sales ignores them and forges its own path, and the feedback loop with the market disappears.

Sales knows how customers actually talk. Marketing knows how to turn scattered insights into a winning argument. The problem is that most positioning strategies are built by only one of them. Sales is sitting on the real pains, the language that actually lands, the value that moves deals forward — and marketing isn’t pulling from that signal early enough, if at all.

We need to be partners in developing the foundations, focusing on what it really takes to win our market. But there’s only so much individuals can change when they’re working under the weight of stretched resources and high goals.

Revenue leadership needs to embrace their role in building a collaborative culture, without forcing either sales or marketing to change who they are. Sales and marketing are different disciplines, and that difference deserves respect — it’s exactly what makes the partnership powerful when it’s aligned.

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The research shows most enablement arrives too late. What’s the actual cost?

The best sales enablement is giving salespeople the insight behind the assets. No marketer can create release content at the 11th hour. It takes time to understand the product changes, how they map to customer needs, and how this changes how buyers rank us versus competitors.

It’s the same for sales.

Assets give them something to send. Insights give them the ability to respond live, in the moment, to a real buyer. Those are not the same thing, and one is much harder to build under time pressure than the other.

Sales blames execution when launches fail. Marketing often disagrees. Who’s right?

Both are pointing at the same problem from different sides. Poor positioning, lack of enablement, insufficient training — they all tie back to the same root issue: if we can’t clearly talk about the value, the product won’t gain traction. That gap shows up everywhere: in marketing, in sales enablement, in the field.

At the end of the day, we’re all storytellers, whether we sit in sales or marketing. The problem comes when we don’t have the right stories to tell. Sometimes products launch before there are any real value points to share — and that makes it hard for anyone to craft a compelling narrative.

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